Dear Reader,

We hope you enjoyed reading this volume and found much food for thought and motivation to act. In this last chapter, we want to signal gaps in both knowledge and praxis at the crossroads of religion and forced migration. Literally, crossroads are defined as a point where two roads meet, but the word is often used figuratively to mean a situation that requires important decisions to be made. We use the term in both of its meanings.

Referring to the crossroads of religion and forced migration, we draw attention to situations, practices, and places where religion and spirituality are interconnected with forced migration. The concept of religion and spirituality at the crossroads also refers to the heterogeneity of religion and religious (and spiritual) values. Peter Berger (1967) posited that modernity leads to the pluralization of religions because various belief systems exist in the same societies and contexts. He also argued that modernization does not necessarily lead to secularization; in many societies, religion is thriving. More recently, Berger (2016) reasoned that pluralism, often perceived as a threat to faith and associated with relativism and a loss of religious substance, is actually good for faith. He spoke of two pluralisms. “The first concerns the fact that many religions and worldviews coexist in the same society. … The second kind of pluralism involves the coexistence of the secular discourse with all of these religious discourses” (Berger, 2016, no page number).

Several contributors to this volume have shown how and where religion and forced migration meet. Religious intolerance is often a root cause of armed conflicts and the resulting forced migration (Goździak and Main, this volume). Many refugees struggle to come to terms with their religious beliefs when trying to understand the meaning of their experiences and the ensuing suffering. Describing the activities of the LGBT Asylum Task Force in Worcester, Massachusetts, Max Niedzwiecki (this volume) shows how the ministry assisted refugees in overcoming the shame and self-hatred that were rooted in religious abuse in their home countries.

There are no reliable statistics on the global number of LGBTQ asylum seekers, though numerous media articles and NGO reports estimate that thousands of LGBTQ refugees seek international protection every year (Held et al., 2022). We need to understand both the scale of this phenomenon and the lived experiences of LGBTQ refugees and asylum seekers in regards to their own religious beliefs and the beliefs of those who adjudicate their cases. A special thematic cluster of Fronters in Human Dynamics on asylum law and policy, sexual orientation, and gender identity includes a range of articles on the impact that categories such as “asylum seekers” or “refugees” have on queer migrants in the Paris area (Chossière, 2021); the effects of “safe country” practices on LGBTI + claimants and the extent to which the securitization of European borders is compatible with LGBTI + inclusion (Le Bellec, 2021); gender identity and gender expression as grounds for international protection (Avgeri, 2021); the impact of different normative understandings of sexuality and relationships on LGBTIQ + people’s experience of the UK immigration system (Gordon-Orr, 2021); the ways transgender refugees living in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States leverage social remittances and transnational ties to advocate for their rights within intolerant receiving countries (Soloaga, 2021); and practices used in Greece to assess credibility in asylum claims based on sexual orientation (Zisakou, 2021). Unfortunately, none of these articles explored the religious contexts in which the discussed laws, policies, practices, and lived experiences occur.

Izabela Kujawa, Agnieszka Bielewska, Nir Cohen, and Katarzyna Durajska have demonstrated in this volume how religious values and political goals are intertwined in Turkey, Israel, and Poland. Religious values often underpin decisions regarding attitudes toward refugees and asylum seekers. Some policy-makers use religious values to provide refugees with a safe haven and permit them to settle, while others use religion to reject petitions for asylum. These decisions are often related to the religious identity of the asylum seekers (Goździak and Main, this volume) and divide them into deserving and underserving refugees (Goździak, 2022; Sales, 2002). We cannot solely blame politicians for this state of affairs. We must also understand the motivations of ordinary citizens who vote for them.

Human mobility and religion have been linked both historically and semantically. Contemporary religious globalization was preceded by religious mobility and religious expansion linked to trade, imperialism, or conquest. In many religious traditions, mobility is also sacralized: pilgrimages and holy sites form the center of a theological and symbolic universe. Nowadays, members of many diasporas contribute to the growth of global religious networks. Among migrant communities, religion is seen as providing a moral guide and spiritual compass. Transnational religious networks and “circulations of people, ideas, images, values, and norms also impact on sending contexts, sometimes creating new modes of cultural distinction, leading to social tensions and conflicts” (Garbin, 2018 online).

Forced migrants often find themselves at the crossroads of mobility and immobility as they wait to be allowed to cross borders or launch an asylum claim or are forced to linger in refugee camps or detention centers. These periods of waiting are often significantly longer than the actual flight. The uncertainty of these periods of waiting puts refugees at the crossroads of physical safety and danger as well as of existence or lack of legal protection (Durajska, this volume).

