In this chapter, we introduce the topic, discuss the aim, define a few key concepts and examine some of the methodological difficulties in researching migration and religion. The chapter aims to make the reader aware of the difference between research and serving up an opinion. Across Europe there are many vocal, opiniated debaters who all too often offer simple answers and quick fixes to identified problems. The very idea behind research is precisely the opposite; it is about grounding rich descriptions and theorisation in carefully crafted, methodologically sound, hard work.

1 Constant Migrations

People have always lived lives between being settled and being on the move, either looking for greener pastures, resources to conquer, adventures and new audiences or markets, or trying to get away from whatever unpleasantries they need to avoid: wars, parents, cruel people in power positions, poverty, natural disasters. Often, motives have been mixed. People have explored, clashing and merging with those already in the area just found. Migrants brought with them ideas about the world.

It is impossible to know for certain whether people had organised religious ideas before the invention of writing, coinciding with the first empires of which we are aware, over 5000 years ago. Yet we can craft theories with the help of graves, cave paintings and the remains of prehistoric cities and monuments (e.g., Insoll, 2020), and these indicate that it is highly likely that people have at least nurtured ideas and assumptions about unseen, transcendent and hidden arrangements and logics of the cosmos and the everyday for tens of thousands of years.

When people have met, their respective religious beliefs have fascinated, shocked, instilled hatred and contempt and converted people; as they have come into contact, ideas have mixed and inspired new thought systems. Religious myths and key notions have been exchanged when people have met at royal courts and in taverns; they have been shared between neighbours, lovers and certainly religious specialists of different traditions. We know from history not only of neighbouring traditions meeting, but also, for example, of Greeks practicing their faiths while living in Afghanistan in the many cities founded or conquered by Alexander the Great (d. 323).

Religious ideas move in mysterious ways. For example, the world’s numerically largest religion today, Christianity, was carried to Europe in letters, by migrating missionaries and in stories told in marketplaces and at inns. At different times those discussing it were non-Christians, slandering Christianity, wondering over it, asking each other about the truth of what they had heard; many knew about its ideas long before accepting it. Today, ideas move quickly and globally, through social and mass media. Filmed lectures and information pages on religion contain self-presentations as well as criticism and hate speech. Even very small faith groups like the Druze or Zoroastrians are present, but so are new religious movements and sects, like Happy Science, the Japanese movement founded in 1986 and now creating global networks.

2 The Aim of This Book

This book is not about this rich global history of mobility, meetings and clashes. Rather, the aim is to provide students and researchers with an original account of relevant perspectives, examples and reflections related to religion and to migration to western Europe after WWII. Thus, it is about a mere fragment of history, although one important to societies all over the globe. During the political turmoil in Europe leading up to the war, many Europeans fled their homes for other European countries or destinations such as Australia and North or South America. However, soon the migration tides turned. One may divide migration after WWII into five major trends (inspired by Stalker, 2002): mass refugee flows (1940s and early 1950s); recruitment of contract workers (early 1950s to 1973); restrictive politics (1974 to mid-1980s); diverse migration flows (mid-1980s until 2001); diverse migration flows plus increased securitisation and restriction attempts (2001-ongoing).

By narrowing our focus to western Europe, we consciously exclude most international migrants of the last decades. As a rule, most refugees end up in neighbouring countries and it is a fact that the largest proportion today reside in the so-called Global South. For example, Pakistan is the home to some two to three million Afghans (a figure that was three times as high in the 1990s). Around a million undocumented Bangladeshis and tens of thousands Rohingya also live in Pakistan (Alimia, 2019). The situation is similar in Bangladesh, India and many other countries. However, research on migration in the Global South is a rather new field and in-depth studies analysing religion and migration are few. To date, most theories about religion and migration have been developed in relation to Europe and North America, and as the aim of this book is to introduce theorisation and perspectives on religion and migration – and as the scope must be limited – we have chosen western Europe as our focus. However, we hope that our writing can also inspire researchers looking into migration in the Global South to expand this field.

