In this final chapter, we venture to give some advice on researching religion and migration, first on what we know and then on what is lacking. If some readers heed our call and caution, it will be a needed and important contribution to far-too-neglected areas in migration research. By ‘researchers’ we mean students, scholars, journalists and others who seriously try to produce knowledge about the situation. Please feel included.

1 Bringing Religion into Migration Research

All through this book, we have tried to convey three key messages: (1) religion should not be overlooked in migration research designs as it is frequently very important to migrants; (2) the purposes for which religion is used and where expressions of it can be found cannot be regarded as fixed in any way; (3) religious norms and actual practices change over time and international migration is connected to these changes.

1.1 Religion in the Research Design of International Migration

It is an integral tradition in anthropology to pay attention to what the people you study consider important. Frequently, when reading the literature on migrants in Europe, we find that interviews contain references to features such as religious views, identities and rituals, without further analytical attention. Even if a researcher is not trained in the field, it is still pertinent to consider religious practices and ideas that informants claim are important. Fortunately, religious studies is not a mysterious field; a great deal of its theorisations are interlaced with those of contemporary sociology, anthropology and cultural studies.

In research on group identities, religious identifications cannot be reduced to a mere aspect of ethnicity, as this is simply not the case. Although religious identities and ethnicities frequently overlap, at times completely, the major religious identities – whether Catholic Church or Sunni Islam – are multi-ethnic. Statistically, Hinduism might primarily be the faith of people originating in India (but living in many corners of the globe), but India contains many ethnic groups (Kumar, 2004). Moreover, while group dynamics for ethnicities and religious identities might be very similar, the ethical, theological and ritual features of religions do not have equivalent parts in ethnicities. Finally, some ethnicities may harbour believers from different religions (Palestinian Arabs or Kurds for example) or, more commonly, different formulations of the same religion (see also Nordin, 2009; Baumann, 1999; Enloe, 1980).

Religious identities and ideas are potentially powerful, and can mobilise solidarity, friendship and even love for strangers – or the opposite. Failing to discover what religions mean to individuals or communities may allow international migration studies to miss a vital motivator in economic transactions, culture consumption, network analysis, political views, social engagement, gender roles, art production or even the very real act of migration itself.

Our recommendation is that migration researchers, in both qualitative and quantitative studies, try to include questions that identify the part played by religious perceptions and practices in the phenomena under investigation. When researching a group of people, talk to their religious leaders (and other community leaders), who can often explain a group’s version of faith and contextualise what is happening within the group. Nonetheless, a word of caution: religious leaders tend to theologise the experience of believers and fix the relations between believer and faith (for example, claiming that a ritual act has a single specific function or meaning). From empirical studies, we know that both believers and non-believers approach religion in many ways, depending on socio-economic circumstances, individual experiences and life history.

1.2 The Function and Spaces of Religion

Be attentive to when and where religious belonging, identification and rituals have functions and are emphasised, and when not. Identities, ideas and interests are, for most people, situational (see discussion on moral registers in Chap. 3). Religious ideas, rituals, practices and behaviour can be identified even in outspoken atheists’ lives and very worldly interests and passions can be found among the most pious people. In fact, expectations of clear divisions may hamper understanding. Religious emotions and ideas are immensely complex and can be triggered in the stoutest unbeliever by the beauty of nature, architecture, literature, music and solitude or accidents, sickness and grief. Most religious organisations catering to migrants are aware of this and will make use of aesthetics and nostalgia to provide a social context for the homesick, and counselling and help for the needy. Some do this efficiently, filling important functions in society – religious organisations are in general very decent, run by people who want to help others; however, there are those that are less benign whose primary interest lies in influence and money. What happens, and where, are tricky but important questions for research; in interviews, adherents tend to be loyal to the religious group they attend, at least initially.

During actual migration, religious space making is important for many migrants: a space to pray or meditate, alone or together with others. Journalists report on this in temporary camps like those along the French coast filled with migrants trying to cross to the UK. The efforts put into this space making suggests that the migrants consider this crucial, but for what? Their wellbeing, spiritual needs, hopes or anxieties? Researchers need to try to work in these difficult areas to explore the function and spaces of religions during migration.

1.3 Changing Religious Norms and Actual Practices

Researchers need to be aware of the difference between written or verbalised norms, on the one hand, and actual practices on the other. Lived religiosity is context sensitive; functions and expressions cannot be taken for granted. Still, some things are surprisingly resilient over time.

