The Changing Soul of Europe

Religions and Migrations in Northern and Southern Europe

Helena Vilaça, Enzo Pace, Inger Furseth, Per Pettersson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317038825
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Saggi sulla religione

This book paves the way for a more enlarged discussion on religion and migration phenomena in countries of Northern and Southern Europe. From a comparative perspective, these are regions with very different religious traditions and different historical State/Church relations. Although official religion persisted longer in Nordic Protestant countries than in South Mediterranean countries, levels of secularization are higher. In the last decades, both Northern and Southern Europe have received strong flows of newcomers. From this perspective, the book presents through various theoretical lenses and empirical researches the impact mobility and consequent religious transnationalism have on multiple aspects of culture and social life in societies where the religious landscapes are increasingly diverse. The chapters demonstrate that we are dealing with complex scenarios: different contexts of reception, different countries of origin, various ethnicities and religious traditions (Catholics, Orthodox and Evangelical Christians, Muslims, Buddhists). Having become plural spaces, our societies tend to be far more concerned with the issue of social integration rather than with that of social identities reconstruction in society as a whole, often ignoring that today religion manifests itself as a plurality of religions. In short, what are the implications of newcomers for the religious life of Europe and for the redesign of its soul?

PART I
Theoretical Remarks

Chapter 1

Religion in Motion: Migration, Religion and Social Theory

Enzo Pace

Introduction

The chapter deals with the relation between religion and migration in contemporary society. I intend to analyse this relation showing its implication for the social theory. In that sense my first assumption is a sort of Husserlian epoché concerning the conventional approach of the sociology of religion I used to adopt as a scholar of this discipline when analysing the impact of migration on the religious landscape. Scholars of sociology of religion tend to focus on the various types of religious transnationalism in a global world (since the seminal studies by Roland Robertson (1992) and by Peter Beyer (1994) and more recently by Peter Beyer and Lori Beaman (2007)); the concept of multiple modernity referred to the differences between secularized and religious societies (see; Berger et al., 1999; Dobbelaere, 2002; Hervieu-Léger, 2003; Davie et al., 2008); the discussion about the notion of boundaries particularly taking into consideration the movement of people around the world, and the consequences on the socio-religious structures of the contemporary society (Ebaugh and Chafetz, 2000; Smith, 2000; Corten and Marshall-Fratani, 2001; Wu, 2001; Spickard, 2007); the process of de-culturalization and de-territorialization of religion (Roy, 2004).

My attempt is indeed to move from the analytical aspects of the relation between religion and migration towards a broader conceptualization according to social system theory. Societies can be studied as systems that interact with environments more complex than the precarious and unstable equilibrium where each system tends to reach. A society, like a system, must learn to transfer this external complexity in internal differentiation. Social systems are large organizations that are experts in complexity. The more the social environment in which these organizations operate is differentiated, the greater must be the degree of political expertise of the system in order to learn to reduce the complexity of the external environment, accepting the principle of a progressive articulation in many sub-systems, as many are necessary to avoid the entropy of the system itself (Luhmann, 1987, 2012). The point of view of the theory of social systems seems to me particularly useful to analyse what happens in a society when its environment changes, becoming in many ways not easily attributable to the apparatus of social cohesion and social control (political, ideological, economic and cultural) that could apply to a society relatively more stable and homogeneous.

Take, for example, the fiscal crisis of the modern welfare state, which has already been analysed with far-sightedness in 1984 by Claus Offe (Offe, 1984a, 1984b) and again more recently by James O’Connor (2009). This crisis has to do with religion as well as the processes of social change produced by mass migration, which started from 1961 onwards in Europe. According to Offe the most crucial contradiction of the welfare state arises because the budget of the State has a tendency to grow much quicker than its resource base. It draws resources from the economy, absorbing a greater part of the gross national product (GNP), contributing to reduce the proportion of the GNP destined to the private sector that, vocationally, works according to the profit-making investment and the accumulation capital. Offe writes: “The contradiction process can be seen as analogous to that of physiological addiction: the addict requires even larger drug doses at the same time as the potential withdrawal phenomena, that would follow a reduction of these doses, become more and more crucial” (1984a: 58).

