Abstract
Support for strangers is deeply anchored in the social ethics of various religious traditions. Based on a qualitative content analysis of interviews with refugees and immigration executives. the article focuses on the role of religion and religious communities in refugee accommodation in Germany between 2011 and 2018. It sheds light on different schemes and measures of support offered by religious communities and explores the significance of religious and cultural differences for processes of accommodation and early integration. The empirical analysis is embedded in conceptual debates on the re-emergence of faith-based service providers in the crisis of the late modern welfare state. The findings suggest that the so called ‘refugee crisis’ has served as an opportunity structure for Christian refugee aid. At the same time, refugee accommodation centres in Germany have responded to an increase of non-Christian refugees (notably: Muslims) by a more restrictive handling of religious freedom.
1 Introduction
Support for strangers is deeply anchored in the social ethics of various religious traditions. Along with other forms of deprivation (hunger, thirst, sickness, loneliness and captivity) being foreign is associated with a deeply precarious state which entitles a person to faith-based support. In the Gospel of Matthew, the person in need is identified with Jesus himself, thus turning support into a duty with direct implications for salvation. Similar concepts of social support can be found in other religious traditions, such as obligatory (zakāt) and voluntary (ṣadaqa) acts of alms giving as part of the core duties of Islam, the notion of Seva (selfless service) in Hindu and Sikh traditions, and the emphasis on social activism in Engaged Buddhism.1
In addition to these general norms of faith-based solidarity, many religious traditions relate to narratives of exile and migration as part of their own history. Perhaps most prominent is the Exodus from Egypt as central founding myth of the Jewish people as well as their Diaspora in Babylonia, which has inspired contemporary analyses of migration and minorities in the so-called diaspora studies.2 Likewise, in the early history of Islam, forced migration plays a prominent role in the emigration (hijra) of Mohammed and his followers to Medina and Abyssinia. The narrative of exile in Abyssinia is particularly interesting here since it involves protection by a Christian emperor and was invoked by Syrian and other Muslim refugees who fled to Western European countries after 2011. Last, but not least, the Buddhist myth of the “Journey to the West” represents a migration narrative from the East Asian context featuring the so-called Monkey King, a mythical figure, which has received a lot of attention in the popular Manga and Anime culture.3
Given the close association of general norms of faith-based solidarity and the significance of migration narratives in the history of many religious traditions, it seems likely that religious communities in modern immigration societies are prepared to take measures in order to support refugees as the most vulnerable of all immigrants. Therefore, in this article I will explore the role of religion and religious communities in refugee accommodation in Germany between 2011 and 2018. More specifically, I will take a meso-level perspective on the schemes and measures of support offered by religious communities and on the organizational handling of religious and cultural differences during the process of accommodation and early integration.
In the following section, I will embed my analysis in the state of research on religion and refugee accommodation. In line with previous studies, I argue that the prominence of religious communities in refugee aid reflects a drawback of the late modern welfare state under the rubric of privatization, which may have strong repercussions on the measures of support as well as the organizational shape of religious providers. In the third and fourth section, I briefly elaborate on my methodology and provide further information about the case of refugee accommodation in Germany within the European context. In sections 5 and 6, I present the results of my empirical investigation and use the seventh section in order to draw some systematic conclusions.
