Mobile bodies,(im)mobile beliefs? Religious accord and discord as migratory outcomes

Abstract

French

This article advances a new understanding of the outcomes that arise from the movement and settlement of religion. These outcomes can range from religious accord to discord; or, from the full integration of migrant religions to inter-religious conflict. It identifies two axes that determine such outcomes. The first relates to the interplay between transnational religious agency and the strength of local religious structures. Harder structures are more likely to require migrant religious groups to make greater compromises to bring about situations of religious accord, while softer structures are less likely to do so. The second relates to the interplay between religion and other aspects of a migrant’s identity. Just as religion plays a more prominent role for some migrants, for others it is more subordinate. Combined, these two axes provide a framework to help understand the negotiations and compromises that arise as a result of religious pluralism in a globalised world.

Keywords

Islam migration religious identity religious structures social fields transnational religion

The travel of religion follows the movement of people, and, like migrants, there is a variability with which religions evolve and adapt to new environments. In the contemporary era of globalisation, bodies move constantly within and between countries, pausing in place for short or more sustained periods. Beliefs are tied to bodies, and are manifested in various ways through religious presence and praxis. Few religions are entirely indigenous to the places in which they are found: most are imported (see Wohlrab-Sahr, 1999; Wong and Levitt, 2014; Woods, 2018). The vast majority of religions have, therefore, been deemed ‘migrant’ religions at some point in time, and have encountered resistance to their integration (Foucault, 1980). As religions continue to move and settle in place, their position within local religious landscapes must continually be (re)negotiated according to ever-shifting structures of religious power, resistance and (in)equality (Cadge et al., 2011; Markofski, 2015). Resistance reflects the enduring tension between stasis and change, and its legacy helps to govern the terms of religious pluralism in the contemporary world.

Yet, whilst the movement of religion can ignite such tensions, it can also help to mediate and smooth the personal upheaval brought about by migration. In other words, belief can provide a source of continuity and strength for spatially dislocated bodies. In particular, transnational religious practices enable migrants to stay connected to their home countries, but can also complicate the process of religious integration. Thus, transnational religion is that which is simultaneously rooted in, yet connects and therefore transcends, different localities around the world. Growth in the frequency and volume of such movements has caused religious landscapes to become ‘more variegated and complex’ (Kong, 2010: 755), and has caused the hegemony of incumbent religions to be redefined and reasserted in the context of increasing pluralism (Kong and Woods, 2016). Thus, the movement of bodies and beliefs forces processes of religious change and resistance. Whilst immigration is now commonplace, the fact remains that ‘the idea that something as complex and extensive as the receiving society . . . should change in response to the arrival of by nature numerically inferior “migrants” is unheard of’ (Joppke, 2007: 3; see also Ebaugh and Chafetz, 2000). The normative view, therefore, is that the ‘receiving society’ sets the terms and limits of migrant integration, which in turn affects migrants’ propensity to adapt to or resist the status quo.

Problematizing such an imbalance of power is the series of religiously-motivated terrorist events that have captured the imaginations of the media and public since 11 September 2001. These events have heralded a shift in attitudes towards religious ‘others’ in general, and migrants in particular. This shift has mostly been negative, and resonates most strongly with the presence of Islam in the West. It has resulted in increasingly public discourse about the threat of migrants (and their religions) in and to the receiving society, and, more specifically, the fear of ‘religion’s expanding role in American society and its increasingly diverse character’ (Levitt, 2007: 104; see also Kong and Woods, 2016), and that ‘the world of Islam may do more to define and shape Europe in the twenty-first century than the United States, Russia, or even the European Union’ (Savage, 2004: 25; see also Joppke, 2007). Fear of the impact of Islam on the collective identity and public values of Western society stems from both its alterity, and its sustained growth: through immigration, through its adherents’ youth and fecundity relative to their domestic counterparts, and, increasingly, through conversion as well (Wohlrab-Sahr, 1999; Savage, 2004; Cesari, 2009; Karyotis and Patrikios, 2010; Galonnier, 2015; Ramahi and Suleiman, 2017). Accordingly, the study of Islam as a migrant religion in and to the West has become a ‘growth industry’ (Levitt, 2012: 494; Meer and Madood, 2015; Sheikh, 2015) for research,¹ and provides a clearly defined empirical lens through which the circulation and settlement of bodies and their beliefs can be examined and understood.

Indeed, the various ways in which Islam has ‘grown’ in the West is instructive in many ways. As much as it reveals how the outcomes of migration can result in religious accord and/or discord, it also reveals how remarkably under-theorised the movement and settlement of religion is. Too often, the empirical bias of existing scholarship can render it idiosyncratic, and therefore limited in its explanatory potential. Compounding this is the fact that studies of religion in/and migration have adopted macro transnational perspectives that overlook the dynamics and politics of local-level religious integration. Thus, where existing scholarship tends to focus on the transnational practices of specific migrant communities and specific religious groups within those communities, this article provides a holistic framework for interpreting and understanding the movement and settlement of religion in more theoretical terms. In doing so, it advances a new understanding of how situations of religious accord and/or discord can arise from the contemporary movement and settlement of bodies and beliefs around the world. We do this first by examining trends and developments in the study of transnational religion, and its implications for religious identity, focusing specifically on the tension between transnational religious agency and local religious structures, and the relative role of religion vis-à-vis other aspects of migrant identity. Following that, we develop a new understanding of how the nature of migrant religiosity can result in either religious accord and/or discord: two poles that define the spectrum of migratory outcomes.

Transnationalism and (im)mutable religious identities

Over the past fifteen years, the study of transnational migration has started to embrace religion as a key aspect of the migration process (see Kong, 2010). This has involved unravelling the many and varied roles of religion in the lives of migrants. Research has explored how religion buttresses migrants’ identities and practices, how it provides tangible and intangible value in terms of socialisation and support, and how religion itself is transformed by its movement and settlement around the world (Yang and Ebaugh, 2001a; Hagan and Ebaugh, 2003; Levitt, 2003; 2004; 2008; Hirschman, 2004). Indeed, as the webs of inter-connections that thread together seemingly disparate locations (and the communities and groups therein) proliferate in size, strength and complexity, traditional, static notions of identity and belonging have been massively disrupted. Below we provide an overview of such disruptions: first, by identifying the role of religion in/and transnationalism; and, second, by introducing existing thought about cultural hybridity and the (im)mutable nature of religious identity.