The observant reader will have noted the lower case ‘western’, used to indicate the geographical area of western Europe, not the political and now outdated concept of Western Europe. Yet the migration history of western Europe is different from that of eastern Europe (and that of the southern most parts).

Frequently when migration is discussed, a political perspective is given priority, perhaps one that takes the point of departure that migrants are problematic and need to be integrated, as well as possibly assimilated. We specifically want to avoid that. Therefore, we attempt to keep to academic discussions about what is known and what we can know and, further, as often as possible, highlight perspectives from the migrants’ own experiences.

We now turn to the task of establishing the vocabulary, which might be more problematic than first reckoned.

3 Migrants and Migration

In 2016, the International Organization for Migration (IOM, part of the UN) defined a migrant as follows:

…any person who is moving or has moved across an international border or within a State away from his/her habitual place of residence, regardless of: (1) the person’s legal status; (2) whether the movement is voluntary or involuntary; (3) what the causes for the movement are; or (4) what the length of the stay is.

This broad definition of a migrant makes most larger cities in the world cities of migrants due to urbanisation. Such a definition is too broad for this book and possibly also for the IOM, which has developed its definition over the years (www.iom.int). We focus on migrants who cross international borders with the intention of staying longer than for a visit or a holiday. Further, we mainly look at migration from non-European countries, although to that we are not entirely faithful.

In their seminal book, The Age of Migration, Stephen Castles et al. (2014) argue that contemporary international migration has six broad new tendencies. The globalisation of migration implies that more places are affected by migration and are becoming interdependent on each other; further, the origins of migrants have diversified. The changing direction of dominant migration flows have markedly affected Europe, which was a continent of emigration until WWII. Now European emigration is marginal compared to immigration. The differentiation of migration means that migration to many places now consists of a range of different types instead of being dominated by a single motivation, like labour migration. The proliferation of migration transition highlights an increase in the volume of migration to states where migrants remain for extended periods without, however, intending to stay. The feminisation of labour migration emphasises that women are increasingly making up a significant sector of labour migrants. The growing politicisation of migration suggests that migration is gradually becoming a pressing item on local, regional, state and interstate agendas, leading to political debate, restrictions, regulations, treaties and new opportunities. Thus, it is inevitable that contemporary societies as well as individual lives are affected by international migration.

Evidently, the experiences of migration are very different. Some migrants are privileged, legally maintaining economic assets and social prestige. For others, migration changes almost everything including social standing, financial and political status and networks. Migrants may encounter racism, hatred for the religion they are assumed to practise and other forms of stereotyping, discrimination or hostility connected to how they are classified, which are often experienced as horrifying and hurtful. Yet they may also experience generosity and welcoming and positive treatment and most encounter every variety of reception.

Nicola Magnusson coined the term refugeeship in her PhD dissertation (2011), using discursive social psychology as the main structuring theory. The concept signals the transformation that people go through, starting from the moment when they acutely feel the urge to leave, a decision that will change the narratives about them – both their own and others – probably for the rest of their lives. Refugeeship means the repositioning of identity in relation to ‘home’, as experience is embodied. Similarly, we can talk about migrantship identity. The experience of migration tends to affect individuals and families – but also societies – for a very long time. Therefore, an essentialist definition of migration may not encompass all the social consequences. We want to emphasise that migration, identity building and reactions to migration are processes. Change should be expected over time.

Thus, we will not proceed from a specific definition of migration. The IOM’s open definition and our above-specified reservations and interests will serve as guidelines. Rather, by showing the varying and complex ways migration is connected to religion, we aim to challenge, broaden and deepen the understanding of what both migration and religion can be. This said, we still need some basic foundations, so we should point out that our understanding of migration is related to the concept of international mobility and movement – transnational, global and circular – and includes the mobility of people as well as of goods and ideas.

4 Religion

Connecting religion to migration, some clarification about what can be meant by religion may also be useful. First, and maybe most importantly, our understanding of religion aligns with methodological agnosticism, a debated but mostly accepted way to understand and study religion within the sociology of religion (e.g., Porpora, 2006). Methodological agnosticism means that religion is studied as a this-worldly social phenomenon using scientific, non-confessional methods and theories. Thus, we do not make religious truth claims and no religion will be treated as more correct than any other.

