Einwanderung und der neue religiöse Pluralismus

Abstract

One of the most significant consequences of the new immigration has been a dramatic growth in religious diversity on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States the new immigrant religions are contributing to the further expansion of an already vibrant American religious pluralism, which is incorporating all world religions in the same way in which it incorporated the old immigrant religions, Catholicism and Judaism. In the case of Europe, by contrast, immigrant religions and particularly Islam present a greater challenge to local patterns of limited religious pluralism and even more importantly to recent European trends of drastic secularization. Islam is perceived as “the other” of Western secular modernity, an identification that becomes superimposed upon the older image of Islam as “the other” of European Christianity.