Religion in/and transnationalism

Global forces have transformed local communities around the world, and have caused societies and cultures to be defined in relation to the world(s) of others. In response, scholars have increasingly looked beyond the boundaries (and bounded nature of) the nation-state to understand and explain the nature of social and religious life. Over time, this has involved ‘trading in the national lens for a transnational one’ (Levitt, 2007: 105; see also Cadge et al., 2011; Levitt, 2003; 2012), which has resulted in:

jettison[ing] the assumption that the nation-state is the natural, logical container where social life takes place and begins instead with a world with no set borders and boundaries. It asks why particular kinds of boundaries arise in particular historical contexts and assumes that these processes happen simultaneously in several settings and at several levels of social experience. (Levitt, 2007: 105)

The notions of ‘boundaries’ and ‘levels of social experience’ are central considerations for this article, as they help to determine the ease and extent of migrant (and religious) integration. Moreover, the relative strength or weakness of religious boundaries can predicate the extent of religious competition, conflict or co-existence within a given context (after Kong and Woods, 2016), and can affect migrants’ behaviours, attitudes and outcomes across various walks of life and in different social contexts (or their ‘levels of social experience’). These boundaries inform our understanding of migrant religiosity, and we return to them later in the article.

Boundaries can therefore help to determine the extent to which religious accord or discord arises as a migratory outcome, and yet research has so far failed to make this connection. Instead, the role of religion in discourses of transnationalism has tended to focus on how migrants (re)create the sense of belonging that is lost through the movement of bodies, rather than the negotiations that are involved in the settlement of beliefs. In particular, numerous studies have demonstrated how religion helps migrants ‘belong’ to several countries at the same time, and to an imagined, global community of religious believers as well (see Levitt, 2003; 2007; 2008). By expounding the notion of ‘belonging’, research has examined the ways in which migrants retain ties to their countries of origin, and how these ties help to shape religious lives within the destination country. Such ties are established, maintained and strengthened through the regular flow of communications, money, people and ideas (also termed ‘social remittances’) between home and host countries. Over time, they have been shown to materialise as ‘social fields’ with ‘tremendous transformative significance that can modify the economy, values and everyday lives of entire regions’ (Levitt, 2007: 106). Social fields can be multi-locational and multi-layered, and are defined by the connections that underpin their construction. They are, however, also insulated (and, therefore, isolated) from the local religious landscapes within which migrants live, and have distracted scholarly attention from explaining the variable nature of religious integration.

In spite of this, an understanding of social fields helps to explain why some migratory routes are stronger, and therefore less risky, than others. Strong social fields make the processes of migration, and the construction of transnational lifestyles thereafter, much easier to navigate, and help to stabilise the international movement and settlement of religion. Sustained migration from the Indian subcontinent to the UK over several generations has, for example, resulted in the establishment of religious infrastructures and understandings that make the movement and settlement of future generations much easier than it was for their forebears. Religious organisations have been shown to play an important role in strengthening cross-border religious ties through ‘thick, multilayered web[s] of links’ (Levitt, 2007: 107; see also Levitt 2004) that provide resources, support and a degree of institutional formality to transnational religious life. Indeed, more innovative scholarship has explored how strong social fields – and the (perceived) power of transnational religious organisations – can drive religious conversion. Akcapar (2006; see also Kalir, 2009), for example, shows how Iranian asylum seekers in Turkey convert from Shi’a Islam to Christianity in order to embed themselves within the organisational networks that will be most effective in facilitating their ongoing (and desired) movement to the US and UK.

This example demonstrates not just the functional role of social fields in enabling transnational religion, but its strategic one as well. It also shows how conversion can result in the accumulation of positive social capital, which helps to mitigate against the broader socio-cultural outcasting associated with their status as asylum seekers (see Woods, 2012a). In itself, this provides a useful and important reminder that religion is just one aspect of the assemblage that makes up an individual’s identity. Existing scholarship has, however, tended to privilege (or, worse, inflate) the role of religion relative to others. The fact remains that a range of identifiers, such as ethnicity, race, gender, language, tastes, preferences and religion – amongst others – all coalesce into one ever-shifting assemblage, with migrants having to negotiate ‘multiple pathways to incorporation simultaneously in different configurations at different times’ (Levitt, 2012: 495; see also Rudolph and Piscatori, 1996; Yang and Ebaugh, 2001b; Vásquez and Marquardt, 2003; Brubaker, 2004; Glick Schiller et al., 2006; Chen, 2008). Indeed, given that migration represents and reflects the movement and diffusion of culture around the world, hybridisation has become an invariable outcome of migration.

Cultural hybridity and (im)mutable religious identities

In the contemporary era of globalisation, the threshing and splicing together of different elements of society and culture has become normative. It is now broadly accepted (or even expected) for migrants in particular to feel a sense of belonging to multiple, often overlapping, categories of identity. As such, the construction of identity is increasingly predicated on negotiation and compromise, and there is a growing need to ‘mak[e] seemingly contradictory loyalties and cultural expectations fit’ (Levitt, 2007: 104; see also Wohlrab-Sahr, 1999; Gregory et al., 2012; Woods, 2017). Religion is both an input and outcome of such (re)constructions. Hybridised religious forms reflect the ‘reterritorialisation’ and adaptation of religion to new contexts, as brought about by the fact that ‘religions have travelled as much to migrants as through migrants’ (Wong and Levitt, 2014: 349, emphasis added). Indeed, in some instances, religious organisations like the Islamic missionary movement, Tablighi Jamaat, have emerged to rid transnational religious communities of their ‘syncretic impurities and impose scriptural orthodoxy’ (Wong and Levitt, 2014: 359) instead. Examples like this start to reveal the politics of religious settlement and change, and how they intersect with migrant processes of adaptation, (re)negotiation and compromise.