Obviously, there are religious and theological explanations for some of the social phenomena with which this book is concerned, but these are not our epistemological departure points. Here, religion is understood as assemblages of social and cognitive reactions to an assumed transcendence (or whatever metaphor is appropriate for different religious understandings), and their implications in worldly life. This can be on an individual level, on the way people believe, order and live their lives in relation to the assumed transcendence, or on different group levels, or organised and shared ways of believing and living in relation to this assumed transcendence. On a macro level, it is about how society is organised and relates to religious traditions, but also how society relates to religious groups and to religious individuals, which can refer to a single nation, international relations or even the global level. Two simple examples of the latter are the social and theological reach of the Catholic Church or the fact that there is a global coordination of the teachings of the Muslim Ismaili faith, coordinated from Canada and using up-to-date social media tools.

There is a critique raised against the use of ‘religion’ as a category that points out its connection to knowledge production in European imperial and colonial states. According to this critique, the concept is seen as a Christo-centric conceptualisation of the vast and complex diversity of ‘life worlds’, traditions and practices. Thus, religion as a category hampers our understanding by imposing certain structures and logics on people’s life worlds, traditions and practices, and at times, in fact, constructing religions out of loose and diverse beliefs, like one Hinduism (e.g., Fitzgerald, 2007; King, 1999). Undoubtedly, the term religion has a fascinating history, and it is a fact that European Christianity has – politically and emically – supplied the default understanding for a very long time. This is likely also true in much academic writing; however, that has not prevented many scholars within the broad field of religious studies upholding an inclusive, open and less fixed understanding of the term. Further, many words have troubled histories (democracy, politics, culture, state, class, civilisation, etc.), but can still be re-forged to serve more inclusive perspectives. The critique of ‘religion’ has failed to present acceptable alternative ways forward; thus, in this book we stick to religion as a concept.

4.1 Religion and Secularisation in Europe

A number of countries in Europe have endeavoured to separate religion from the state as part of the shaping of secular state politics. Comparing the number of European states professing a religion (using the juridical definition) in 1900 with 2000, only the Netherlands (out of 45), was proclaimed secular in 1900, while 13 countries were formally secular in 2000 (Madeley, 2009). Several others, like Finland, Denmark and Iceland, retain an official religion, but are, in most aspects, de facto secular in legislation. The trend of political secularisation has been consistent for decades and there is every reason to believe that it will continue in the foreseeable future.

The differentiation between state and religion is also related to a general decrease in religious belonging and religious practices in society among the citizens of European countries, a degree of secularisation often described as particular to Europe, and thus different to many non-European societies. In some sense, this is true. Let us look at some figures from the twentieth century. In Sweden, belief in God has declined from being held by 80 percent of the population (1947) to 45 percent (2001) – the lowest in Europe – while the belief in a god in Canada has dropped from 95 to 88 percent in the same time period. In Brazil comparable figures are 96 and 99 percent and in India 98 and 94 percent. The typical European figure by country would be between 60–70 percent. Still, some countries like Japan have even lower figures than Sweden, 35 percent in 2001, likely due to the question being about belief in God rather than a transcendental world; God is a problematic concept in Japan. In Belgium, service attendance has dropped from 52 percent in 1970 to 5 percent in 1998. Even in a country like Ireland it has dropped from a 91 percent attendance in 1970 to 65 percent in 1998 (Norris & Inglehart, 2011). The figures indicate a general development that may change any time, yet the situation is more complex than these figures express; we return to this later in this chapter.