Refugees and asylum seekers are not the only ones that move: religion does as well. “We assume that religious practices and organizations obediently respect national boundaries. We take stasis and boundedness as the default categories for organizing religious life while, in fact, many religious ideas and practices are often and unabashedly in motion”. (Levitt, 2011, p. 159, cited in Meyer and van der Veer, 2021, p. 267)

Islam is often at the center of concerns regarding immigrant integration in Europe, Canada, and the United States. There was a rise in anti-Islam sentiments after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States and jihadist attacks in France, Germany, and Spain. Richard Alba and Nancy Foner (2015) argue that in Europe “religion has become a bright boundary that separates a significant proportion of immigrant minorities from the mainstream or the cultural, institutional core of their societies” (p. 118), while religion does not form the same divisions in the United States. The reasons include religious similarity between citizens and immigrants, the socioeconomic status of Muslim immigrants, the religiosity of the majority population, and existing institutional structures (Alba & Foner, 2015, p. 140). Muslims constitute only 1.1 percent of the US population. Moreover, not all of them hail from immigrant communities; African Americans account for 20 percent of the country’s Muslim population (Mohamed and Diamant, 2019).

When scholars write about religion and forced migration, they mainly focus on the “world religions,” while less known and less populous religions are studied mainly by anthropologists. In this volume, Johannes Bhanye examines the Nyau cult and witchcraft and the role they play in reinforcing access to and ownership of land among migrants in peri-urban Zimbabwe. Looking at the crossroads of witchcraft and forced migration, we need to better understand the practice of witchcraft and the persecution of witches and those who they bewitch. In a working paper written for the UNHCR, Jill Schnoebelen (2009) provides a global overview of the link between witchcraft accusations and displacement. She posits that accusations may cause displacement through forced exile or a personal decision to flee from the threat of harm. She demonstrates the impact of witchcraft accusations in a displacement continuum: internally displaced people’s camps, refugee camps, during repatriation and reconstruction, and among resettled refugees. Schnoebelen also examines the role of governments, including decisions to outlaw witchcraft accusations and the prosecution of alleged witches in government courts.

Witchcraft-related violence, especially violence directed toward women and children, has become a source of increasing concern for human rights organizations (ActionAid, 2012; Aguilar Molina, 2006). However, the heightened attention to this issue has not translated into refugee decision-making (Dehm & Millbank, 2019). Witchcraft beliefs have been utilized by rebel groups, in places such as Uganda, Liberia, and Angola (Schnoebelen, 2009) and we need to know more about these phenomena to better adjudicate refugee claims based on membership in a particular social group.

In this volume, Ingrid Løland argues that the academic literature lacks studies on the ways that lived experiences of religion inform both real and imaginary forms of temporal and spatial displacement contexts. There is an urgent need to adequately capture the multidimensional and (dis)empowering aspects of religion in migratory experiences. In her chapter, Løland maps the storied landscape of Syrian refugee trajectories, where religion, identity, and belonging fluctuate between retrospective and future-oriented processes. More research along those lines is needed.

The contributors to this volume focused primarily on showcasing where and how religion and forced migration meet. They have not explicitly recommended what needs to change and what decisions need to be made to move the field of religion and forced migration forward. Below, we signal some of the changes that are urgently needed.

While it has been documented that religion plays an important but often overlooked role in forced migration,

this neglect of religion in relation to the study of refugee issues is not simply an empirical problem, but also a conceptual one. It stems from the secularist approach in mainstream social and cultural science discourses, according to which religion, understood in terms of private belief, is marginal. (Meyer & van der Veer, 2021, p. 257)

The contributions in the volume Refugees and Religion: Ethnographic Studies of Global Trajectories call for a rethinking of religion from the vector of mobility as a way to correct a scholarly bias toward “the nation as the taken-for-granted habitat of religion and unit of scholarly analysis” (Meyer and van der Veer, 2021, p. 267).

A new approach to the trauma experienced by many forced migrants is also needed. The literature on migration records a robust discussion about the concepts, values, and cultural appropriateness of mental health interventions to reduce the psychological burden of war and armed conflict in resource-poor countries (Bracken et al., 1995; de Vries, 1998; Dyregrov et al., 2002; Mezyey and Robbins, 2001; Pupavac, 2001; Silove et al., 2000; Summerfield, 1999). The concept of PTSD and trauma-related services are the main focus of this controversy (Ommeren et al., 2005), which is compounded by the relatively recent development of a new field—labeled “psychosocial”—that has been introduced by international organizations working in resource-poor countries.

