Consequences of religious and secular boundaries among the majority population for perceived discrimination among Muslim minorities in Western Europe

ABSTRACT

While the concept of symbolic boundaries and ethnic boundary-making is well established in social research, the direct consequences of these boundaries for the integration of migrants have not received much attention. This paper thus analyses whether religious and secular boundaries of national belonging among the majority population have an impact on perceived discrimination among Muslim minorities in Western Europe. To analyse this linkage, data from the International Social Survey Programme measuring the importance of religion as a symbolic boundary of national belonging among the majority have been aggregated as a regional context condition and combined with a Muslim minority subsample from the European Social Survey. The results of the multilevel models reveal that the salience of religious boundaries is associated with less perceived discrimination among Muslim minorities, while secular orientations among the majority seem to be more decisive for subjective perceptions of feeling discriminated against. Overall, the results thus challenge the role of religion as an ethno-religious demarcation and point to the relevance of secular boundaries of belonging for immigrant integration.

KEYWORDS:

• Symbolic boundaries
• religion
• perceived discrimination
• Muslims
• Europe

Acknowledgments

I gratefully thank Matthias Koenig, Silke Hans, Steffen Kühnel, Jan-Philip Steinmann and Lisa Harms for their very helpful comments and support, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions on previous versions of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Sabine Trittler is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Konstanz, Germany. In her PhD project, conducted at the University of Göttingen, she focused on the relationship between religion and national identity in cross-national comparative perspective. Further research interests include sociology of religion, migration and integration research, and sociological theory. Parts of her work have been published in Nations and Nationalism and European Sociological Review.

Notes

1 A migration background was assigned when at least one of the parents were not born in the country where the survey took place.

2 ‘Christian’ was replaced in countries with a specific majority religion (e.g., Catholic in France and Protestant in Norway).

3 The different measures of the religious boundary (raw score, relative score, and percentages) are highly correlated with each other and lead to similar results in the regression models. Moreover, the different measures of the religious boundary and the secularity measures are likewise correlated and support my interpretation of a secular demarcation (see Tables 1.4 and 2.1 in the online supplement).

4 As there is no variation at the country-level, I have included the independent variables only at the regional-level. However, to test for the robustness of my results and the modeling strategy, I have estimated additional models that include individual-level and region-level control variables, country-dummies, and different estimations methods based on a linear probability model. Moreover, I have tested for possible bias due to singletons by replicating the analysis on different samples. All of these models attest to the robustness of my results (for a description of models and results see online supplement).