When researching migrants and paying attention to the role religion(s) play in their life and their migration experience, textbooks on religions may be helpful. Yet textbooks can only do so much if they are attempting to cover hundreds or thousands of years of development. Further, most religions have minority groups that are not even addressed in an introductory textbook. There will likely be special volumes on these too but, again, the coverage must be understood in relation to the limitations of the form.

An example: prayer practices are interesting in relation to migrants’ religion and we need to understand them in context. We may learn a lot about prayer from a textbook or by asking a religious leader; it may add to the knowledge needed to understand the discursive relations between the studied migrants and prayer. In interviews about personal religious practices, religious interviewees often relate religious norms in attempts to meet expectations, while in their private lives they must create themselves as individuals in light of their knowledge of the norms, their personal practices and possible discrepancies. When in migration, how and why do relations with prayer – knowledge of the norms and actual practices – change over time or remain static? These are tricky things to explore. Researchers need to be careful and attentive to avoid reducing prayers to simple questions about practice and regularity.

Historicise, contextualise and see relations with religious identities, discourses and practices as exactly that: relations that must be upheld and negotiated, that can change and morph into something else while retaining names, symbols or rituals. At times, observed religious communities, rituals or beliefs, as yet unnamed, defy established practices and conceptualisations. New interpretations, new configurations and even new religions may appear in new settings when social conditions change. Charismatic leaders tend to appear at such times and US history, in particular, is full of such instances.

2 What We Do Not Know

This section addresses blank areas in our knowledge of religion and migration. Clearly, we have been selective; however, we consider the following areas crucial, as research on them is very scarce indeed (we have already mentioned some areas in Chap. 5). We begin with historical research and then move on to contemporary phenomena. We have striven to make this section forward looking with the intent to stimulate research we would like to see done in future.

2.1 Historical Perspectives

Most migration research concerned with religion focuses on synchronic perspectives, possibly with a history of the group concerned as an informative backdrop. What is needed are projects following populations over time as some migration research of the labour market has succeeded in doing. All the questions we have raised above – from religious change over time and generation to different stages of the migrationship process – are possible to pose to a well-crafted research project examining long-term processes. Particularly interesting is religious change over time in individual lives.

Typically, in religious environments, religious socialisation takes place in childhood and young people subsequently tend to strive to sort out, confirm, engage in or reject the religious heritage. Young adults generally are allowed flexibility in relation to religion, not least if they are engaged in higher studies. Later, work and family life often restrict the time spent on religious engagement. However, in old age, religion may return.

Is this admittedly sketchy version of European religious trajectories true for immigrants whose old country ways must be considered? While researchers have engaged with the religious development of immigrant children, youth and young adults, far fewer have addressed the religious attachment and thoughts of older immigrants. In a way this is puzzling as one reason to focus on young adults is their accessibility as informants, yet many older retired immigrants will likely also have time on their hands and can easily be reached through religious organisations or cultural clubs. Classical ethnographic life-story interviews supported by letters, diaries and photo albums would likely be a good start.

Another side of historical research is engaging with the period specifically not mentioned in this book: religious migration to Europe before WWII. Some remarkable research on the European colonial powers, slaves, businesspeople and intellectuals has already been done (e.g., Asmay, 2021; Sorgenfrei, 2018; Offermanns, 2003), but much more is needed. To detail lives through archival research is fascinating and stimulating work although the ideal material rarely surfaces; rather, names turn up once in a newspaper, a police report, a departmental dispatch or on a tombstone and then no more. But at times reports, diaries and newspaper clippings can be puzzled together, most easily for successful migrants. The accessibility of computerised archives and newspapers makes it possible to attempt the research even if writing an undergraduate or MA dissertation.

2.2 Developing More Reliable Statistics

As mentioned in Chap. 1, while data on age, assumed sex, nationality and certain information on economic issues such as employment can be provided by states, NGOs or the EU, researchers scavenging for good data on such basics as nominal religious affiliation are generally disappointed. At times states have legal barriers to gathering such information while the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation considers religious belonging sensitive personal data. Often, any data on religious belonging will have to be gathered by researchers rather than drawn from registers.