In sociology of religion, these changes are understood as processes of secularisation and – closely related – modernisation. Intertwined with this are the ideologies of modernism and secularism which do not see religions as a necessary or even appropriate part of modern, secular national states and which dominated politics and public debate in many European countries during the 19th and 20th centuries. This is still largely the case in the twenty-first century, although, as debates have changed, some intellectuals now talk about a post-secular society (Habermas, 2005). Nonetheless, due to the secularism drive, religions and individual religious belonging, practices and beliefs are protected by laws in many European countries, most commonly in freedom of religion acts and anti-discrimination laws but also in laws privileging religious organisations, for example through tax exemptions (Byrnes & Katzenstein, 2006). Societies vary in their relations to religion and there are normative aspects connected to these variations.

Many migrants reaching Europe after WWII have arrived from societies where religions hold other positions in society, often more influential or integrated ones. Yet not even that can be taken for granted, as some societies promote secularism, and some migrants, not least European-inspired elites, may have lived European-style secularism more consistently than most Europeans or are refugees because of a committed Marxist or atheist stance or as members of discriminated against or outlawed religious minorities.

Religious beliefs can influence every part of people’s lives. The way life, society and persona are understood may all relate to religious beliefs, at times primarily so. Religious beliefs may shape meaning and explain why things happen, have happened and will happen, and can in this way act as a framework for migrants to understand the migrant situation (e.g., Porobić, 2012; McGuire, 2008; Hirschman, 2004). Yet they might also comprise a bothersome heritage difficult to compartmentalise or even leave behind (e.g., Enstedt et al., 2019; Otterbeck, 2010).

In this book, we mainly cover well-established, institutionalised religions that are organised into religious denominations, organisations, communities and groups. We are aware of ongoing religious transformations in contemporary Western societies, from organised religion to more private spirituality, changes that affect large sectors of the population (e.g., Parsons, 2018; Heelas & Woodhead, 2004); however, the research on migration and religion from which we draw has been almost entirely on organised religion. When appropriate, we point out alternatives.

5 Religion and Migration

Migration is one of the most distinctive social phenomena in Europe today, and one that reveals a great deal about contemporary European societies. Relating religion to migration allows us to understand European immigration better, but it also makes it possible to learn more about religion in general. This latter aspect has to do with understanding migration as social mobility; it is about a move from one position to somewhere else. What happens with religion in a new situation? Do key features and structures become visible at times of change?

The book shows how social aspects from legislation to cityscapes transform as the result of religious change due to migrations. We touch on how religion affects migration – for example, when people seek the advice of religious specialists about if, and when, to migrate or when someone’s religious conviction makes them migrate to spread their religion – but our focus is on how migration affects religion, keeping in mind that other forces than migration change societies. Studying religion as a social phenomenon, we can also observe that religions change over time even without migration: for example, as a result of movements from the countryside and small towns to cities (e.g., AlSayyad & Massoumi, 2011; Schiffauer, 1990), particularly industrialisation and urbanisation in nineteenth-century Europe, which had a huge impact on religion (McLeod, 1997). Moreover, in many European countries, religion continues to have a larger social impact in smaller towns than in larger cities, although international immigration to Europe seems to change this process as we can observe a partial increase of religious practices and active organisations in urban centres in Europe (e.g., Goodhew & Cooper, 2019; Berking et al., 2018; Anderson, 2013).

Changes in religion may also depend on the type of international migration. We know that strong transnational ties are maintained in relation to religion (e.g., Mooney, 2009; Lorentzen et al., 2009; Levitt, 2007), and that temporary migration, circle migration or intra-corporate migration have lower impact on the establishment of religious organisations and religious premises (e.g., Nielsen & Otterbeck, 2016). Reasons for migration also most certainly affect religion; fleeing because of one’s religiosity or moving between two countries with similar religious contexts and being vaguely religious, probably affect people’s religiosity in different ways (e.g., Saunders et al., 2016).

A substantial part of immigration to Europe is from former colonies to the former colonial centre – not least because of language competence, and contacts – and involves considerable political, economic and social tension, on state, group as well as individual levels. It is marked by the lingering complexities of colonialism that can manifest itself in racism, discrimination, violence, unfair economic relations between countries and the knowledge that the wealth of the former colonial powers has been acquired at the expense of the colonies. The cognitive maps inherited from colonialism may lead to stereotypes (on all sides) about the other (e.g., Keaton, 2006; Pryce, 1974) but may also be challenged by people with inclusive agendas and mindsets. The psychological wish to conquer, or be accepted, is well described in several novels with migration themes, and is part of this structural inequality that is difficult to erase or set aside (e.g., Salih, 2003; Rushdie, 1988).