Critics of these concepts and approaches point to the medicalization of normal distress and the possible harm of assuming that Western models of illness and healing are valid across cultures, while others consider denying the importance of traumatic stress to be a professional error and the denial of preventable suffering. In an attempt to generate strategic advice to program designers in war-torn countries, Ommeren et al. (2005) have attempted to survey expert opinion. The authors have put forth eight principles resulting from their research that should be used when formulating response strategies:

  1. (1)

    contingency planning before an acute emergency

  2. (2)

    assessment before intervention

  3. (3)

    a long-term development perspective

  4. (4)

    collaboration with other agencies

  5. (5)

    provision of treatment in primary health care settings

  6. (6)

    access to services

  7. (7)

    training and supervision

  8. (8)

    monitoring indicators.

Derrick Silove (2005) and Derek Summerfield (2005) have responded to the proposed principles in two separate essays, both published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization. In his response, Silove (2005) stresses that these principles “present a radical challenge to those single-issue advocates promoting trauma counseling programs or short-term psychosocial projects” (p. 75). Silove points out the necessity to distinguish between common, self-limiting psychological responses to violence and the persisting reactions that become disabling. He believes that the best therapy for acute stress reaction is a social one: providing safety, reuniting families, creating effective systems of justice, offering opportunities for work, study, and other productive roles, and re-establishing systems of meaning and cohesion—religious, political, social, and cultural. He also points to the challenges inherent in changing entrenched perspectives and the practices of international agencies and donors to prioritize support of integrated, community-based programs focused on the social needs arising from psychological disturbances, rather than special issues or particular diagnoses.

Summerfield (2005), on the other hand, indicates that there is tension in the materials on refugee mental health issues from international agencies—such as the World Health Organization—“between the wish to acknowledge local worlds and the wish to promote Western mental health technology as a reproducible toolkit” (p. 76). He reminds us that the Western mental health discourse introduces core components of Western culture, including a theory of human nature, a definition of personhood, a sense of time and memory, and a secular source of moral authority. None of this is universal.

What is needed, in our opinion, is support for empirical research, including epidemiological and qualitative studies to assess both the scope of the issues facing forced migrants affected by armed conflict and the cultural appropriateness of the projects being implemented. This research needs to be formulated and packaged in a manner that translates readily into new program designs or policy approaches. More importantly, refugees and internally displaced persons must be active participants in the design and implementation of this research and any ensuing policy and program recommendations.

Research, policy-making, and programming at the crossroads of religion and forced migration need to also consider the gender of forced migrants. While most religious movements are rooted in transformative visions, which focus on the inner, ethical motivations of the person and respect for all individuals regardless of gender or ethnicity, in reality there is an abundance of oppressive interpretations of religious texts promoted by male-dominated religious institutions. Obviously, these interpretations can be challenged by alternative interpretations of religious texts; in fact, that is what many feminists are attempting to do. Feminist theologies reclaim the egalitarian spirit of many religious texts to counter the current life-and-death threat that religious extremists present to women in many contexts. For example, Iman Hashim (1998) and Fatima Miernissi (1991) argue that the practices of veiling and purdah (seclusion) have no foundation in the Qur’an and discuss the manner in which patriarchy has circumvented the Qur’an’s essentially egalitarian message. Hashim also talks eloquently about reasons for feminist engagement with Islam. However, as Sadia Ahmed (1998) describes in her article on religious extremism in Somalia, feminist engagement with religion and gendered reinterpretation of religious texts are only useful for the majority of women if women at the grassroots can gain access to these arguments. It is their bodies which become the battlegrounds for competing interpretations of religious texts, so they require basic education and knowledge of religious texts as well as arguments to serve as weapons against fundamentalist interpretations of their religion.

Research is important, but so is law and policy. As Julian M. Lehmann reminds us, the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees has undergone a remarkable evolution and has remained relevant by providing guidance for elements of the definition of refugee. The Convention has also long overcome the initial postwar, Eurocentric bias. However, Lehmann also emphasizes that in order “to endure and maintain universal appeal, the Convention needs continuous application by a community of practice committed to objective principle, all the while the Convention is under constant strain of measures for migration control, and despite imperfect supervisory mechanisms” (Lehmann, 2019, p. 15).