Assumptions may be made from register data: for example, citizenship (even former) can be drawn from such sources and it may be assumed on this basis that if Turkey is a country with a 99.8 percent Muslim population (as the government claims), the same percentage of Turkish migrants to Europe are Muslims. Still, despite being a very minor group (far less than 1% of the Turkish population), we know that a disproportionately large number of Christian Turks have migrated to Sweden, accounting for maybe a third of Turkish immigrants – at least before the mid-1990s (Sander, 1993). Further, Muslim belonging is a diverse category. In Turkey the majority are Hanafi Sunni Muslims, but the Alevi are a large minority that some Alevis consider Shia, others see as separate from both Sunni and Shia and yet others as primarily a cultural rather than religious tradition. Estimates of the number of Alevis in Turkey range from 10 to 33 percent, making it hard to operate with assumptions (Cagaptay, 2014: 83). Twelver Shia Muslims also make up approximately 4 percent of the population while Sunni Muslims are split between government-loyal Hanafi Sunnis and a plethora of other Sunni groups like Süleymanlı, Hizmet and Milli Görüş.

This is but one example, but religious statistics tend to be absent, primitive, flawed or all three, both in countries of origin and in Europe – particularly statistics on actual religious practices and beliefs. The existing data and statistical studies on Muslims in Europe have been reviewed and harshly criticised as shallow and built on uniformising categories (Johansen & Spielhaus, 2012). What is needed is quantitative data built on large surveys, preferably designed by professional statisticians trained in multivariate analysis collaborating with migration theory-conscious humanists or social scientists with an in-depth knowledge of the tricky variable ‘religion’. However, such studies have proved very difficult to conduct and large surveys are quite expensive. Some general quantitative studies of sampled populations, like the World Values Survey,Footnote 1 or whole populations, like the UK Office of National Statistics survey,Footnote 2 have been conducted, but these are not geared to the specific interests of religion and migration studies.

2.3 Comparative Perspectives

To be able to formulate valid theories, researchers need to investigate numerous cases, preferably involving various religious traditions in different countries. Some brave synthesis has been attempted, (e.g., Kivisto, 2014; Ebaugh, 2010; Warner, 2000), but more needs to be done, taking more variables into account. Big data holds a certain promise for both qualitative analysis inspired by intersectional analysis and quantitative, multivariate analysis. This requires experts in different fields to join forces, which is what is happening in some large-scale, digital humanities projects. To be able to address the longue durée comparatively, a group of researchers would have to be granted funding for a large-scale project covering years of research like some of the most ambitious US-based projects mentioned in Chap. 2. Such projects could be game-changers for the field. In most cases, comparisons must be made in relation to previous research and again it is important to ferret out fine studies from different countries, despite language barriers.

2.4 The Role of Social Media for Religion in Relation to Migration

As mentioned, social media connects people in ways hard to imagine some decades ago. Today, everything from crucial religious rituals to family events can be followed anywhere with a digital connection. Thirty years ago, the birth of a child to immigrant parents would be announced to relatives in the homeland with a letter and photograph or an expensive telephone call; nowadays grandparents can initiate online relations with a grandchild immediately after delivery. As group attachment and socialisation are important factors in the development of religion – as is the transition from being childless to having children – researchers need to investigate whether social media has a role for migrants in upholding, developing and changing religion (e.g., Ferguson et al., 2021; Trysnes & Synnes, 2022).

Such research faces several challenges as even delineating the field requires input from informants. Further, researchers will have to collaborate closely with migrants and be allowed to follow their social media activities, documenting informants’ activities using the latest technology. Such research raises ethical complexities requiring attention before research starts and also as they appear. At times, researchers will need to compartmentalise to be able to frame the field, despite knowing that one or two media channels are only part of the full media flow.

Research on media and rituals could be developed for social media, migration and religion questions. For example, Ronald Grimes (2002) suggests looking at ritual action in virtual spaces including playful (ludic) rituals in games, mediatised rituals including marriages conducted with the partners in different places, and interactive, mediatised sacred objects and texts, just to mention a few things of interest. Can this be combined with migration research? Researchers need to find ways to adjust the very active social media research field to accommodate religion and migration. The 2020–22 pandemic saw some research on religious rituals that have moved online due to physical distancing rules (see Grafton, 2021) and it is likely that any successful mediatisation will become part of future standard repertoires. If a devotee migrant misses the weekly sermons of a charismatic leader of choice due to migrating to another country, for instance, they may now participate in (or at least follow) them online, in real time.

Finally, as religious celebrities, authorities, monks, rabbis and imams take to TikTok, Instagram and Twitter, their accounts have become among the most popular in the world, raising issues about how religious authority can be analysed. Is there an ongoing transformation whereby the authority of traditional religious offices is being complemented by other – more personal (or humanising?) – elements, like the singing, dancing, joking, pranking or baking religious leader? Is this especially important in a minority position where religious authority is less institutionalised and more personalised (or charismatic if turning to Weber’s terminology)?