Evidently, as migrants are people participating in socio-economic contexts, the character of migration and religion changes over time, as we demonstrate. Unfortunately, this will also eventually make this book outdated and in need of a new edition.

6 The Complicated Task of Finding Things Out

Below we caution against hastily construed knowledge about migration and religion by questioning some of the very basics of our assumed knowledge. First, we discuss how to establish that changes in religion are due to migration and not temporal factors; the religiosity of youth, for example, often differs from that of elders. Hypothetically, religion in European countries would not have been the same nowadays as in the twentieth century even if there had not been any migration at all; there are many other things in society that change. To be able to discuss this, we must decide what aspects of religion we are studying and the social level on which we are studying it.

If we want to investigate – on a meso level – whether, due to migration, there are fewer or more religious organisations in a country today than before, we must start by finding out if there is a difference compared to, say, 10 or 20 years ago – yet even this seemingly simple task may prove tricky. Registers on religious organisations may provide opportunities to assess whether there has been an increase or a decrease in established groups (‘Is there a change in the number of Pentecostal groups?’) or in the number of religions/denominations (‘Are there Christian charismatic groups that were not here before or are no longer here?’). However, there may be religious organisations that are not registered as religious and religious communities not registered at all. For example, 144 Muslim communities were registered in Sweden in 2017, but there were simultaneously over 700 NGOs that included Islam or Muslims in their name (Sorgenfrei, 2018: 223).

If there have been changes, is migration the reason? We may find that the number of groups is the same as before but this could still be the result of immigration; society might have had fewer religious organisations without immigration due to secularisation and a loss of interest in organised religion over time. During recent decades in Sweden, so-called protestant free churches have lost many adherents and that has led to the merging of groups and decreasing numbers (not due to immigration); at the same time, the number of orthodox churches has increased (due to immigration).

How do we decide if immigration is the root cause for the increase in orthodox churches, but not for the decrease of protestant free churches? This can be done by finding out if immigrants belong to these churches (micro level). Yet this is difficult in many European countries due to legal restrictions on registering people’s religious belonging or because membership registers kept by religious organisations may not be official or may not include information on members’ immigration history. Information on immigrant backgrounds among members in religious organisations can at times be estimated by the organisations themselves but this may also be troublesome as we seldom can control how these numbers are generated.

Generally, it is difficult to find statistics covering the religious background of migrants; therefore, researchers tend to use so-called origin proxy. This includes gathering information on people’s religious belonging in their country of origin and assuming that emigrants comprise an average sample of this population. There are, however, many difficulties with such statistics, one being that information about religious belonging is often estimated, and, in fact, a hot political potato in many states. It may be difficult, sometimes impossible, to discover the size of minority religious groups, such as the number of Copts in Egypt. Moreover, it is not always a religious average that emigrates from a country; indeed, often religious minorities are more likely to emigrate. Further, belonging to a religious group in the country of emigration is not necessarily followed by belonging in the country of immigration (research rather shows that is not). And, on top of that, who is to decide which groups are to be counted as religious? Alevis, for example, make up a fair part of Turkey’s population and are also a large group among the migrants from Turkey. Some of them consider Alevism a religious belonging, but others see it as primarily a cultural identity that may or may not include being Muslim (e.g., Özkul & Markussen, 2022).

