Religion and integration: religious organisations’ communication in a diverse city district of Oslo, Norway

ABSTRACT

This article raises the question whether and how religious organisations contribute to integration in a diverse city district of Oslo, the capital of Norway. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s theory of society and his work on religion, it argues that this question requires an analysis of the way religious organisations are integrated into different social systems and of the way people are included in such organisations. With regard to the inclusion of people, the article suggests that not more than half of the city district’s population were members of local religious organisations and that the religious organisations may not have targeted excluded groups, as Luhmann suggests they might. Focusing on the way the religious organisations were integrated into different social systems, the article finds that they were engaged in local communities within the city district, with local public authorities and welfare service providers, and in religious networks that spanned the city, the country, and the world. The article concludes that the religious organisations in the city district were part of a global religious system and mostly communicated in non-religious ways at the local level. The contribution of religious organisations to integration must thus be understood in relation to communication on a global scale and across the secular/religious divide.

KEYWORDS:

• Religious organisations
• immigrant religion
• diversity
• integration
• Niklas Luhmann

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Annette Leis-Peters, Olav Helge Angell, the anonymous referees of the Journal of Contemporary Religion, and the anonymous judges of the 2017 Peter B. Clarke Memorial Prize (for which an earlier version of this article was submitted, but which was not awarded) for valuable comments at different stages of the writing process. I am also very grateful for the work Elisabeth Arweck put into facilitating the review process and the finalisation of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The idea of the inclusion of people is in one sense at odds with Luhmann’s theory of society, in which only communication can be included in social systems. However, Luhmann himself uses the inclusion concept, defining it as “the opportunity for the social consideration of persons” (Luhmann 2013a, 17). He also notes that it “cannot mean that parts or processes or single operations of a system take place in another. It means rather that the societal system provides for persons and assigns them to positions in the framework of which they can act in keeping with expectations; to put it somewhat romantically, where they can feel at home as individuals.” (Luhmann 2013a, 18) I return to the issue of inclusion and exclusion in Luhmann’s theory of society.

2. See my PhD thesis (Holte 2018, 13–15) for an overview of Norwegian research on immigrant religion and religious diversity drawing on social capital theory.

3. For a more detailed presentation of the city district, including references, see Holte 2018, 6–10.

4. Two of the parishes had merged in 2016 and are therefore treated as one organisation here, resulting in a total of 17 organisations.

5. The Church of Norway parishes merged their youth activities so that these two parishes were responsible for all Church of Norway youth activities in the city district.

6. This is also the source material used in official statistics on religious and life stance communities outside the Church of Norway (Statistics Norway 2017).

7. Our research focused on young people who were not in education, employment or training (‘NEET’ young people), which was generally understood to mean ‘street youths’ by the representatives we interviewed. One of the religious organisations targeted such youths in their work, but we were not able to ascertain to what extent these youths were in NEET situations (Holte et al., forthcoming). ‘NEET’ is a narrower and weaker understanding of exclusion than the accumulation of exclusions discussed by Luhmann (2008, 2013a, 24–25, 2013b, 218–219). However, although the universalist ambitions of the social democratic welfare state mean that exclusions do not accumulate in the Luhmannian sense in Norway, at least not for citizens, NEET young people are seen as facing the longer-term risk of ‘falling outside’ the labour market and sometimes even ‘society’ (Holte, Swart, and Hiilamo 2019, 262–263).

8. This tendency is more pronounced among the religious organisations in the two larger centres. As reflected in Figure 1, hardly any communication between the religious organisations was recorded in one of the smaller centres and the religious organisations in the other smaller centre were closely interlinked with the religious organisations in one of the larger centres. This may relate to factors beyond the scope of the analysis in this article, such as the geographical proximity of the centres and local histories.

9. As reflected in Figure 1, we did not interview representatives from either of these religious organisations.

10. The representatives we interviewed mentioned religious authorities and international headquarters in many foreign countries, including the Congo, India, Nigeria, Tibet, and the USA.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bjørn Hallstein Holte

Bjørn Hallstein Holte is a social anthropologist and associate professor at the Faculty of Social Studies at VID Specialized University in Oslo. He completed his PhD in 2018 as part of the Nordic–South African research project “Youth at the Margins” (Swart 2013). This article was part of his PhD work, which was based at the Centre of Diaconia and Professional Practice at VID Specialized University. Holte has previously published on youth in Nordic countries and African countries in Journal of Youth Studies, YOUNG: Nordic Journal of Youth Research, and Volunteer Economies: The Politics and Ethics of Voluntary Labour in Africa (Prince and Brown 2016). CORRESPONDENCE: Faculty of Social Studies, VID Specialized University, P.b. 184, Vinderen, 0319 Oslo, Norway.