Islam and identity: a study among young German-Turks

ABSTRACT

While religiosity can help immigrants maintain their ethnic identity, some have argued that it can hinder national identification with the host country. This study looks at the relationship of religiosity with both German and Turkish identification among Germans of Turkish descent, the largest minority group in Germany. Adopting a three-dimensional conception of religiosity, it distinguishes between individual, subjective and communal forms. The results of ordered logistic regression analyses underscore a significantly positive relationship between subjective religiosity and Turkish identification. Concerning German identity, the findings do not show, in the full model, any form of religiosity having a significant relationship with German identity. The results demonstrate that not all forms of religiosity are of equal importance for identity formation. Furthermore, the findings also call into question the importance of religiosity on the identity formation of allochthonous groups, especially when compared to other factors.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• identity
• Islam
• immigration
• Germany
• Turks

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Spearman correlations between the measurements of the dimensions of religiosity range from 0.51 to 0.56; which are moderate levels of correlation (Dancey and Reidy 2007), and similar to the correlations that Scheepers and colleagues (2002) found between their dimensions of religiosity (0.31 to 0.62). We nevertheless also explored collinearity diagnostics that show the variance inflation factor (VIF) ranging from 1.58 to 1.67 and the value of tolerance ranging from 0.59 to 0.63. These indicators do not suggest that multicollinearity is present among the dimensions of religiosity.

2 The survey weight available in the dataset was used for the analyses. The weighting specifications are estimated from a corresponding special evaluation for the structures of the target group based on the 2014 microcensus (Personal communication with Oliver Sartorius, Director of Policy Research at Kantar TNS, January 11, 2022).