Building on these ideas, research has explored how some migrant communities may be predisposed to more flexible understandings of identity. In such instances, hybrid identities may not necessarily be just an outcome of migration, but a pre-existing state of being as well. Two examples illustrate the point. In the first instance, ‘religion’ often has a more flexible and inclusivist meaning when interpreted outside of Western and/or Christian traditions and contexts. In Singapore and Malaysia, for example, Chinese forms of Buddhism are often referred to as a ‘syncretic religion’ that has expanded in definitional size and scope as it has been carried and settled across borders (Goh, 2009; see also Kitiarsa, 2005). In the second instance, second-generation migrants have been shown to be born into an inherently more flexible way of shaping their religious identities than their parents. For example, the Hindu and Muslim children of Indian parents living in the US create blended religious identities that are based on real and imagined experience. These identities include their own experiences of religious life in the US and India, along with the imagined experiences of their parents’ religious upbringing in India, and their understanding of US religious traditions other than their own, notably Christian (Cadge et al., 2011). Such creations are a form of negotiation between the religious expectations of their families and ethnic communities, and the dominant milieu in which they have been born and raised. Flexibility is central to migrant integration, and we return to this later in the article.

The ideas that underpin these examples help to reveal important axes of opinion that must be recognised and reconciled in order to develop the discourse further. Two axes are of particular importance for this article. The first is the interplay between transnational religious agency and local religious structures; the second is the interplay between religion and other aspects of a migrants’ identity. Exploring these axes in more detail can lend new perspectives to the role of ‘boundaries’ and ‘levels of social experience’ in the formation and expression of identity and socio-cultural integration. We do so in the next, and unravel some of the factors involved in determining the outcomes of the movement and settlement of religion.

Negotiating the outcomes of transnational religion

Whilst mobility may be associated with agency, and transnationalism with deterritorialised (religious) practices, this does not mean that migrants are immune to the complicating effects of inter-religious relations, or the religious structures that dominate a locality. In fact, religious agency is often inequitably distributed, and is relativized by the socio-religious context within which it is expressed. This dialectic of distribution and relativized expression is caused by the enduring tension between transnational religious agency – manifested in the form of transnational social fields – and the mediating effect of local religious structures (Glick Schiller, 2005; after Rudolph and Piscatori, 1996). The outcomes of this tension reflect the fact that there are ‘multiple pathways of [migrant] incorporation’ (Glick Schiller et al., 2006: 615), and therefore helps to determine the limits of religious identity and expression, especially amongst migrants affiliated with marginal religious communities. Accordingly, it determines the dynamics of introducing a new religion, from seeking accommodation and acceptance by other religions, to seeking full integration into the religious structure of a locality. To gain a clearer understanding of the possible outcomes of transnational religion, we now explore, in turn, the interplay of transnational religious agency and local religious structures, and of religion versus other aspects of a migrant’s identity.

Transnational religious agency and local religious structures

Whilst migration itself is a process of disruption in the life of a migrant (and the community that they move from and to), transnational practices help to minimise and manage such disruption. In many instances, they are a source of agency, with the extent of religious agency often being a function of the strength of transnational ties (whether social, cultural, economic or political), and/or the size of the migrant population. The problem, however, is that ‘many scholars of transnational migration view the social fields engendered by transnational migration as anomalous’ (Glick Schiller, 2005: 441) and, therefore, divorced from the broader local structures within which they are framed. Whilst theoretical approaches such as structuration – the reflexive influence of structure on agency, and agency on structure – provide a framework for understanding such tensions, they have rarely been applied to religion (Morawska, 2003; after Giddens, 1984; cf. Glick Schiller, 2005). Instead, there is a tendency for the transnational religiosity of migrants to be treated in acontextual terms, despite the fact that transnational agency is invariably relativized by the religious structures within which it is expressed.

Whilst a unique characteristic of some transnational religious groups is that they may consciously choose to insulate themselves from the host society – choosing instead to import religious leaders from overseas, and to restrict participation to members of the migrant community (through linguistic exclusivism, for example) – there is little understanding of how such strategies impact, and are impacted by, other religious groups. The closest we can get is the example of Gujarati migrants in the US, who are shown to cultivate a form of Hindu exclusivism as ‘a way to protect themselves and their children from what they perceived as inferior Western values’ (Levitt, 2004: 13; see also Levitt, 2008). This sense of social and cultural superiority is reinforced by the fact that the sadhus² based in their local temple are transplanted directly from India, speak no English, do not interact with women, and are otherwise oblivious to life in the US beyond the temple walls. The problem is that examples like this treat the migrant community as being isolated from the social, political and cultural context within which it operates. It is distinct from the community-at-large, and the Hindu temple is interpreted as an autonomous organisation that is not influenced by – nor does it influence – the perceptions or actions of other religious organisations. Simply put, there is a tendency for discourses of migrant religion to focus on intra-religious relations at the transnational level, and, to a lesser extent, religion-intra-community relations at the local level, but rarely inter-religious relations. A notable exception is the study by Gregory et al. (2012: 323) of how migrant children in London draw on their various ethno-religious backgrounds to create syncretic, faith-based narratives that are ‘greater than the sum of the constituent parts’ that enable them to be ‘a head taller than in any one of their separate worlds’. In this case, the children’s religious agency was amplified by integrating English linguistic and cultural traditions with their Hindu, Muslim, Catholic and Pentecostal faiths, a process that resulted in syncretic religious understandings, enhanced creativity, and the forging of stronger inter-group relationships.

There are two key reasons for the acontextual nature of existing discourse. The first is that, whilst transnational religion is often enabled and formalised by religious organisations, existing work tends to focus on the experiences of the migrant. Focussing on the strategies of integration employed by religious organisations that cater to migrant communities (whether exclusively or not) would help broaden the discourse, not least because religious organisations are much more visible than migrants, and, therefore, are much more accountable to the various public spaces in which they operate. The second is the fact that it draws heavily on the empirical terrain of the US and, to a lesser extent, Western Europe, where integration is taken as normative, in order to draw general conclusions about the mechanics of migrant religiosity. In the US, after all, the ‘social climate in general is also more tolerant of ethnic diversity’ (Levitt, 2007: 113; Wong and Levitt, 2014); an ideal that is not only variably applied throughout the US (both spatially and temporally), but that other countries may not extend to their migrant communities to the same extent and in the same way. As an outcome of such privileging, discourse reflects a benign and largely uncritical view of religion, taking integration as its goal or outcome, and politics as something that resides within religious groups, rather than between them (see Ammerman, 2009; Cadge et al., 2011). Religion is, however, a fluid category of understanding that is relativized by its position within (or, more problematically, without) the mosaic of religions within which it is embedded. Migrant religions – or religions popularly associated with migrants – are at a natural disadvantage, as they are often deemed outside, or ‘other’, to prevailing religious hierarchies. Accordingly, not only do situations of religious pluralism invariably result in religious tension, but migrant religions are often placed in positions of marginality relative to prevailing socio-cultural and religious norms.

