The Importance of a Religious Funeral Ceremony Among Turkish Migrants and Their Descendants in Germany: What Role do Socio-demographic Characteristics Play?

ABSTRACT

Our paper analyses the attitudes of Turkish migrants and their descendants in Germany regarding the importance of a religious funeral ceremony. Previous research provides competing hypotheses on the intergenerational transmission of religiosity in migrant communities, such as, declines in religiosity due to assimilation versus maintenance of religiosity as a means to ethnic identity formation. Quantitative research however has not yet considered funerals. Our study utilises data from the Generations and Gender Survey; our sample comprises roughly 4000 people of Turkish migrant background aged 18–81, most of whom are Muslims. We apply logistic regression methods to attitudes regarding the importance of a religious funeral ceremony. More than 80 per cent of the respondents maintained that a religious funeral ceremony was important. Examination of individual characteristics revealed variation by education, partner's origin, and citizenship. Overall, however, Muslim funeral traditions are sustained across first- and second-generations.

KEYWORDS:

• Life-course rituals
• religiosity
• Muslim funeral
• Turkish migrants
• Germany
• GGS

Acknowledgments

We thank two anonymous reviewers and Eva Soom Ammann and Alistair Hunter, the guest editors of this special issue, for their constructive feedback and helpful suggestions as well as Renée Lüskow for language editing.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributors

Nadja Milewski is Assistant Professor for Demography in the Institute for Sociology and Demography at the University of Rostock, Germany.

Danny Otto is a doctoral student in the graduate school ‘Power of interpretation. Religion and belief systems in hermeneutic conflicts’ at the University of Rostock, Germany.

Notes

1. In this paper, the term Turkey refers to the country of origin. The term migrants refers to the first-generation whereas their children are called descendants of migrants. Together they are referred to as having immigrant background, in accordance with official practice in Germany today (Swiazny and Milewski 2012). In official statistics, the term Turk(s) is based on citizenship. We do not differentiate further by ethnicity.

2. This survey is part of the Generations and Gender Program, which is coordinated by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) in Geneva, and is designed to study demographic and social developments in 19 countries. In Germany, the GGS is carried out by the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB), together with TNS Infratest (Ruckdeschel et al. 2006, Ette et al. 2007; see also: www.ggp-i.org).

3. Diehl and Koenig (2009) used the same data set as our study. They, however, created a summary indicator for the religious variables and combined the religious ceremonies at life events, that is, they did not explicitly focus on funerals.

4. As can be seen in the question on baptism, the GGS questionnaires were designed for primarily Christian contexts and used the same phrasing for the Turkish subsample. The question on the importance of a religious baptism ceremony is not applicable to a Muslim context, however. Although there may be ‘welcome rites’ for a newborn, a baptism ritual is generally not part of Muslim traditions (Dessing 2001, p. 25; McAuliffe et al. 2001). Hence, this question was not used in our study.

5. Odds ratios lower than 1 indicate that the respective group is less likely than the reference group to think funerals important; values above 1 indicate that the respective group attributes higher importance to religious funerals than the reference group.

6. About 61 per cent of the respondents lived in a household with their children. This variable did not have a significant statistical impact (not displayed).

7. Informal interview with the leader of a local community centre in Eastern Germany in December 2015. The members originate from various Arabic countries.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the first author's European Reintegration Grant provided by Marie Curie Actions (FP7 People, PERG-GA-2009–249266 – MigFam) and funded by the European Commission. The views expressed in this paper do not reflect the views of these funding agencies.