2 State of Research
The state of research on the role of religious communities in refugee accommodation is limited at best. Most of the existing studies have dealt with religion as an individual resource of identity and resilience. In a special issue of the Journal of Refugee Studies in 2002, the authors emphasized the role of religion and spirituality as coping mechanisms for instances of trauma4 which helped to stabilize individual identity despite profound experiences of liminality.5 While some authors have concentrated on a particular community of refugees, based on their country of origin,6 others have emphasized and challenged the religious dimensions of refugee experiences.7
With regard to the meso-level of religious communities or refugee accommodation facilities, some authors have explored the bonding and bridging capacity of religious institutions. In this regard, Allen found that the functions of religious institutions differed for refugees from majority and minority traditions as he observed that Catholic refugees used their church for bonding and bridging whereas Muslim refugees used their mosque primarily for bonding purposes.8 In a similar vein, Nawyn has investigated the role of faith-based organizations in refugee resettlement in comparison to non-religious NGO s. She underlined the significance of national and local institutional settings of refugee assistance and held that faith-based organizations could draw on religious networks to assist refugees which makes them more independent of but not more distanced vis-à-vis state actors.9 On a related matter, Bruce has examined the discursive adaption of faith-based providers of refugee services, based on a case study of a Catholic organization. She observed a high degree of adaption to the organizational environment and pointed to the challenges “of organizations seeking to preserve the integrity of the religious act while remaining true to legal standards and a pluralistic context of social service.”10
A variety of more recent studies have concentrated on the religious implications of refugee aid in response to the arrival of refugees from the Near and Middle East during the so-called “refugee crisis” in 2015 and 2016. From an organizational perspective, de Jong and Ataç have analysed the emergence of new types of NGO s and a the same time pointed to the dominance of “church-related humanitarian organizations, such as Caritas and Diakonie.”11 Other studies set out to explore the “religious profile” of refugees in terms of affiliation and particular attitudes which are deemed relevant for social integration, such as tolerance or the participation of women in the labour market.12 In terms of refugee reception in Austria, the authors hold that “religious communities can act as key meditators for integration into the host society” and express their concern that the politicisation of Islam may hamper this positive potential.13
In another recent contribution, Wlasak and Wonisch have analysed religious motivations in refugee aid, based on two city case studies in Austria and Italy.14 The authors have identified various measures of refugee aid: Whereas the professional social work of faith-based and secular organizations (partly commissioned by regional authorities) included more structured measures of accommodation, counselling and language learning, religious communities and volunteers were engaged in a variety of informal support measures, such as emergency aid (housing, donations) and spiritual counsel.15 The main emphasis of the study is, however, on the motivations of faith-based support. While many religious actors emphasize that religious norms of solidarity apply regardless of the religious affiliation of the person in need, the authors hold that some religious communities embed their activism on behalf of refugees in a distinct missionary interest.16 In their conclusion, the authors call for further research on the perception of religious and non-religious support measures by refugees.17
As far as the German situation is concerned, a recent quantitative analysis has focused on the individual religiosity of refugees and how it relates to social integration. Based on data of the Socioeconomic Panel for refugees who arrived between 2013 and 2016, Siegert reported that refugees with a Christian background were much more likely to attend religious events and showed higher rates of subjective religiosity.18 Moreover, he suggested that the attendance at religious events was positively associated with contact to German people and, hence, might foster social integration. In another quantitative study on the religious conditions of refugee aid, Nagel and El-Menouar found that Muslims in Germany were much more likely to engage in refugee aid than (mainline) Christians and non-confessionals.19 Furthermore, their analysis showed that persons who were highly religious (as measured by their attachment to religious communities and the significance of religious norms for their conduct of life) reported to be more active in refugee aid.20
While these studies rely on aggregated individual data and the self-rating of respondents, generic meso-level approaches to the role of religion in the organizational context of refugee reception are still rare. Based on a small sample of refugee accommodation centres, Nagel and Rückamp have offered explorative insights on how the staff (administrators, social workers and security personnel) conceive of and handle religious diversity.21 They found that religious pluralization, mainly the increase of Muslim refugees, went along with uncertainty on behalf of the staff and more restrictive interpretations of religious freedom, i.e. the prohibition of collective and visible forms of worship on the premises of the centres.22 In addition, Nagel has presented an overview on the role of religious actors in refugee aid in Germany and complemented a macro-level perspective on the self-positioning of major religious communities in public discourses on refugee aid with a meso-level analysis of local collaboration between refugee accommodation centres and religious communities.23 He concluded that all religious umbrella associations had expressed their willingness to support refugees based on theological arguments, such as the God-likeliness of all human beings. At the same time, some of them emphasized that accommodation and integration of refugees were primary responsibilities of the state (e.g. the German Bishops’ Conference) while others (e.g. the Conference of Christian Orthodox Bishops and the Central Council of Jews) cautioned against imported religious conflicts.24 With regard to Muslim communities, there appeared to be a blatant imbalance between the high participation of Muslim volunteers in refugee aid and the reluctance of refugee accommodation centres to collaborate with Muslim organizations.25
Although there is an emerging state of research on refugees and religion in Germany, studies on the role of religion in refugee accommodation, which combine the perspectives of refugees and the staff of accommodation centres, are still missing. That is the research gap I intend to fill with this article.