Religion in/and identity

In the second instance, research has tended to focus exclusively on the impact of religion on a migrant’s identity, yet it is important to bear in mind the fact that such identities are shaped and defined by various factors, not just religion. The dislocation associated with migration can, however, cause religion to play a greater or lesser role in the (re)construction of identity. Indeed, whilst religion was ‘once . . . kept analytically separate’ from ethnicity in enabling processes of transnational affiliation, it has since been embraced (Glick Schiller, 2005: 443; see also Glick Schiller et al., 2006). So far, scholarship has, however, tended to privilege the more agentic aspects of migrant religiosity, as evinced in associations with ideas of ‘cosmopolitanism,’³ ‘global citizenship’, as well as more peripheral socio-economic groups that find strength in transnational religion (after Levitt, 2008; see, however, Naylor and Ryan, 2003; Karagiannis and Glick Schiller, 2006). Relatively less consideration has been given to the more reactive (or less powerful) forms of migrant religiosity; those built on the premise of negotiation and compromise in response to the local religious structures in which they have been embedded. Even expressions of cultural hybridity tend to assume that the migrants pick and choose from different cultural signifiers in order to develop an identity to suit their circumstances. Thus, the fact is that for some migrants, ‘boundary crossing or combining elements from different faiths is the rule, not the exception’ (Levitt, 2007: 110; for example, Gregory et al., 2012), and this is treated as unproblematic and without consequence. The reality, however, is that many migrants operate from positions of socio-cultural marginality, and are constantly, therefore, responding to their surroundings. Moreover, such marginality elevates the potential – or the need – for self-censorship or self-denial in response to different circumstances; a dynamic that remains hitherto unexplored.

More does need to be done to recognise the role of religion within the broader assemblage of migrant identity, and how the transnational agency afforded by the non-religious aspects of migrants’ identity mediates religious expression and vice versa. As the ‘ethnic lens’ of transnational studies was once criticised for obscuring ‘the diversity of migrants’ relationships to their place of settlement and to other localities around the world’ (Glick Schiller et al., 2006: 613), so too does an exploration of religion as isolated from other aspects of identity obscure the complex interplay of competing forces that coalesce to ultimately determine the extent and limits of religious expression. Whilst some studies have shown a sensitivity to the coupling of religious and other identities, showing how one can affect the other, this body of work is small, albeit innovative. Notably, Sinha (2005; see also Hewelmeier and Krause, 2009) demonstrates how, in India, the Hindu god Muneeswaran is often worshipped by the lower castes, whereas in Singapore, it is worshipped by middle-class Hindus. This is explained by the upward socio-economic mobility experienced by Indian migrants to Singapore, and the associated reframing of religion alongside socio-economic gains. This creates tensions and divisions between established Indian migrants to Singapore (who have attained middle-class status), and their lower caste counterparts, which can restrict their religious integration. Little, however, is known about the strategies employed by religious organisations to help overcome such socio-cultural rifts amongst their adherents.

The prevailing assumption, however, is that ‘their [migrants’] primary identification is not to the nation but to the global religious community’ (Levitt, 2007: 108), and that religious praxis is only a local manifestation of global religious belonging. Such assumptions reflect the fact that the discourse is heavily influenced by learnings from Islamic and Christian traditions (and by the US/Europe as receiving countries), both of which promote a sense of global belonging (Menjivar, 1999; 2003), and, in the case of Islam, prescriptions on dress, diet and conduct (especially amongst women). In addition, other, more wide-ranging socio-cultural aspects of identity – such as ethnicity, gender, language or profession – are typically either absent in existing work, or conflated with religion. ‘Cultural talk’, as Cesari (2009: 2) puts it, is currently limited by its ‘overemphasis [of] the role of religion in the process of integration’. Besides being an analytical oversight, this can also have potentially damaging consequences in the public domain. Speaking of Islam in Europe, for example, Cesari (2009: 2) criticises the tendency for ‘politicians and academics . . . [to] conflat[e] factors such as immigrant background, ethnicity, socio-economic deprivation and the war on terror with Islam as a religion’. Conflating religion with other constructs not only causes confusion about the actual role of religion in academic discourse, but can also taint the public perception of – and create discrimination against – migrant communities in the real world.

Accordingly, research needs to situate religion within a broader schema of socio-cultural forces at play more carefully, not least because such forces have compounding effects that shape the extent to which migrant groups are absorbed into, or rejected from, local religious structures. The view that ‘faith guides the way that they [migrants] live their everyday lives, with whom they associate, and the kinds of communities they belong to, even among those who say they are not very religious’ (Levitt, 2007: 109, emphasis added) clearly reflects the biases that are embedded within – and that have stymied – the discourse. These biases not only privilege religion above all else, but also uncritically assume that migrant religiosity is divorced from both other religious actors, and from the socio-cultural structures within which it is expressed. In the next section, we seek to overcome such shortcomings by developing a new understanding of migrant religiosity.

Towards a new understanding of migrant religiosity

Migrants create – and, over time, are created, by – new religious architectures that must be established and developed amongst pre-existing encampments of religious actors. By religious architectures, we refer to the materialisation of religious belief and praxis through, for example, organisations, buildings, posters, clothing, diet, and any other symbolic manifestation of religious identity. The reality, therefore, is that ‘the religious landscapes on which modern travelling faiths attempt to take root are not inert traditional religious fields’ (Wong and Levitt, 2014: 359). Rather, they mediate religious settlement and assimilation, and play an important role in shaping the composition and nature of the local religious landscape. In addition, migrants – and their religious architectures – are mediated by the socio-cultural milieus in which they find themselves living and working in their host countries. Over time, the religious architectures of migrants become embedded alongside what came before, creating a mosaic of religions that both reflects and, over time, can determine the religious structure of a locality (after Woods, 2013). The mosaic of religions that are active within a given locality exists in a constant state of flux, as ‘meeting the other symbolic system promotes a redefinition of one’s own, but also a definition of the identity of the other one’ (Wohlrab-Sahr, 1999: 351). It is constantly being (re)negotiated in response to various factors. These include government legislation, the relative size and strength of different religious (and ethnic) groups, the rate of inter-religious conversion, natural disasters, the media, and so on.

