Bridge or Barrier? Religious Identification’s Role in Shaping Attitudes toward Immigrants and Immigration in the European Context

Kumulative Dissertation, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, 2023

Societal and political changes in European countries have led to a renewed scholarly interest in the relationship between individuals’ religious identification and attitudes toward immigrants and immigration. However, previous research on this topic did not reach a consistent conclusion. It remains unclear whether greater religious identification acts as ‘bridge’ and results in positive attitudes or as a ‘barrier’ which results in negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration. The present cumulative dissertation dedicates itself to addressing this ambiguity. Multivariate statistical analyses of survey data have come to at least three major conclusions for individuals’ attitudes: First, the attitudes depends on the values religious individuals support and how threatened they generally feel by immigrants, not only on how strongly they identify with their religious group. Second, the attitudes differ in the context of external shocks that highlight the salience of religion and immigration. Third, religious identification does not only shape the attitudes of majority group members within the host population but also of minority group members, especially Muslim immigrants.