In doing so, I relate to conceptual debates from the European research consortium “Faith-Based Organisations and Exclusion in European Cities” (FACIT), which took place between 2008 and 2010 and was funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme. The innovative approach of the consortium was to link the return of faith-based organizations to the drawback of late modern nation states form their responsibility to provide public goods, such as social welfare: “Globalisation, neoliberal reforms and the retreat of the welfare state open spaces for NGO s in general and FBO s in particular to engage in economic, social and political actions with vulnerable, excluded and marginalised citizens.”26 The authors emphasize the opportunity structures for the public role of religious communities and hence the invitational character of public-private collaboration. At the same time, they underline the challenges of neoliberal retrenchment whereas other authors from the same research consortium embrace its chances for the post-secular constellation.27 On an analytical level, the FACIT consortium set out to map types of activities of FBO s in relation to different welfare regimes, based on a wide understanding of FBO s including “any organisation that refers directly or indirectly to religion or religious values, and that function as a welfare provider and/or as a political actor.”28
In this article, I adopt this definition, but focus on the meso-micro link between FBO s and their beneficiaries, thus responding to the research gap identified by Wlasak and Wonisch. Hence, I seek to identify different schemes and measures of faith-based support for refugees and explore the role of religious differences in the organizational management of religious and cultural differences during the process of accommodation and early integration. In the following section, I will outline my methodology and provide a brief introduction to the German case of refugee accommodation.
3 Methods and Data
The empirical analysis draws on two sets of semi-structured interviews from two different projects. The first set of interviews is from an explorative pilot study on “Religious Diversity and Practice in Refugee Accommodation Centres”, which was conducted between 2016 and 2018.29 In the course of this project, we conducted 24 interviews with members of the administrative, social work and security staff of accommodation centres as well as 6 interviews with representatives of neighbouring religious communities and persons in a chaplaincy capacity. The sample included established regional and municipal reception centres as well as four emergency shelters (“Notunterkünfte”). Even though the main sampling unit were accommodation centres and not faith-based organizations, religious welfare providers and communities were not only addressed in the interview guidelines, but played an important role in most of the centres.
In the framework of this article these data offer insights on the meso-level of faith-based service provision with a particular focus on accommodation and early integration. At the same time, the second set of interviews brings in the micro-level perspective of refugee experiences. It forms part of the international research project RESPOND (“Multi-level Governance of Mass Migration in Europe and Beyond”).30 In the course of this project, we conducted 60 interviews with refugees from different countries of origin (including Syria, Iran, Turkey, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Balkans) who had applied for asylum in Germany between 2011 and 2017. The interviews were conducted in Arabic, Farsi and English and covered a wide range of topics related to experiences of border crossing, protection, reception and integration. Although the guidelines only addressed religion as part of the overall sociodemographic questions, our interlocutors brought up numerous instances related to religion or FBO s as a source of support.
In terms of data analysis, I aim at data triangulation by integrating the two datasets in a joint content analytical framework. While some important categories for the analysis can be derived from the research foci, I also applied inductive coding in order to keep my approach open. As mentioned earlier, the first research focus is on schemes and measures of faith-based refugee support. Here, I coded single measures of support reported by refugees, religious representatives and the staff of refugee accommodation centres, and sought to categorize them along several criteria, such as scope, target group and the role of faith components. The second research focus refers to religious differences in the process of accommodation. Here, I coded perceptions of the staff and refugees with regard to interreligious and intercultural conflicts in accommodation centres as well as individual experiences of interreligious or intercultural encounter. In practice, coding was based on a close reading of relevant sections of interview transcripts (e.g. the demographic question for religious affiliation in interviews with refugees or the question of interreligious conflict in staff interviews) combined with the identification of relevant passages through an enhanced keyword search (e.g. searching for the combination of “faith”, “religion” or “mosque” with “support”, “help” or “need”) under MaxQDA.