In light of this reimagination of how religions move and settle, it should be clear that integration (especially of migrant religions) is not normative; often, it is the exception rather than the rule. The terms of exchange involve manifold factors: the agency of the migrant (which, in many instances, correlates with socio-economic, or socio-cultural status), the presence and strength of pre-existing social fields, the strength and co-operability of incumbent religious groups, the degree of pre-existing religious pluralism or singularity, as well as any intra-group divisions or schisms. At best, dominant religious groups may allow the co-existence – or accommodation – of other religions as long as they are not perceived to be a threat; at worst, marginal religious groups may have to operate underground or informally to avoid surveillance, censorship or attack. Religious parity – the treatment of all religious groups on equal terms – is therefore rare, even under conditions of pluralism. Accordingly, there is a need to better understand ‘how the stories nations tell themselves about who they are, and how they perform themselves to members and non-members alike, influence immigrant incorporation’ (Levitt, 2012: 497–498). In some countries, religious elites may actively ‘securitize’ public discourses of religion in order to entrench prejudices and reaffirm the marginal status of ‘other’ religious groups (see, for example, Karyotis and Patrikios’s 2010 discussion of the hegemonic role of the Orthodox Church in Greece). Indeed, in the context of Islamic migration, ‘the battle for Europe’ can be understood as ‘a battle over the right of [Muslim] self-definition’ (Kepel, 2004: 287; see also Taarnby, 2005) in the face of Christian hegemony. Thus, just as religious and ethnic characteristics help to define levels of migrant integration (Yang and Ebaugh, 2001b), so too do levels of migrant integration affect the extent to which religions are absorbed into (and accepted by) the religious structure of a locality.

An important aspect of our understanding of migrant religiosity is that it does not treat religion as an isolated variable, but one that is defined in relation to other, ostensibly ‘non-religious’ variables. It recognises the adaptive necessity of most migrant religions in the face of ‘discrimination, economic hardship, and social exclusion’, and the pervasive reality – felt in various ways and to varying degrees in different contexts around the world – that ‘the assumption of assimilation is no longer omnipresent’ (Karagiannis and Glick Schiller, 2006: 140). Adaptation is often based on the premise that religion is just one, inter-connected component of an ever-shifting mosaic of socio-cultural interactions that ultimately mediate how a migrant lives his/her life. Admittedly, for some migrants, in some contexts, religion looms larger than for other migrants in other contexts, but it is rare for religion to be the one force shaping how he/she lives her life in the migrant destination. Moreover, because identity is an ‘ensemble of subject positions’ (after Mouffe, 1992), its different elements interact and shape one another such that ‘during a particular struggle, one dimension of identity prevails… [and] its other dimensions are defined in relation to that predominant position’ (Levitt, 2008: 787). Thus, whilst Levitt (2004) suggests that the state is the predominant arbiter of religious expression, we recognise the state as being just one actor in a web of cultural, social, economic and political actors that work together to condone, mediate or censor such expression, and that in diverse contexts, different actors play more significant roles in shaping religious expression. As a result of this web of influence, we can begin to see how religious identities are constructed in response to myriad factors. Whilst some may be ‘hidden from public view because of feelings of shame and guilt’ (Taarnby, 2005: 31), others may respond to the religious structure in a more reflexive way in the search for socio-cultural acceptance. The flexibility associated with religious accord is now explored in more detail.

Religious accord/discord and the spectrum of migratory outcomes

Migration does not just result in the movement and settlement of religion, but in a host of other potential outcomes as well. Whenever religion stops moving, it must settle. Wherever it settles, it reveals how ‘new overlays land on pockmarked geographies, enabling some things to travel easily while inhibiting others’ (Wong and Levitt, 2014: 351). Bodies rarely change when they are moved, but beliefs are often expected to undergo processes of adaptation in response to the religious structure of the host country or locality. The hardness of a religious structure dictates the degree of adaptation required; harder structures suggest thicker, more impenetrable boundaries, and therefore command greater adaptation; softer structures suggest thinner, more penetrable boundaries, and therefore require relatively less adaptation. Compounding this is the fact that religious organisations often play a central role in determining how migrants adapt to local religious environments, and should therefore provide a focus of future research and analysis. Accordingly, there is a need to understand how the religious structures of different contexts engender different ‘philosophies of integration’ (after Favell, 2001), which may, in turn, affect the presence of (implicitly, public) religious alternatives. Religious accord and discord represent two broad-based categories that encompass a greater range of religious outcomes. In terms of accord, outcomes range from accommodation to integration, and often reflect complementary relationships with the religious structure of a locality; in terms of discord, outcomes range from exclusion to conflict, and often reflect antagonistic relationships with the religious structure. Below we explore these two categories in more detail, first by examining the flexibility associated with religious accord, followed by the conservatism associated with discord.

Religious accord: From accommodation to integration

Religious accord refers to relationships between new and incumbent religious groups that are, generally speaking, complementary. Over time, new religious groups may shift from a position of accommodation by the pre-existing religious structure (i.e. where they exert influence from outside the structure), to one of full integration within the religious structure (i.e. where they exert influence from inside the structure). Accommodation therefore refers to a degree of acceptance as a religious other, but presence is often manifested through the use of informal spaces for religious purposes. Integration reflects a formalisation of acceptance within the religious structure of a locality, in some instances manifested in the construction of formal places of worship, and the treatment by incumbent religions as a peer rather than an outsider. To facilitate accommodation and, ultimately, integration into the religious structure, migrant religions usually express a degree of flexibility in adapting their beliefs and practices in a way that is amenable to the local milieu. Often, the religious structure will dictate the terms of religious accommodation and integration, with harder structures reflecting the need for greater flexibility; the reverse is true for softer structures.