The welfare state crisis implies at least two important consequences on the religious field, as has been well pointed out by Bäckström et al.’s research on religion and welfare in Europe (2010). If the State reduces the weight of welfare because of the fiscal crisis that is gripping the country, this creates a new paradox. We are in fact coping with the new role of churches and religions; it becomes more and more important precisely in an area of social life that the welfare state replaced the traditional power of the churches. But, on the other hand, the churches are forced to go back to being the medical institution of capitalism, as the German sociologist and political scientist, Carl Schmitt (1925) liked to say (not suspected for his proximity to the Catholic Church). The reduction of welfare therefore contributes to differentiate the sustainable welfare state from the sphere of religious welfare, where the ethics of brotherhood reappears, whereas Max Weber (1988) had forecasted its decline in the spheres of the modern society (in the politics as well as in the economics, art, Eros and so on). The anxiety of Europeans who view that the State was committed to resize the welfare system (from pensions to the health system, from the subsidies of unemployment up to the support for people affected by severe disabling illness or disability) is not diminishing, whilst seeing the renewed social activism of the churches and other non-Christian organizations, and indeed it increases. That the small number of Europeans who procure material aid from the religious organizations are mostly immigrants, is evidence of at least some relevant stereotypes: that immigrants have not only taken away jobs from natives, but have encouraged the reduction of the benefits of welfare that were also distributed to newcomers. The State, partially receding from the welfare model, is coping with various social and political movements which protest against the policies of hospitality and social integration of the immigrants, who are considered not only as foreigners, but foreign and incompatible with the Christian culture, that is seen as the common root of European identity.

To sum up we are coping with a crisis that involves a major restructuring of the modern state. This crisis reflects a profound social change in European societies: from the demographic point of view as well as from the cultural and religious perspective. Therefore the question of religious identity and belonging seem to me crucial in understanding both the relation between welfare and immigration and welfare and religion. The welfare state (crisis), identity and religion form the sides of a triangle which hopefully will not become the Bermuda Triangle of the European Union.

In other words I am trying to speak about religion and migration not from a peculiar sociology of religion’s point of view, but with a social theory-oriented approach, because I would like mostly to focus on the concept of social change. Therefore the proposal is to read the social change in contemporary society through the bifocal lenses of religion and migration. The angle of refraction is precisely the notion of social change, a multi-dimensional notion indeed because it concerns at least four relevant aspects among others. Illustrating these four aspects I would like to use a metaphor: the four Knights of the Apocalypse. The metaphor works as a sociological game: on the one hand I am trying to detach the observation of the contemporary phenomena of social change from an incumbent sociology of religion’s approach, and on the other I would like not to disguise myself completely. However the theoretical reflection on the dimension of social change is interested in showing the social function of religion in a globalized world. Last but not least, the word Apocalypse is used in this context not as synonymous with the end of history or the world, but according to the more appropriate etymological meaning: revelation. Religion and migration actually reveal the intensity and complexity of the social change we are facing.

The White Knight

The White Knight symbolizes the tension between Pure and Impure, and clearly evokes the well-known Mary Douglas (1966) thesis in her seminal book Purity and Danger. If the contemporary world is interconnected as it has never been before, it means the inadequacy of the traditional centre–periphery scheme. The world becomes a small village that can be considered global. Economical and technological trends push people to move around the world taking with them their cultural, linguistic, juridical and religious differences as individual and collective stores. The impact on the social stratification and articulation within the labour market is crucial. We are facing a reconfiguration of the classes and division of labour according to at least two unexpected elements. First, the labour market indeed tends to distribute jobs according the ethnic differentiation, that is, the women coming from Eastern Europe are mostly recruited as care workers of the elderly people (Vianello, 2009; Vilaça and Pace, 2010) or the maritime workers are coming more and more from East Asia. The ethnicization of the labour market reproduces sometimes religious cleavages. Second, the clash of classes sometimes reflects the ethno-religious cleavages in a striking juxtaposition which are not easy to analyse according to the classical approach of social theory concerning social stratification and mobility.

Take for instance what is happening with the question of conversion in some states of India: the case study on conversions in the Indian subcontinent is an interesting benchmark for analysing the conversion phenomenon as a battle taking place along the symbolic boundaries of various systems of belief, in a society that has historically been pluralistic from the religious standpoint (Pace, 2009). This battle follows a precise narrative scheme: conversion is seen by one system of belief as a perversion; the social action to obtain a reversion of those who convert becomes a communication and action strategy (a socio-religious action strategy) implemented by one system against another. The action is imagined as the re-conquest of a lost soul and celebrated with rites of purification. To defend its boundaries, each system tends to describe its competitors as the expression of falsity, impurity, the reign of darkness, as opposed to its own, the one and only true and pure faith, the resplendent reign of light. The system sees itself as a reign to be preserved actually in the land, in a territory where the cohabitation with others classified as impure (or non-indigenous) is dominated by two hegemonies: one based on the primacy of one class over the other (those who are considered as pure could act as citizen pleno iure), the second ruled by the social segregation that condemns those who want to survive as human beings, to accept non-skilled work or dirty jobs, in the grey and black market.

