XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

424

Religion and Migration: Contrasting the First and Second Generations

RC22 Sociology of Religion (host committee)

Language: English

Today as yesterday, religiosity is alive among immigrants, as can be seen from the existence of churches, mosques, temples and prayer rooms. Naturally these do not only play a religious role but are also important centres offering welcoming services and a social support system both for state-sponsored new arrivals and clandestine immigrants. Migrants may feel at home in places of worship: there they find religious ministers (priests, imans, spiritual guides) who speak their mother-tongue, share (or at least perceived to understand) their cultural and ethnic background, and appear to know the difficulties that may arise from the tensions between a familiar way of life and the host society’s demands. The increasing number and variety of first generations of immigrants and their decision to live permanently in the host societies reveals how important religion is among immigrants, as well as how strong ethnic chaplaincies and churches are, which contrasts to what some scholars have argued. If this is true for the first generations, however, what has happened to the second? In Europe, attention is paid to the children of Muslim migrants, but there are few studies on how other religious minorities live and define their relationship with religion. In other parts of the world, these patterns are known for some groups but not for others. Thissession will discuss papers on how religion and integration interact with and influence one another, both on the social and on the individual levels in the case of religiously diverse, second generations.