The Italo-Brussels Jehovah's Witnesses Revisited: From First-generation Religious Fundamentalism to Ethno-religious Community Formation

Abstract

In 1976 a survey was conducted among two Italo-Brussels congregations of Jehovah's Witnesses and the results compared with a number of autochthonous Dutch-speaking and French-speaking control groups. Towards the end of 1996 the author put the same questionnaire to the same two Italo-Brussels congregations as part of a wider survey about allochthonous religious and social networks in Brussels. The results show how the Italo-Brussels community of Jehovah's Witnesses has evolved from being a specific movement, which took advantage of first-generation immigration, into a community in which kinship—as a source of support and as a symbolic frame of reference—and a traditional family ideology are very much in evidence, but which henceforth will be increasingly sustained, on the one hand, by a second generation who have been born and brought up in the “Truth” and, on the other hand, by a network that is based on kinship and social proximity.