4 Refugee Accommodation in Germany
Before turning to the results of the analysis, a brief introduction to the German context of refugee accommodation is in order. It is beyond the scope of this paper to provide a comprehensive picture of the reception system as such or the variety of experiences and challenges it entails for asylum seekers.31 In line with the terminology of RESPOND, I understand reception as the liminal state between filing the asylum application and receiving the final decision. Whereas accepted asylum seekers in Germany have access to basic security benefits (“Grundsicherung”) like German citizens, the reception regime is more restrictive in terms of allowances, the freedom of movement and the widespread obligation to reside in refugee accommodation centres. Since 2015, a new paradigm of “integrated refugee management” has gained ground that requires asylum seekers to stay in so-called arrival centres, which have been criticized for promoting a policy of deterrence vis-à-vis prospective asylum seekers.32
Between 2011 and 2018, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) has registered more than 2 Million first-time applications for asylum in Germany. Despite earlier movements of forced migration, from the internal dispersal of expellees after World War II over the Vietnamese “boat people” in the 1970s to refugees of the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s, the arrival of asylum seekers in the aftermath of the “Arab Spring” was most extensively framed in terms of religion. In 2014 and 2015, public debates revolved around the question of interreligious conflicts in refugee accommodation centres and culminated in a discussion about the spatial separation of refugees along religious lines.
Although forced migration only accounts for a minor part of overall immigration to Germany (mostly internal labour migration within the EU), the recent movement of refugees from Near and Middle Eastern countries has contributed to the further pluralization of the German religious field. In 2017, more than 23 Million people were members of the Roman Catholic Church (28 %) in contrast to more than 21.5 Million (mainline) Protestants (26 %) and about 4.5 Million Muslims (5.5 %) and 2 Million Christian-Orthodox people (2.4 %). A relative majority of 28.8 Million people in Germany did not belong to any particular confession or religion (34.7 %).33 Among the 1.5 Million refugees who arrived in Germany between 2013 and 2016, more than 70 % were Muslims and 17 % were Christian.34
With regard to my focus on the role of religion and FBO s in the process of refugee accommodation, it is important to note that Christian mainline churches and confessional welfare associations, such as Diakonie and Caritas, are important players in welfare production, including numerous services for refugees. In contrast to this close entanglement between (mainline) Christian actors and the state, Muslim communities have been struggling to meet the formal requirements of public-private collaboration and are only slowly catching up. Within the period of observation (2011–2018), the asymmetry between the strong increase of Muslim asylum seekers and the traditional Christian presence in accommodation centres and other, decentral forms of refugee has become more than obvious.
Given the emerging body of literature on religious motivations and organizations in Austria and Italy, it seems sensible to briefly position the German case vis-à-vis these countries. In terms of their patterns of reception governance, Austria and Germany share a lot of systemic commonalities including a conservative welfare regime, a federalist structure and an established corporatist system. Italy on the other hand, is marked by a Southern European welfare regime, a semi-centralized pattern of regionalization and a passive, less structured approach to the involvement of societal actors.35 In terms of their religious field, Italy and Austria exhibit a Catholic majority whereas Germany is traditionally bi-confessional. At the same time, the relations between the state and religious communities in all three countries are marked by a cooperative model and Muslims constitute the biggest non-Christian religious minority. In contrast to Germany and Italy, Muslims are organized as an entity of public law in Austria and thus play an active role in the corporatist structure, similar to the mainline churches whereas Banfi has pointed to principle differences between Christian and Muslim communities in Italy.36
Given the salience of right-wing populist movements in all three countries and the subsequent politicisation of Islam, I would expect a reluctant attitude vis-à-vis Muslim initiatives of refugee aid as observed by de Jong and Ataç (see above).
5 Schemes and Measures of Support
As mentioned earlier, the umbrella associations of all major religious communities in Germany have avowed themselves to practical refugee aid. In a programmatic document, the German Bishops’ Conference outlined several action fields with regard to the accommodation and integration of refugees including housing, employability and education.37
Based on our interviews with representatives of religious communities in the neighbourhood of refugee accommodation centres, we gained a nuanced picture of their schemes and measures of support: Representatives from the Christian mainline churches emphasized the division of labour between confessional welfare associations and their own role of chaplaincy. Since welfare associations (in this case Diakonie and Caritas) were responsible for much of the practical support, such as the supply with clothes and everyday commodities, day-care and educational programs for children, legal advice (“Asylverfahrensberatung”) and monetary support for advanced training or the recognition of educational certificates, the chaplains could concentrate on pastoral and liturgical duties, including personal counselling and worship. Despite the clear Christian shape of these activities, they were explicitly directed to (and made use of) by non-Christian refugees. In the case of an ‘ecumenical’ Sunday service the Protestant chaplain counted 80 participants, 70 of whom had a Muslim background.