Below we present a specific example of what calculations of religious belonging may look like. In Sweden, the number of Muslims is estimated to be between 190,000 (figures from 2018, SST Yearbook, 2020) and 800,000, depending on who is writing. The first figure is based on membership in Muslim organisations given state grants, larger figures are estimations based on, at best, former citizenship and the assumed percentage of Muslims coming from a specific country. Authors rarely explain the logic behind their estimates. It is generally unclear whether figures relate only to people with Swedish citizenship, or include people with permanent or only temporary residence, or even people who have recently applied for asylum. Mostly we are not told if converts to Islam or people who have left Islam are included or excluded; nor are we informed if children born in Sweden are included or whether children with one nominally Muslim parent and one non-Muslim parent are accounted for. And that does not cover all possible problems. For example, there are Muslims with Swedish citizenship who live outside Sweden; are they part of the figures provided (see also Thurfjell & Willander, 2021)?

Terms like ‘religious affiliation’, ‘religious belonging’ and ‘religious preferences’ are difficult to substantiate. ‘Belonging’ signals old-style worldviews, as if people are owned by religious groups. ‘Affiliation’ implies membership in a group, while ‘preferences’ implies an active role for the individual and may contain bricolage solutions of affiliations to different groups in different situations. A concept particularly favoured by Otterbeck (2010, 2015) is ‘religious family background’ as it avoids drawing any premature conclusion about peoples’ relations to such backgrounds. After all, it is quite common for people to participate in order to maintain community contacts, as Danièle Hervieu-Léger (2006) has pointed out. It should be clear from above that the ways migrants, like everyone else, relate to religions, vary (see also The Swiss Metadatabase of Religious Affiliation in Europe (SMRE), 2021, https://www.smre-data.ch/). Thus, in research, you must explain what you mean more precisely when you estimate that 4 percent of a population is, for example, Hindu. Do not take statistics on religion at face value. Interrogate them and, if possible, create your own, according to your own methodology.

We may also want to know how people’s religion changes due to migration (religion on a micro level), keeping in mind that religious beliefs and practices can have tremendous importance for people in relation to migration: suggesting if and when to migrate, and where and how to learn prayers and find amulets to safeguard the traveller; prompting promises to a god to do good or make offerings if arriving safely; providing information on how to keep in contact with local spiritual centres, religiously powerful people left behind and important contacts during and after the actual migration; even prompting some migrants to change their religion upon arrival in a new country. For many, migrantship is deeply intertwined with religion, an aspect that frequently gets overlooked in migration studies (e.g., Straut-Eppsteiner & Hagan, 2016).

But how should this be researched? Ideally, we should start by asking people about their religiosity before and after they migrate, yet this requires us to know beforehand that specific people will migrate and having the opportunity to ask them again after migration, which is very rarely the case. Another way is to ask – after migration – about religiosity before and after, bearing in mind all the difficulties with recollection and tactical answers when being interviewed (e.g., Van Tubergen, 2013; Van Tubergen & Sindradóttir, 2011; Connor, 2008).

On an aggregated level, we can compare religiosity between a group of people that have not migrated and a comparable group that have and investigate differences in religiosity between them. The difficulty with this is to find comparable groups, but it can be done (Hamberg, 2000). We can also compare religiosity among similar groups of immigrants that have stayed for different periods of time in the same country, which will make it possible to not only include place but also time in understanding how migration influences religion (e.g., Maliepaard et al., 2012).

This leads us to an important perspective related to the phenomenon of religion and migration, namely, integration.

7 Religion, Migration and Integration

In migration studies, to be integrated is to be part of a society. Often researchers distinguish between ‘assimilation’ (effacement of prior group characteristics), ‘integration’ (merging with the new society without giving up central characteristics), and ‘segregation’ (isolating as a group from others in society). This division serves a didactic function but does not help researchers in search of a more nuanced understanding. Further, the concepts are often politicized and people from different strands will insist that one or other is the better option, when aspects of all three strategies are often required or observable. Regardless of whether you are a migrant or not, integration processes orchestrate changes that affect most people in a society, although critics of integration debates have pointed out the skewed power balance between immigrants and the established who discursively decide what integration should be and frequently move the goalposts. Some argue that this disqualifies integration as an analytical concept (e.g., Schinkel, 2018); thus, operating with the simple idea of a single overall integration process may become counterproductive in research. It makes sense to, at least, distinguish between economic, legal, educational, political, social, cultural and religious integration/assimilation/segregation processes.

