“…Overall, these findings bring further nuance to the ongoing debate on the accommodation of Islamic traditions and practices in Western contexts (Helbling, ; Helbling & Traunmueller, ). Nevertheless, it has to be noted that most of the variance on anti‐immigrant attitudes is located on the individual level .…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 54%
“…For example, a liberal policy may lead to prejudice, if majority members consider it a threat to their cultural unity, whereas a restrictive policy may lead to tolerance, if it communicates to the majority that the state will continue to maintain the status quo. In a study on Swiss cantons, Helbling and Traunmueller () reach conclusions that are in line with this approach. The authors demonstrate that, contrary to the widely held belief, European societies are far from being secular, and liberal policies toward a new religion lead to prejudice if they undermine the long‐standing privileges extended to the majority religion.…”
This study examines church–state relations in Europe, and analyzes their influence on anti‐immigrant attitudes. The literature explains this relationship primarily with religious demographics, or state privileges for the majority faith. Alternately, this study focuses on the status of the majority religion. It argues that, in countries with a national church, citizens are more likely to consider the institutionalization of a new religion to be occurring at the expense of the national heritage, and react negatively. To test that hypothesis, the study focuses on Muslim immigrants in Europe, and builds an index that gauges the extent to which European states institutionalize Islam. Then, employing multilevel regression analysis, it investigates how the institutionalization of Islam influences anti‐Muslim prejudice in different contexts of church–state regimes. Individual‐level data come from the latest wave of the European Values Study, and cover 31 countries. Findings indicate that, in European countries with a national church, institutionalization of Islam increases anti‐Muslim prejudice. In countries without a national church, however, institutionalization leads to tolerance. These results confirm the continuing relevance of religion on the national level in Europe, despite the decline in individual religiosity.
“…Overall, these findings bring further nuance to the ongoing debate on the accommodation of Islamic traditions and practices in Western contexts (Helbling, ; Helbling & Traunmueller, ). Nevertheless, it has to be noted that most of the variance on anti‐immigrant attitudes is located on the individual level .…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 54%
“…For example, a liberal policy may lead to prejudice, if majority members consider it a threat to their cultural unity, whereas a restrictive policy may lead to tolerance, if it communicates to the majority that the state will continue to maintain the status quo. In a study on Swiss cantons, Helbling and Traunmueller () reach conclusions that are in line with this approach. The authors demonstrate that, contrary to the widely held belief, European societies are far from being secular, and liberal policies toward a new religion lead to prejudice if they undermine the long‐standing privileges extended to the majority religion.…”
This study examines church–state relations in Europe, and analyzes their influence on anti‐immigrant attitudes. The literature explains this relationship primarily with religious demographics, or state privileges for the majority faith. Alternately, this study focuses on the status of the majority religion. It argues that, in countries with a national church, citizens are more likely to consider the institutionalization of a new religion to be occurring at the expense of the national heritage, and react negatively. To test that hypothesis, the study focuses on Muslim immigrants in Europe, and builds an index that gauges the extent to which European states institutionalize Islam. Then, employing multilevel regression analysis, it investigates how the institutionalization of Islam influences anti‐Muslim prejudice in different contexts of church–state regimes. Individual‐level data come from the latest wave of the European Values Study, and cover 31 countries. Findings indicate that, in European countries with a national church, institutionalization of Islam increases anti‐Muslim prejudice. In countries without a national church, however, institutionalization leads to tolerance. These results confirm the continuing relevance of religion on the national level in Europe, despite the decline in individual religiosity.
“…This situation reinforces the claim that religion and secularism continue to compete with each other, even in supposedly secular countries. In their explanation of this issue, Helbling and Traunmuller (: 397) emphasized that We are not saying that European societies are ‘religious’ in terms of active religious practice or beliefs … (but) collective identities and institutions of public life are intimately related to historical religious traditions and are now shared by their citizens regardless of whether they consider themselves to be religious or not.…”
Section: Discussion – Religion Immigration and Integration: Is Israementioning
confidence: 99%
“…Other scholars attribute hostile attitudes towards immigrants to the host country's homogeneity level and to its degree of support for, and involvement in, matters of religion. Some researchers have attributed inclusiveness to Protestant traditions and exclusiveness to Catholic ones (Bohman and Hjerm ; Helbling and Traunmüller ). In addition, some scholars attribute the rejection of Muslims to the prevailing Western secular culture, while other findings revealed a strong linkage between religious‐Christian groups, at all levels of practice, and anti‐immigrantion views (Minkenberg : 366–93; Pew Research Center ).…”
Section: The Social Aspect: Religion Immigration and Integrationmentioning
This article deals with the complex relationship between religion and immigration in Western countries, with an emphasis on Israel. The main argument it presents is that the legal procedures of immigration, i.e. laws relating to the acquisition of civil status, have undergone dramatic secularization, while religion's influence is expressed in the social and cultural aspects of the integration of immigrants belonging to religious minorities. This division reinforces the classical theory of secularization, as the formal boundaries of nations are not subject to religious affiliations, but it also supports the theories of competition and complementation between religion and secularism in the social sphere. The tension in the Israeli case between the immigration, naturalization and integration of non‐Jewish Jews, who are part of the extended Jewish population that is not defined by religious parameters, confirms this thesis. The immigration of hundreds of thousands of non‐Jewish Jews' under the Law of Return based on ethno‐national‐secular parameters is an ultimate expression of the secularization of Jewish nationality. On the other hand, the state's encouragement of non‐Jewish immigrants to convert to Judaism so that they can better assimilate into Jewish society signifies the importance of religion in the social integration aspect.
“…Such legal institutional structures are likely to shape (and be shaped by) collective narratives of what constitutes “the nation” and, by extension, what threatens the nation (Wright ). As shown in research on Swiss laws banning the construction of minarets, “policies that relate to the upholding of collective identity and are highly visible to ordinary citizens” are likely to be associated with more exclusionary attitudes toward minority outgroups” (Helbling & Traunmüller :394).…”
Western societies have experienced ethnic and religious diversification in recent decades. These demographic changes have been met by efforts to defend the local dominant culture using majority nationalism laws, intended to protect the cultural heritage of the majority. We empirically examine majority nationalism laws’ expressive effects on patterns of minority discrimination using the Israeli draft Nation Law (NL) as a case study. Drawing on two experimental surveys of a representative sample of the majority population of Israel (N = 602), our results lend weak support to the hypothesis that majority nationalism laws increase bias against minorities, and modest support to the hypothesis that such laws generate unintended spillover effects across different minority groups and from the public to the private sphere. Our main finding is that majority nationalism laws provoke a backlash reaction from those who oppose them. We define this as the provocative effect of law and discuss its relation to the expressive law theory. The results suggest that the effects of majority nationalism laws may vary systematically across ideological groups and spheres of discrimination.
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