Religious diversity through a super-diversity lens: National, sub-regional and socio-economic religious diversities in Melbourne

Abstract

Melbourne’s religious diversity is increasing. This article reveals distinctive new configurations of ethno-religious diversity arising from immigration and residential mobility at a fine spatial level in different parts of one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities – Melbourne. Using the lens of super-diversity, we see beyond multicultural groups to intersections of diversities, and identify new types of ethno-religious compound in neighbourhoods that were once defined by religious patterns of solidarity. We can no longer use religious labels to describe these evolving groups because they are not defined by any dominant religion; instead, we describe them in terms reflecting their other increasingly salient characteristics. At the local level in Melbourne, it is now necessary to refer to the existence not only of religious diversity but of a ‘diversity of diversities’ in patterns of religious identification.