‘Culture-free’ religion: new second-generation Muslims and Christians

ABSTRACT

The turn to ‘pure’ Islam cleansed of the cultures of their parents’ homeland traditions by children of Muslim immigrants in Europe and North America has been widely discussed. Scholars have attributed this behavior to factors particular to younger Muslims in the contemporary period or to the nature of Islam itself. In this article, I challenge these arguments by drawing on research on children of Christian immigrants in the United States who support a ‘culture-free’ Christianity, in contrast to the ‘cultural’ Christianity of their parents, and turn to American non-denominational evangelicalism. By making this comparison, my goal is to show that the decoupling of religion and ethnicity by children of immigrants is a broader phenomenon, not just confined to Muslims. I argue that it is a consequence of larger shifts in the understanding and practice of religion and ethnicity as well as assimilative pressures, racialization, and intergenerational dynamics. The comparison also demonstrates that the religious traditions embraced by the children of immigrants are not truly ‘culture-free’, but involve shedding ethnic languages and worship cultures to adopt dominant modes of religiosity.

KEYWORDS:

• Culture-free religion
• second generation
• Muslims
• evangelical Christians
• ethnicity

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the research assistance provided by Laurah Klepinger-Mathew who conducted some of the interviews. This article draws on some material from my book Ethnic Church Meets Mega Church (Kurien 2017).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was report by the author.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this project was made possible by funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Louisville Institute, an Appleby Mosher award, and a summer project assistant award from Syracuse University.

Notes on contributors

Prema A. Kurien

Prema Kurien is Professor of Sociology at Syracuse University, NY. She is the author of three award-winning books—Kaleidoscopic Ethnicity: International Migration and the Reconstruction of Community Identities in India (2002), A Place at the Multicultural Table (2007), Ethnic Church Meets Mega Church (2017)—and around 50 sole-authored articles and book chapters. She is currently finishing her next book, Race, Religion, and Citizenship: Advocacy Organizations of New Ethnic Americans, and the research project “The Political Incorporation of Religious Minorities in Canada and the United States”. CORRESPONDENCE: Department of Sociology, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA.