United in diversity? Religious categorization in the German 2011 census

ABSTRACT

This article examines how German politicians conceptualized religion in debates on the 2011 Census Law. It shows that they selectively used four different conceptualizations: religion as legal membership, as descent, as motive of behaviour and as belief. Their use of these categories depended not so much on policy demands as on the religious community under consideration. While Christians were viewed as members of religious organizations who deserved optimal services, Muslims were interpreted as members of an ethnic group that the state needed to identify. The final law upholds this divide, albeit in a different form. By studying the entire repertoire of religious categories, this article reframes the problem of ethnicized religion. It reveals that politicians selectively used multiple, also non-ethnic, categories of religion by adhering to legal and organizational legacies. Instead of conceptualizing categorizations as products of a unified path dependency, this article charts their varied, even conflicting, legacies.

KEYWORDS:

• Categorization
• religion
• ethnicity
• statistics
• Islam
• Christianity

Acknowledgments

I thank Ann Morning, Sonia Prelat, Iddo Tavory and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 23 out of 41 European states collect data on religion in their census (Simon 2012).

2 In addition, a sizeable literature interrogates the construction of the category of “religion”. It stresses that this universal category rests not on native terms but on scholarly-made ascriptions (Dubuisson 2003; Smith 1998). It further shows how “religion” and related categories of “the sacred” or “world religions” are historically biased given their use to hierarchize cultures (Asad 1993; Fitzgerald 2000; Masuzawa 2005) and to govern (colonial) subjects (Chidester 1996).

3 Zugehörigkeit could also be translated as belonging. The term can denote both a formal, chosen and an organic, timeless membership.

4 A bifurcated religious order also emerged through choices about who not to mention. The debate entirely omitted the religions of non-Muslim immigrants and the persons without any affiliation (who amount to approximately one third of the population). One newspaper article commented that “Germany is being promoted to a state of believers” (Patalong 2011).

5 My argument also resonates with observations about the influence of inherited church-state relations on religious policies (see for instance Fetzer and Soper 2005).

6 Until 2013, no Muslim group had corporation status. Organizations were not considered established enough and criticized for representing an insufficient number of Muslims (Azzaoui 2011). The Constitution also introduces another, more basic status, religious community (Religionsgemeinschaft). Its applicability to Muslim groups has been similarly contested (Spielhaus and Herzog 2015).

7 While religion has been studied as a colonial census measure (Guilmoto 1998; Haan 2005; Kateb 1998), little attention has been paid to its use as a census category in contemporary Europe (but on the UK see Weller 2004).