Abstract
In recent decades, scholars have been increasingly interested in analysing immigrants’ religiosity in Europe. In this article, we provide evidence about how the patterns of religious transmission are shaped by religious characteristics of both the origin and receiving contexts. We do so by focusing on Italy, which is both an almost homogeneously Catholic country and a fairly recent immigration destination, and by analysing three different dimensions of religiosity: service attendance, prayer and importance of religion. By relying on the “Social conditions and integration of foreign citizens” survey (ISTAT, 2011–2012), we fill an important theoretical and geographical gap by analysing differences in religiosity between parents and children. We claim that immigrant groups who share many characteristics with the natives tend to assimilate by adopting the same patterns of transmission (for example, Romanians in Italy). In contrast, immigrants who come from very different religious contexts, such as the Muslim Moroccan group, strongly react to this diversity by emphasising the transmission of their own religiosity. If, instead, immigrants come from a very secular country, such as Albania, they also tend to replicate this feature in the receiving countries, thus progressively weakening their religiosity and also their denominational differences. Overall, it is the interplay between origin and destination context which matters the most in shaping the patterns of religious transmission.
Highlights
In recent decades, scholars have been increasingly interested in analysing immigrants’ religiosity in Europe, paying particular attention to its intergenerational transmissionMolteni F., Dimitriadis I.(Cesari, 2003; Fleischmann & Phalet, 2012; De Hoon & van Tubergen, 2014; Jacob, 2020; Jacob & Kalter, 2013; Maliepaard & Lubbers, 2013; Roy, 2004; Soehl, 2017)
Our results show that immigrants coming from countries that share religious characteristics with the receiving context tend to replicate the patterns of the natives, whereas immigrants coming from very different countries, both in terms of denomination and levels put stronger emphasis in transmitting their religiosity to children
What emerges is that Moroccans and Albanian Muslims are by far the most religious groups
Summary
Scholars have been increasingly interested in analysing immigrants’ religiosity in Europe, paying particular attention to its intergenerational transmissionMolteni F., Dimitriadis I.(Cesari, 2003; Fleischmann & Phalet, 2012; De Hoon & van Tubergen, 2014; Jacob, 2020; Jacob & Kalter, 2013; Maliepaard & Lubbers, 2013; Roy, 2004; Soehl, 2017). In contrast to the US social science literature that sees immigrants’ religion as means to facilitate integration (Foner & Alba, 2008), in Western Europe religion has received growing attention due to the problems linked to Muslim immigrants’ and their children’s difficulties in adapting to the receiving context (Buijs & Rath, 2006) Against this general interest, the lack of studies focusing explicitly on religiosity in Southern European countries is puzzling. Zanfrini (2019) shows that children of poor migrant families achieve lower competencies at school, need more time to finish their course of studies and are more likely to leave school These facts increase their risk of obtaining a bad job and less qualified professions. These integration problems are shown to be relevant in the case of immigrants with greater religious intensity (Guetto & Fellini, 2017), especially following the terrorist attacks in various European cities (Ricucci, 2017)
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