Such flexibility is witnessed amongst some Muslim migrants in Europe, who are defined in public discourse as being part of an ‘ultimate[ly] abject people’ (Silverstein, 2005: 376), causing integration to be a long and complex process. A key barrier to integration is that many forms of Islamic belief and practice – such as wearing a hijab in public – are interpreted as political acts. It has reached a point where ‘anti-terrorism and security concerns fuel a desire to compromise liberties and restrict Islam from the public space’ (Cesari, 2009: 2; see also Silverstein, 2005; Taarnby, 2005; Karyotis and Patrikios, 2010), which has resulted in restrictions on immigrants from Muslim countries, and less flexibility in the accommodation of Islamic beliefs and practices. Compounding such inflexibility is the (perceived) conflation of Islamic religious and cultural practices, which causes some practices (like wearing a hijab in public) to be (mis)interpreted as an antagonistic expression of cultural, more than religious, agency. In the Netherlands and Germany, for example, immigrants must espouse Western liberal values before crossing the border in order to demonstrate a degree of compatibility with the defined lifestyles and values of the host country. This reflects a hardening of the religious structure, which necessitates greater flexibility on behalf of migrants in order to bring about situations of religious accord.

In response to such a rejection of difference across many European societies, many Muslim migrants have demonstrated a more flexible approach to (the practice of) belief, which helps them overcome barriers to integration. They have made ‘accommodations in their [religious] practices to fit into Western society’ (Cesari, 2009: 8; see also Savage, 2004) in order to integrate and induce their acceptance into the religious structure. This has involved praying less frequently and in less disruptive ways; a more flexible form of religiosity that ‘extend[s] to almost all rituals or practices’ (Cesari, 2009: 9; see also Bowen, 2004), and has involved an almost complete reimagination and redefinition of what being a Muslim in Europe entails. The fact that Muslim migrants in Europe tend to be socio-economically marginalised further highlights the willingness to integrate by compromising their religious identity in the hope that doing so will grant them a degree of integrationist cultural agency that could in turn reduce their overarching sense of ‘otherness’. Combined, this demonstrates the power of religious structures in dictating the terms within which migrant – or marginal – forms of religiosity can be expressed, and how religious accord is often predicated on the flexibility of belief and practice.

Religious discord: From exclusion to conflict

Religious discord refers to more antagonistic relationships between new and incumbent religious groups. Over time, if situations of religious exclusion (i.e. where a religious presence – either informal or formal – is denied by the religious structure) are not addressed and rectified, they can mutate into religious conflict (i.e. where a religious presence is actively removed by the religious structure). Exclusion reflects the tolerance of religious others as long as their religious identity is not expressed. Conflict reflects a growing intolerance of religious others, irrespective of whether their identity is expressed or not, and active steps taken to marginalise, if not obliterate, religious others. Bearing this in mind, religious discord arises from either a pre-existing inflexibility in belief, excessive discrimination towards marginal religious groups, or a combination of both forces at once. Often, it reflects either excessively (i.e. outside the normal bounds of acceptance) hard religious structures, and/or excessively antagonistic expressions of religious agency.

For example, some Muslim migrants have ‘a physical presence in Europe but no accommodation with European society’ (Savage, 2004: 44). In itself, this reveals how the misalignment between bodies (‘presence’), belief (‘accommodation’) and context (‘society’) can create situations of discrimination, and, therefore, discord. Such discrimination can cause some migrants to strengthen their religiosity in the search for dignity and ideological emancipation. Taken to the extreme, the feelings of social isolation and the crisis of identity that such discrimination can bring about can also push migrants towards positions of religious extremism, which find ‘solidarity, meaning, and direction in radical Islamist groups that are actively looking for such recruits’ (Savage, 2004: 33; see also Juergensmeyer, 2003; Taarnby, 2005). This dynamic reinforces the marginal – and feared – position of migrant religion, and serves to further harden the religious structure.

Whilst some migrants respond to the religious structure by strengthening their beliefs and moving towards positions of religious conservatism, others may reframe the situation in order to justify their marginality and understand the resulting conflict with dominant religions. Such reframing is common amongst Pentecostal and Islamic communities, who often construct boundaries between the imagined community of their belief, and the restrictive religious structure within which migrants must practice their religion. Doing so is part of the construction of a ‘terrain of control’ that renders such communities seemingly impervious to the workings of a religious structure as they are ‘theologically predisposed against accommodation strategies’ (Bauman and Ponniah, 2017: 74; see also Bowen, 2004; Csordas, 2009). As Peterson and Vásquez (2001: 40) explain with regard to Pentecostalism:

Since this closed social terrain [of control] is ultimately grounded in the radical deterritorialization demanded by the reign of God, it mirrors the erasure of borders and identities that is central to globalization. In other words, for all its emphasis on the self, Pentecostalism, like global capitalism, homogenizes, making particularity only a strategy or stepping stone toward the production of globality/universality.

Such reframing nullifies the influence of the local-scale religious structure on the beliefs and practices of migrants, and can serve to catalyse conflict in many (non-Christian) contexts around the world (see Woods, 2012b). As an idealised vision of a trans-boundary religious community, practices like these are often encouraged by the religious organisations that serve migrant communities, and which serve to benefit from migrants expressing allegiance to them rather than more locally-embedded religious groups. Tablighi Jamaat, for example, has grown significantly amongst disoriented and socio-economically (and ethnically) marginalised Muslim diasporas in France and the UK, amongst whom their message resonates and actually ‘reinforces the lifestyle of ethnic exclusivity and societal parallelism that is already in place’ (Wong and Levitt, 2014: 356). Such ‘exclusivity’ and ‘parallelism’ are often exacerbated by the spatial segregation of migrant communities, which serves to enhance the ‘visibility and impact’ of religious alterity, and to ‘circumscrib[e] day-to-day contact with the general population’ (Savage, 2004: 29). Actions like these not only reflect a rejection of the religious structure, but also fuel the destructive cycle of inter-religious hardening and distantiation over time.