On the other hand, the Mosque communities in our sample did not report any sort of outreach work in accommodation centres, but relied on the refugees to approach them. A representative from a big Turkish mosque observed that many refugees from the Near and Middle East had joined the Friday prayer. In turn, the support measures of his mosque were more situational and selective including free meals or the supply with prayer rugs or Qurans. In contrast, the representative from an Arab-speaking community in the same city mentioned various schemes of support from donations in kind over a preparatory German class unto practical assistance in matters of administration or finding access to work. In addition, he strongly emphasized the efforts of his community to educate refugees to accept the norms and values of the German society. In both cases, the scope of support was rather limited reflecting the lack of full-time personnel of the communities. The allocation of services was based on a self-selection process, which resulted in the religious homogeneity of beneficiaries.
At the same time, a Yezidi community in our sample reported a much more targeted – and selective – approach of refugee support. In this particular case, Yezidi or Kurdish employees of a nearby accommodation centre would proactively address Yezidi refugees offering them support. Apart from several measures of practical assistance (translation, administrative, logistic), the community also provided for housing and sustenance of Yezidi asylum seekers. Furthermore, it was engaged in political advocacy for Yezidis in their homelands and organized demonstrations and donations on their behalf. In comparison, the evidence suggests that non-Christian religious minorities have taken a more selective and less structured approach to refugee aid which is in line with earlier studies by Banfi and Buber-Ennser et al. At the same time, the apparently low degree of support by Muslim organizations stands in contrast to the high involvement of individual Muslim actors in refugee aid (see section 2). There are three possible explanations to solve that puzzle: First, the inward orientation and informal shape of support measures are typical for Muslim (and other non-Christian minorities as well as Christian Orthodox) communities and reflect the utter reliance of these groups on voluntary efforts by their members.38 Second, as I will show in the following section, the politicisation and securitization of Muslims in public discourse translates into a reluctance of professionals in the field of refugee reception to embrace support initiatives by Muslim groups. And third, there may indeed be a gap between the collective and individual participation of Muslims in refugee aid: the fact that Muslim organizations have little resources to develop structured measures of refugee support (and unlike Christian charities are no acknowledged part of public welfare provision) does not prevent their members (and other, non-organized Muslims) from engaging in other endeavours of refugee aid.
How do these organizational perspectives resonate with the individual experiences of refugees? In our interviews with refugees from the Near and Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey and the Balkans we could observe three main constellations of faith-based support. First, and in line with the reports of religious representatives, we encountered numerous instances of personal assistance. A young man from Eritrea who found himself in a village in Brandenburg pointed to the holistic scope of support he received through the local parish:
There was a church group […]. I could go to church, they came they taught us their language in private and then volunteers come and they teach the kids and they teach the women and they have these coffee gatherings and they came by and that was all very good at first. Even when I wanted to study, the church here in [name of village] they helped me a lot. Before I had to buy a ticket to get to Berlin so they bought me a Monatskarte [monthly pass] so I was very welcomed here.
The quote points to several measures of support, such as (informal) language education, financial support and an overall spirit of attention and care. These measures seem to be embedded in a wider scheme of refugee aid as an integral part of the mission of the parish and is carried out by a number of volunteers. Given the Christian affiliation of our interlocutor and his participation in the services of the congregation one could wonder whether the same scope of assistance had been offered to a Muslim refugee. Indeed, most of the accounts of practical support in the sample involve Christian communities helping Christian refugees. Yet, there were other examples, too. For instance, one young Muslim man from Syria shared the pleasant memory of an elderly lady who helped him and his friends out in a difficult situation by standing up for them. A 33-year-old woman from Iran who was brought up as a Muslim, but regards herself as non-religious, mentions another case of Christian support and reflects on its personal implications:
Sometimes in go to the church myself […]. I met a friendly pastor there. He was a very helpful person and has accompanied me two times to the social assistance office and asked for me to be sent to an accommodation where you do not have to share a room with four persons. And I still go to that church today. Actually, only because of this friendly man. If he leaves the church one day, I will not go any more either.