For example, European states demand legal assimilation, not integration, of immigrants, which means paying taxes, declaring yearly income, following traffic laws and so on. Yet, due to international agreements and the legal principle of comity, marriage contracts are respected when already entered into legally in the country of origin. In most countries, migrants who are not citizens in the new country of residence may further be divorced according to the law of the country of origin. Not even legal assimilation demands are absolute but must be investigated even more specifically.

Every European country provides different demands, conditions and possibilities for migrants, who are, in turn, tactical about preserving what they think is essential. For example, researchers have noted that while quite a few European states allow imams to oversee marriage contracts to register a marriage before the state, Muslims may not divorce according to Islamic family law if the marriage is registered in these countries. A way of allowing Islamic law to regulate Muslim marriages in European countries is not to register a marriage before the state, but instead sign a private contract that is accepted as a valid marriage before the community. Then divorce can be settled according to tradition and inheritance may be regulated with a will. Methods of avoiding adherence to the pertinent laws while still remaining legal are manifold (e.g., Bowen, 2016).

Formal registration of religious organisations and membership in them illustrate how diverse these integration processes can be. For example, baptism has traditionally been the way a person becomes Catholic, and she or he can thereafter choose to identify as this or not. In cases where membership in a religious organisation also rests on fees – a very common way in western Europe to organise religious minorities – membership becomes less optional. Consequently, religious organisations adapt to the organisational structures of the country in which they operate and change the traditional premises for religious belonging. So, what do people do who are baptised in the country of origin and want to stay Catholic in their new country of residence, but do not want to pay a fee for participation?

The processes of integration related to religion also require an awareness of the processes of secularisation and modernisation mentioned above, and the connected normative understanding of them.

8 Religion and Migration from an Intersectional Perspective

To study religion as a social phenomenon in relation to migration cannot be done without including other social aspects such as gender, ethnicity and age (e.g., Saunders et al., 2016). Gender has always been closely related to religions which mostly contain gender systems in which women almost always have a structurally subordinated position to men, evidenced in institutions such as marriage, gendered leadership and male dominance in interpreting religious scriptures, and particularly important if migration is between countries with clear differences in gender equality or roles (e.g., Okin Moller, 1999). We also find that women are normally measured as more religious – or possibly more invested in the religious – than men in terms of religious belonging, beliefs and practices, which should also be taken into consideration in studies about migration and religion (e.g., McGuire, 2008; Stark, 2004).

Ethnicity is often intertwined with religion to the point that separation risks becoming artificial. Being Jewish or Druze are obvious examples of this, but so is being Palestinian and adhering to an Abrahamic religion. Ethnicity and religion are frequently interlaced in minority politics and diaspora identities (e.g., McGuire, 2008: 199f; Kumar, 2004; Ebaugh & Chafetz, 2000; Kashima, 1977; Glazer & Moynihan, 1970).

Age is also important. We know that the configuration of religiosity changes over a life span and differs according to cohort (e.g., Beit-Hallahmi & Argyle, 1997), which should be taken into consideration in relation to migration. As mentioned, migration studies are primarily about changes in place, but may also include time. It is common to compare the religiosity of immigrants and their children to measure changes in religion and its practice due to migration (e.g., Jacob & Kalter, 2013; Raj, 2000; Roof & Manning, 1994), whereupon one must be aware of when the first generation migrated (cohort), how old they were when they migrated (age) and of course their religiosity before and after migration. This is also the case for the immigrants’ children: how long have they lived in the country of settlement (cohort) and how old are they now (age)? If the statistics are good enough, we should also take note of the composition of the groups regarding, for example, gender, education and economic class.

Thus, anyone who wants to study migration and religion seriously will have to be attentive to several factors (including some not yet mentioned like class and sexual identity). Unfortunately, we do not always have the luxury of such data, which should not hinder studies, only call for cautious conclusions. Luckily, much has already been done that can support interpretations and help formulate ideas. We now turn to that rich research.