Conclusion

This article has provided a critical overview of the movement and settlement of religion, and has offered a new perspective to help understand its variable outcomes. Beyond its application to different empirical contexts around the world, two inter-related areas of focus can help to further advance the ideas outlined in this article. The first pertains to the construction of public discourses of religion. In particular, research needs to uncover how ‘religious actors can themselves be powerful discourse entrepreneurs’, which can lead to them occupying positions as the ‘guardians of national identity’ (Karyotis and Patrikios, 2010: 44–45). Such positions can play an active role in crystallising ‘fluid categories of difference into fixed species of otherness’ (Silverstein, 2005: 364), which has real ramifications for the acceptance and integration of migrant religions. Religious organisations often play an integral role in helping or hindering migrant integration into host countries, yet research has not yet explored in detail the strategies of integration employed by such organisations, and their wider-ranging effects on local religious adherents and society-at-large. Exploring how such strategies (and their effects) change across religions, migrant groups and contexts will help to unravel the reasons why some migrant groups are more readily, and more easily, integrated than others.

The second pertains to the varied effects of such public discourses, especially with regard to the regulation of religion. Any religion is, by its very nature, multi-faceted; the transnational and supranational dimensions of religion can further complicate such a dynamic. Throughout Europe, the rapid and relatively recent growth in the population of Muslim migrants has led to the formulation of policy that has paradoxically contributed to the ‘securitisation’ of Islam whereby ‘the measures intended to prevent radicalisation actually engender discontent and prompt a transformation of religious conservatism to fundamentalism’ (Cesari, 2009: 1; see also Silverstein’s 2005 notion of a ‘new savage’). Building on this, the role of marginal and/or migrant religious actors in discourses of domestic security remains under-studied, despite having significant consequences for the meaning of religious pluralism in the contemporary world, and the recalibration of domestic and international politics in response to the ever-shifting religious landscape (see Savage, 2004). Linking together the regulation of religion with the hardening of religious structures will contribute to a more theoretically-informed understanding of the destructive cycle of religious discord, and how this cycle can be managed and mitigated across time and space. Until such an understanding is reached, inter-religious relations will continue to be undermined by the stultifying effects that stem from the defence of the self, and the fear of the other.

Footnotes

Funding

This article was made possible by funding from the Singapore Management University Lee Kong Chian Chair Professorship Fund.

Notes

Author biographies

Lily Kong is the Lee Kong Chian Chair Professor of Social Sciences at the Singapore Management University, where she is also Provost. Her work has addressed socio-cultural and urban change issues in Asia, and especially Singapore. She has written extensively about religion, cultural policy and creative economy, urban change, and nationhood and identity. Her latest books include Religion and space: Competition, conflict and violence in the contemporary world (2016, with O. Woods), and Arts, culture and the making of global cities: Creating new urban landscapes in Asia (2015, with Ching C-H and Chou T-L).

Address: Singapore Management University, 90 Stamford Road, Level 4, 178903, Singapore.

Email: lilykong@smu.edu.sg

Orlando Woods is a Research Fellow at the School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University. His research interests span religion, urban environments and space in/and Asia. He is the co-author of Religion and space: Competition, conflict and violence in the contemporary world (2016, with L. Kong), and the author of various journal articles and book chapters on the politics of religious praxis in Asia. He holds BA (First Class Honours) and PhD degrees in Geography from University College London and the National University of Singapore respectively.

Address: Singapore Management University, 90 Stamford Road, Level 4, 178903, Singapore.

Email: orlandowoods@smu.edu.sg

References

Akcapar

(2006) Conversion as a migration strategy in a transit country: Iranian Shiites becoming Christians in Turkey. International Migration Review 40(4): 817–853.

Ammerman

(2009) Building religious communities, building the common good: A sceptical appreciation. In: Lichterman

Potts

(eds) The civic life of American religion. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 48–68.

Bauman

Ponniah

(2017) Christian responses to discrimination and violence in India and Sri Lanka: Avoidance, advocacy, and interfaith engagement. The Review of Faith and International Affairs 15(1): 68–78.

Bowen

(2004) Does French Islam have borders? Dilemmas of domestication in a global religious field. American Anthropologist 106(1): 43–55.

Brubaker

(2004) ‘Civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalism’. In: Brubaker

(ed.) Ethnicity without groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 132–146.

Cadge

Levitt

Smilde

(2011) De-centering and re-centering: Rethinking concepts and methods in the sociological study of religion. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 50(3): 437–449.

Cesari

(2009) The securitisation of Islam in Europe. Challenge Research Paper 14: 1–14.

Chen

(2008) Getting saved in America: Taiwanese immigration and religious experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Csordas

(2009) Transnational transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press.

10.

Ebaugh

Chafetz

(2000) Structural adaptations in immigrant congregations. Sociology of Religion 61(2): 135–153.

11.

Favell

(2001) Philosophies of integration: Immigration and the idea of citizenship in France and Britain. New York: Palgrave with Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, University of Warwick.

12.

Foucault

(1980) Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books.

13.

Galonnier

(2015) The racialization of Muslims in France and the United States: Some insights from white converts to Islam. Social Compass 62(4): 570–583.

14.

Giddens

(1984) The constitution of society. Cambridge: Polity Press.

15.

Glick Schiller

(2005) Transnational social fields and imperialism: Bringing a theory of power to transnational studies. Anthropological Theory 5(4): 439–461.

16.

Glick Schiller

Caglar

Guldbrandsen

(2006) Beyond the ethnic lens: Locality, globality, and born-again incorporation. American Ethnologist 33(4): 612–633.

17.

Goh

DPS

(2009) Chinese religion and the challenge of modernity in Malaysia and Singapore: Syncretism, hybridisation and transfiguration. Asian Journal of Social Science 37(1): 107–137.

18.

Gregory

Lytra

Choudhury

Ilankuberan

Kwapong

Woodham

(2012) Syncretism as a creative act of mind: The narratives of children from four faith communities in London. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 13(3): 322–347.

19.

Hagan

Ebaugh

(2003) Calling upon the sacred: Migrants’ use of religion in the migration process. International Migration Review 37(4): 1145–1162.

20.

Hewelmeier

Krause

(eds) (2009) Traveling spirits: Migrants, markets and mobilities. New York: Routledge.

