![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Previous research on interreligious marriages has indicated that they tend to cause both ethnic and religious ‘dilution’ and ‘loss’, but these concepts are misleading and cannot explain different and often contradictory identification processes. Based on qualitative in-depth interviews with 66 sons and daughters raised in families where one partner is an immigrant from a majority-Muslim country and the other Italian, this article explores the offspring’s religious identities. The article counters the notion that there is a univocal process of religious ‘loss’ among ‘mixed’ offspring. Three different identification processes were found: ‘Islamic’, ‘non-religious’, and ‘spiritual’. In the first case, the identification with the Islamic faith of the Muslim father leads the offspring to discuss identity in terms of opposition to youth with a ‘Western secularised’ way of living. In ‘non-religious’ identifications, offspring downplay the role of religion, preferring to emphasise their dual ethnicity. The third type of narrative (‘spiritual identities’) shows the elaboration of an anti-dogmatic position on religion, sometimes more syncretic, sometimes more holistic. Results suggest that offspring’s identities are much more complex and characterised by a re-shaping, rather than a loosening, of religiosity.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the reviewers of the Journal of Contemporary Religion for their useful comments and suggestions. The enriching and fruitful reviewing process was very helpful in improving the original manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. I decided to use the word ‘offspring’ instead of ‘children’ or ‘young people’ since it defines more properly the interviewees aged between 16 and 34 years who constitute the empirical data on which this article is based.
2. The concept of ‘mixedness’, as Beate Collet points out, implies that “differences between the partners due to their cultural and social affiliations or gender roles are not equal and also influence the transcultural hybridisation process, sometimes even hindering it considerably” (Collet Citation2012, 63).
3. Following Miri Song and Caitlin O’Neil Gutierrez (Citation2015b), I use the term ‘white’ when referring to people whose phenotype is ‘Caucasian’ (of European ancestry) and who are not associated with the migrant stereotype in the public imaginary. All the boundaries of ‘white/black’ have been variable historically and in different societies. In Italy, citizenship is based on the principle of jus sanguinis and is thus inherited through the parent–offspring tie, but it can also be acquired by marriage to an Italian citizen (jus conubii). Mixed marriages are therefore often stigmatised as a factor which puts at risk an assumed ‘purity’ of the ‘Italian white identity’. The overlap between ‘blood’, ‘nation’, and ‘citizenship’ reinforces the social construction of “white […] defined as the absence of any racial mixture” (Bratter Citation2007, 842).
4. The use of the term ‘race’, especially in the European context, is still deeply problematic since it is connected with the nineteenth-century theorisation of different human races and the historically associated racial persecution. Without going more deeply into the different uses of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ in the US and Europe, in this article, I only use the term ‘ethnicity’, referring to shared cultural aspects such as language, ancestry, practices, and beliefs.
5. See ISTAT data at https://www.istat.it/it/archivio/3847 and https://www.istat.it/it/censimenti-permanenti/censimenti-precedenti/popolazione-e-abitazioni/popolazione-2011, accessed 15 October 2020.
6. All the interviews were preceded by participants signing an informed consent form. In the cases where participants were below the age of legal majority, informed consent was obtained from both them and their parents.
7. In accordance with other authors, I selected pseudonyms for the participants that are “as close as possible in intention and effect to their actual names” (Edwards and Caballero Citation2008, 46).
8. The average duration of the interviews was between three and four hours. All interviews were conducted in Italian and fully transcribed, before being translated into English by the author.
9. According to the latest ISTAT data, of a total figure of 5,144,440 foreigners residing in Italy (on 1 January 2018), Muslims count approximately 1.5 million, equivalent to 28.2% of the total number of foreigners. The data assume religious belonging based on the migrants’ nationality, which says little about their actual religiosity. In general, the Muslim presence in Italy, compared to the Turkish one in Germany or the Maghrebian in France, is characterised by many countries of origin. In descending order, the largest number of Muslim migrants comes from Morocco (about one third of Muslims), followed by Albania, Tunisia, Senegal, Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Algeria. They are mostly settled in northern Italy because of the employment offered by the industry in the region.
10. For both religions, the transmission of faith to descendants is central; it is in religious transmission that conflicts are narrated between both partners and families of origin and the social context. The Qur’an only allows Muslim men to marry women from “the people of the Book” (kitabiyya)—Jewish or Christian women (Qur’an 5,5). This is because, according to the Qur’an, only the father’s religion can be passed on. “There are several justifications for this view. First is the preservation of the Muslim community. If Muslim women marry outside the Muslim community, this would hinder the growth of the Muslim community as a whole. Second, the father establishes religion for his children.” (Yahya and Boag Citation2014, 487)
11. The latest ISTAT data of 2015, referring to 2014, show that Italian women in mixed marriages marry most frequently men coming from North Africa, while men in mixed marriages marry more frequently women from Eastern Europe and Latin America.
12. According to the most recent research on the religiosity of Italians aged between 18 and 29 years, over 90% underwent baptism and first communion (Garelli Citation2016).
13. The social perception of their difference, which can be defined as ‘social visibility’, would need a separate analysis focused on their stigmatisation experiences. Briefly, I can highlight that the question of skin colour as a marker of ‘non-Italianness’ was reported above all as linked to their darker skin colour and indeed emerged more strongly in offspring with a parent from Senegal. Despite this, as reported in a previous article (Cerchiaro Citation2019), having a non-Italian name or surname was also an important element in producing feelings of being perceived as ‘non-Italian’.
14. Although, as highlighted above, there is a high percentage of baptised people (90%), the data show that weekly attendance at the rites is decidedly lower, involving just 13%. Among these young people, the ‘non-believers’ grew by 5 percentage points in just a few years, from 23% in 2007 to 28% in 2015.
15. Although this article is not the place to summarise the long and controversial debate on the categories of ‘spiritual and ‘religious’, it is important to clarify the use of the terms and my position in the debate. However far the shift towards inner-life spirituality diagnosed by Houtman et al. (Citation2012) and Campbell (Citation2015) has advanced meanwhile, it is still a controversial issue that stimulates a rich debate around it. Some authors (Ammerman Citation2013; Zinnbauer et al. Citation1997) have contested the separation of the categories ‘religious’ and ‘spiritual’, arguing that the latter should be understood as a moral rather than an essential category. Analysing data from the World Values Survey, Houtman and Aupers (Citation2007) interpret the “neither-Christian-nor-secular outlooks” (Houtman et al. Citation2012, 29) as New Age spirituality rather than “fuzzy fidelity” (Voas Citation2009a, 167). Unlike Voas, they conceptualise these spiritualties as a third option beyond the common polarisation of traditional religions on the one hand and science, reason, and secularism on the other hand. According to Houtman et al. (Citation2012, 29), the term ‘spiritual’ is used as a “third corner of a triangle rather than a mixture of traditional theistic Christian religiosity and non-religiosity”.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Francesco Cerchiaro
Francesco Cerchiaro has a PhD in Social Sciences (2013) from the University of Padua where he was a researcher and lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education, and Applied Psychology (2016–2018). He is now a FWO Senior Fellow at the Centre for Sociological Research (CeSO) at KU Leuven (University of Leuven), Belgium. His research uses qualitative methods, in particular ‘life stories’ and ethnographic observation. His focus on mixed families and, in particular, Christian-Muslim families, represents a key to examining the wider social changes related to families, Muslim migration, and religious pluralism in Europe. Between February 2018 and February 2020, he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at KU Leuven.