The Red Knight

The figure of the Red Knight refers to religion in war and the resurgence of religious nationalism and ethno-religious movements. It covers also the recurrent conflicts arising all over the world in host societies, because of the huge number of migrants; it occurs not only at the macro-level but also at a micro one, in everyday life. Social change is dramatically perceived by people when they start to experience unfamiliar sensations; the real clash of civilizations actually begins when the diversity (religious, cultural and so on) strikes our senses in everyday life (sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste), when the colour of the skin, the way a woman dresses, the smell of food, the physical contact, the sound of a religious song – all seem to us as strange, offensive, disturbing, untouchable and so on. The conflicts, affecting many societies involved in the global movement of people, represent indeed another side of the coin of the modern ethnic conflicts. We have to cope with many war scenarios all over the world where not only the contenders claim land, independence or the control of some economic resources (petrol, gold, opium, human trafficking and so on), but also sometimes in doing that invoking the name of God (or Dharma), to stress the impossibility of continuing to share a land with people who belong to another belief system. Those who learned yesterday to live together in the same land start to fight each other tomorrow, building up barriers of religious differences (Buddhist versus Hindu – as in Sri Lanka – or Catholic versus Orthodox – during the recent Balkan wars – or Ashkenazi versus Sephardic – as in Israel, where the original religious division overlaps, and sometimes hides, social, economic, political and cultural conflicts) (Vrcan, 1994; Seneviratne, 1999; Guolo, 1997; Pace, 2004; Roumani, 2009).

The Black Knight

The Black Knight concerns the question of social justice and the impact of the religious differences on the juridical order. I would like to start by quoting the title of a recent book by Peggy Levitt, God Needs No Passport (Levitt, 2001, 2007). The world is now more and more “a transnational field in which religion operates alongside other social institutions and forces” (Adogame and Spickard, 2010). In the global landscape, religion could act either on the backstage or on the stage playing both the function of voice and exit (Hirschman, 1970). Hirschman, striking at the foundational assumptions of liberalism (and of neo-global-liberalism), argued that social groups (at macro, meso, micro levels) have two chances when the members (or part of them) are convinced that the organization to whom they belong is not yet able to guarantee the quality of life, social benefit or satisfaction of the basic needs. First possibility: they can exit (withdraw from relationship, including the dramatic decision to move from the motherland, if the macro-group means a nation-state). Second chance: they can voice, making an effort to confront the social deprivation, improving the relationship through communication of complaint, imagining “another world is possible”, inventing a new set of shared values, and a new repertoire of social action for change. In both cases there is a lack of loyalty, a deficit of social trust. We could interpret the migrants who decided to move to another country as indicators of the exit, as a result of the increasing discontent of people about the quality of life in a society that is not yet able to provide for them; it is a silent protest that has an impact on the economics (both of the sending society and hosting one), without any relevant effect on politics. Vice versa the voice means protest, social mobilization, political conflicts and actions. Hirschman’s theory indeed says: the greater the availability of exit, the less likely the voice will be used.

To what extent is it useful to apply Hirschman’s theory to the relation between religion and migration? It seems to me that the scheme exit/voice/loyalty works quite well if we take into account and under the control of the empirical methodology at least two socio-religious dynamics that occur when we pay attention on the multiple phenomena that the relation between religion and migration involves.

First of all, I would like to point out the role that religion plays in transnational migration before actual migration, according to an acute analysis by Obadare and Adebanwi (2010). The thesis of these two scholars actually is: “the transnational migration is imagined and treated as a spiritual phenomenon … religion and religious symbols and rituals are banalized against the backdrop of the disorderly retreat of the State from ordinary people’s lives” (p. 32). The case study is precisely that of Nigeria where the very high wave of emigration to various countries around the world (including Europe) interplays with the upsurge of Pentecostal Christianity on the African continent. Religion from many aspects works as a spin-off of the “appetite for elsewhere” (Ojo, 2006; Kalu, 2008) that affects a large number of highly skilled younger Nigerians. Roughly speaking, the will to emigrate is an exit, but because in many cases those who emigrate share a common religious experience (belonging to Pentecostal or Charismatic churches), therefore, they experience the power to communicate with each other the moral and political complaint against the social disorder and the collapse of the State. In other words religion works partially as voice too. It is a voice among others of an implicit protest that is not able to mobilize people politically against the establishment. It is an old story – someone could remark – coming from the Marxian approach to religion. The difference between, in particular, the Engels and Gramsci thesis on religion as an instrument for protest by the marginalized social class and the definition of religion as the opium of the people proposed by Marx, could allow us to reconsider the relation between structure (economic and political) and superstructure (religion, moral and so on), but in any case the Marxian approach does not explain the relative autonomy of religion in a complex society. If we assume religion as communication, its relative autonomy is based on a peculiar power of communication (Pace, 2011) that enables people to imagine another world, to sustain the sacrifices of migration by the moral and spiritual persuasion that the host society is a land to be converted, a gift of God to reverse mission. Part of the controversy around this formula, religious symbols provide support for people to cope with the initial difficulties of integrating themselves in a different society (the host one) (Levitt, 2007; Maduro, 2009), having to resort to faith when adjusting their lives in a new social environment, where more frequently they have to learn not only to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Theoretical Remarks
• Part II: Religion And Migration In Europe: Case Studies
• Conclusion
• Index