2.5 Lingering Immigrant Identities

An intriguing, partly disturbing phenomenon is the lingering identification as ‘migrant’, ‘immigrant’ or even ‘foreigner’, both by the established and the newcomers and their children. It is not surprising that ethnic consciousness is retained in families and by outsiders; that is to be expected, especially given modern communication technologies. Nor is it surprising that families remember and at times celebrate their migration history (or complex of histories). The phenomenon that needs attention is why members of the second generation are still identified by others and at times by themselves as immigrants. This is likely due to a mix of immigration politics, class, economic position and discourses on ‘race’ (not least racialised othering where whiteness is a key category), ethnic identification, national identity and religion. Different country-based, regional or local cases should be compared to theorise this properly: on a micro level among individuals; on a meso level – both in-group and out-group; and on a macro level, taking into consideration state politics and policies. Again, longer perspectives would benefit conclusions drawn.

Researchers should also be open to ongoing terminological reinterpretations, as immigrants (or equivalent) may encourage group empowerment by appropriating terminology that is meant to exclude. A similar development is taking place with racist slurs, with some of the terminological reinterpretations involving religious identities. It would be rewarding to develop theories concerning the role of religion in all this. For example, religious belonging clearly plays a role in anti-immigrant political propaganda all over Europe and those responsible for it have a vested interest in confining people to categories of otherness, shunning hybridity and fluid identifications; equating the religious other with the immigrant thus becomes a trope. In this, we sense an opportunity to combine the strong research on the Jewish other, Islamophobia and racism with, for example, migration research on political discourse and the economy.

2.6 Religious Change in Society in General and Among Established Religious Communities

Does migration change attitudes to religious rituals, ideas and belonging among the established? In a globalising world interconnected by a myriad of media channels and technologies, isolating one cause for possible change is risky. Nonetheless, if the newly arrived in a given European country not only practice other religions but also demonstrate different attitudes to religious rituals, morals, ethics and belonging, and if the established live and/or work alongside them, it is fair to ask if this affects attitudes and behaviour among the latter. Comparisons between cities and areas in cities should be possible, at least on a surface level. Are there changes in the wearing of visible religious symbols, attendance at rituals or even engagement in activities? Are there differences if people belong to an established majority or an established minority? Are immigrants of the same overall religion as the established more or less likely to trigger change among the established than if they engage in other religions? Are youth more or less likely to be affected? Is there a difference in shallow contacts and profound ones? Most projects have focused on the reverse, on how the religions of the migrants are affected, but as the ideological discourse on integration stipulates: integration is not a one-sided process.

For example, a study on how the Church of Sweden meets new challenges generated by migration discloses many interesting aspects worthy of further research. The study discusses whether the Church – still by far the largest religious denomination in the country – should only take responsibility for its own members or should also assume responsibility for members of other congregations and for irregular migrants who are not being recognised as citizens in the country – a responsibility it had when it was the state church. One conclusion is that basic values must be reflected upon and negotiated. What values can the Church of Sweden not give up? What can it learn and include from immigrant churches to become a church that is relevant to all Swedes, immigrants as well as non-immigrants (Helgesson Kjellin, 2016)? The Church of Sweden still organises more than half the population but is very aware of the changing religious atmosphere in the country. We are likely to find changes relating to migration on many levels.

We also need to investigate changes in religion among majority populations by looking beyond national or state borders and trying to capture transnational flows. We know, for example, that rituals change: some become fashionable before disappearing, some become more permanent features. Can this be connected to migration or is it more likely connected to the globalisation of ideas?

3 Final Words

This book has had the overall aim to inform, inspire and challenge. Religious rituals, ideas and belongings – the three main fields in religious studies – have played roles in migration throughout human history and continue to do so. When researching migration issues, this should not be forgotten in research designs. These fields are not neatly compartmentalised and separated from contemporary society in Europe; on the contrary, states regulate religious expression and belonging, assigning different rights to different groups, and the established and newcomers alike have specific relations with religious rituals, ideas and belongings which affect how they go about their everyday business and perceive the world. Neither are religious convictions distinct from the economy, politics or the labour market. Migration researchers need not add the broad examination of religion to every project but, given that migration theories largely ignore religion, we suggest researchers at least consider it as a possible complexity in the fields they study.