21.

Hirschman

(2004) The role of religion in the origins and adaptation of immigrant groups in the United States. International Migration Review 38(3): 1206–1233.

22.

Joppke

(2007) Beyond national models: Civic integration policies for immigrants in Western Europe. West European Politics 30(1): 1–22.

23.

Juergensmeyer

. (2003) Terror in the mind of God: The global rise of religious violence. Berkeley: University of California Press.

24.

Kalir

(2009) Finding Jesus in the Holy Land and taking him to China: Chinese temporary migrant workers in Israel converting to Evangelical Christianity. Sociology of Religion 70(2): 130–156.

25.

Karagiannis

Glick Schiller

(2006) Contesting claims to the land: Pentecostalism as a challenge to migration theory and policy. Sociologus 2(1): 137–172.

26.

Karyotis

Patrikios

(2010) Religion, securitization and anti-immigration attitudes: The case of Greece. Journal of Peace Research 47(1): 43–57.

27.

Kepel

(2004) The war for Muslim minds: Islam and the West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

28.

Kitiarsa

(2005) Beyond syncretism: Hybridization of popular religion in contemporary Thailand. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 36(3): 461–487.

29.

Kong

(2010) Global shifts, theoretical shifts: Changing geographies of religion. Progress in Human Geography 34(6): 755–776.

30.

Kong

Woods

(2016) Religion and space: Competition, conflict and violence in the contemporary world. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

31.

Levitt

(2003) ‘You know, Abraham was really the first immigrant’: Religion and transnational migration. International Migration Review 37(3): 847–873.

32.

Levitt

(2004) Redefining the boundaries of belonging: The institutional character of transnational religious life. Sociology of Religion 65(1): 1–18.

33.

Levitt

(2007) Redefining the boundaries of belonging: The transnationalization of religious life. In: Ammerman

(ed.) Everyday religion: Observing modern religious lives. New York: Oxford University Press, 103–120.

34.

Levitt

(2008) Religion as a path to civic engagement. Ethnic and Racial Studies 31(4): 766–791.

35.

Levitt

(2012) What’s wrong with migration scholarship? A critique and a way forward. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 19(4): 493–500.

36.

Markofski

(2015) The public sociology of religion. Sociology of Religion 76(4): 459–475.

37.

Meer

Madood

(2015) Religious pluralism in the United States and Britain: Its implications for Muslims and nationhood. Social Compass 62(4): 526–540.

38.

Menjivar

(1999) Religious institutions and transnationalism: A case study of Catholic and Evangelical Salvadoran immigrants. International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society. 12(4): 589–612.

39.

Menjivar

(2003) Religion and immigration in comparative perspective: Salvadorans in Catholic and Evangelical communities in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Washington DC. Sociology of Religion 64(1): 21–45.

40.

Morawska

(2003) Disciplinary agendas and analytical strategies of research on immigration and transnationalism: Challenges of interdisciplinary knowledge. International Migration Review 37(3): 611–640.

41.

Mouffe

(1992) Democratic citizenship and the political community. In: Mouffe

(ed.) Dimensions of radical democracy: Pluralism, citizenship, community. London: Verso, 70–82.

42.

Naylor

Ryan

(2003) Mosques, temples and gurdwaras: New sites of religion in twentieth-century Britain. In: Gilbert

Matless

Short

(eds) Geographies of British modernity: Space and society in the twentieth century. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 168–184.

43.

Peterson

Vásquez

(2001) Upwards, never down: The Catholic charismatic renewal in transnational perspective. In: Peterson

Williams

Vásquez

(eds) Christianity, social change and globalization in the Americas. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

44.

Ramahi

Suleiman

(2017) Intimate strangers: Perspectives on female converts to Islam in Britain. Contemporary Islam 11(1): 21–39.

45.

Rudolph

Piscatori

(1996) Transnational religion and fading states. New York: Westview Press.

46.

Savage

(2004) Europe and Islam: Crescent waxing, cultures clashing. The Washington Quarterly 27(3): 25–50.

47.

Sheikh

(2015) Introduction: Être musulman en Amérique du Nord et en Europe/Being Muslim in North America and Europe. Social Compass 62(4): 519–525.

48.

Silverstein

(2005) Immigrant racialization and the new savage slot: Race, migration, and immigration in the new Europe. Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 363–384.

49.

Sinha

(2005) A new god in the diaspora? Copenhagen: NIAS Press.

50.

Taarnby

(2005) Recruitment of Islamic terrorists in Europe: Trends and perspectives. Research report funded by the Danish Ministry of Justice, 14 January 2005, 42.

51.

Vásquez

Marquardt

(2003) Globalizing the sacred: Religion across the Americas. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

52.

Wohlrab-Sahr

(1999) Conversion to Islam: Between syncretism and symbolic battle. Social Compass 46(3): 351–362.

53.

Wong

Levitt

(2014) Travelling faiths and migrant religions: The case of circulating models of da’wa among the Tablighi Jamaat and Foguangshan in Malaysia. Global Networks 14(3): 348–362.

54.

Woods

(2012a) The geographies of religious conversion. Progress in Human Geography 36(4): 440–456.

55.

Woods

(2012b) Sri Lanka’s informal religious economy: Evangelical competitiveness and Buddhist hegemony in perspective. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 51(2): 203–219.

56.

Woods

(2013) The spatial modalities of evangelical Christian growth in Sri Lanka: Evangelism, social ministry and the structural mosaic. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38(4): 652–664.

57.

Woods

(2017) Cultural politics. In: Castree

Goodchild

Kobayashi

Liu

Marston

(eds) The Wiley-AAG international encyclopedia of geography: People, the earth, environment and technology. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 1–8.

58.

Woods

(2018) Religion and development in Southeast Asia. In: McGregor

Law

Miller

(eds) Routledge handbook of southeast Asian development. London: Routledge, 250–260.

59.

Yang

Ebaugh

(2001a) Transformation in new immigrant religions and their global implications. American Sociological Review 66(2): 269–288.

60.

Yang

Ebaugh

(2001b) Religion and ethnicity among new immigrants: The impact of majority/minority status in home and host countries. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 40(3): 367–378.