God Can Wait – New Migrants in Germany Between Early Adaptation and Religious Reorganization

Abstract

We analyse migration-related changes in religiosity among new Polish and Turkish migrants in Germany by using data from an international project on Socio-Cultural Integration Processes of New Immigrants in Europe (SCIP). The study confirms that after migration, both groups experience a decrease in religious practices that is more pronounced among Muslim Turks than among Catholic Poles and more pertinent for worship attendance than for prayer. Among new Polish immigrants, religious decrease is greater for individuals with stronger social ties to the secular German mainstream and there are no signs that religious practices are resumed after the disruptive first couple of months. For Turks, however, our study shows that initial religious decrease is followed by a process of religious reorganization, independent of social assimilation. We discuss the role that "bright" symbolic boundaries against Islam may play in explaining these group-specific patterns.

Contact and conflict between adult children and their parents in immigrant families: is integration problematic for family relationships?

“…In including this measure, we indirectly control for how conservative or liberal the values of the parents are. Studies on Muslim populations show strong effects of the degree of religiosity on traditional values about gender, marriage, and sexuality (Diehl and Koenig 2013;Diehl, Koenig, and Ruckdeschel 2009;Glas, Spierings, and Scheepers 2018;Halman and van Ingen 2015). Adjusting the effect of the child's cultural values and behaviours for the effect of the parent's degree of orthodoxy in a multivariate model is analytically similar to estimating effects of parent-child differences in cultural integration.…”

‘Having a German passport will not make me German’: reactive ethnicity and oppositional identity among disadvantaged male Turkish second-generation youth in Germany

“…It increasingly ethnicized the labour force by proletarizing Muslim Turks, associating this group with inferiority in the German ethno-racial system (Özyurek 2014). The Turkish minority group currently makes up the largest immigrant group in Germany, numbering 2.8 million, and is socially more disadvantaged in comparison to other minority groups (Diehl and Koenig 2013).…”

Religion and new immigrants' labor market entry in Western Europe

“…In terms of their religious characteristics, immigrants display relatively high rates of regular worship attendance at the time of wave 1, although it is known from previous research with SCIP data that religious participation is, for all groups, considerably lower than prior to migration (see Diehl and Koenig, 2013;Van Tubergen, 2013). In Germany and the Netherlands, both in the full dataset and in the balanced panel, around a third of the respondents indicate attending places of worship at least on a monthly basis in wave 1, and the numbers are even higher in Great Britain, notably among Muslims.…”