The example underlines the inherently relational quality of faith-based refugee support. Instead of isolated and commodified instances of assistance (in this case advocacy at the social assistance office), refugees enter a personal relationship with their supporters which may involve mutual obligations. In this particular case, we may assume that out interlocutor attends the church as an expression of gratitude towards the pastor even though religion does not matter to her at all.
Although there is certainly no sort of automatism, the prominence of Christian support structures may influence individual decisions for conversion. Another Iranian woman in our sample shared with us her personal experience of conversion during her journey to Germany and draws a connection between her new religion and faith-based support after an emotional crisis: “After I got out of hospital, I was fortunate to get a bed in a church. [...] Normally, you do not find shelter in a church and even for 1.5 months, but the women who worked there treated me like her own daughter”. For this interview partner, the unexpected fortune of finding shelter in a church is not something she feels entitled to having become a Christian, but yet another instance of divine agency in her life. At the same time, mosque communities were hardly mentioned in our sample in terms of practical assistance with the exemption of one young man from Syria who reported that they had found a mosque in Serbia where “we washed ourselves and prayed”.
A second constellation of faith-based support relates to the networks and social capital of religious communities. Typically, it would take the form of support chains as the following example of a young Syrian women elucidates:
I got to know the Rotary Club through a woman working in Caritas. I was scared of them during the interviews because of their politics. They paid me 1400 euros until the B2 [language certificate]. I was paying the transportation. I was not comfortable when dealing with them. So I went to another NGO, Jugendmigrationsdienst [Youth Migration Service]. They did two interviews, they gave me the money and I did the C1 level and the DSH [language proficiency test for universities].
The statement indicates that an employee of Caritas established a contact to the Rotary Club, which provided our interlocutor with financial support for her language class. For reasons not specified in the interview, she decided to quit this support relationship and successfully found an alternative source of assistance. In a similar vein, another Syrian woman held: “I started with school courses, then I got a contact with an active woman who works a Christian NGO, she gives a lot of information about scholarships. She told us about the scholarship of DAAF”. Again, this is an example for support with regard to education. While the previous example emphasizes the bridging social capital of faith-based settings, the second instance points to faith-based support in the form of sharing important information.
A more institutionalized mode of supporting accommodation through faith-based networks was the participation of refugees as volunteers or assistants in confessional welfare associations. Several of our interlocutors reported to have volunteered and played an active part in refugee aid themselves. For instance, a young man from Syria informed us: “And also when I came to the camp, I volunteered with the Johanniter [Christian welfare association]. I was working with them and helping them. When I went out of the camp, I kept in contact with the manager there. Also continued to do that (when) I moved to [bigger city next to the camp]”. The statement indicates how an active contribution can lead to long-term support relationships which facilitate accommodation and early integration, e.g. when they open up opportunities for employment or qualification. Some of our interview partners framed their volunteering as an act of gratitude vis-à-vis the host society.
The third constellation of faith-based support is less tangible and refers to religious communities as spaces of sociality and conviviality. A 29-year-old man from Turkey who had fled in the aftermath of the coup and described himself as an observing Muslim shared his experiences with interreligious and intercultural events organized by Christian welfare associations:
Associations like Caritas organize activities, provide course opportunities and aids, I try to go to their activities. For instance, I participated to that interfaith dialogue. A young man from the university, theology student I think, came to represent Islam. He started to tell five pillars of Islam. However, Islam is an experience of being ethical above all. So, when he made an introduction like that, it is not decent.
The statement indicates that faith-based organizations do not only provide individual assistance, but also engage in more general forms of civic activism, such as interfaith or intercultural dialogue. At the same time, our interview partner complains that these activities do not “get to the core” in the sense that they do not lead to sustainable personal relationships.
On the other hand, some of our Muslim interlocutors emphasized the significance of mosques for social life and for preserving their religious and cultural identity. A Woman from Algeria who was married to a Syrian held: “My husband, especially on Fridays, he goes to the mosque here. It is like something important for him because in the mosque, he will meet his friends and his brothers and yeah, it’s ok. Me, I have no time to go to the mosque yeah so I pray at home”. The statement underlines the role of the mosque as a meeting place and space of (male) social life. In a similar vein, a 34-year-old woman from Syria with two sons decided against moving to a rural area in order to stay close to her urban mosque community: “Here it is much better, in the city, we meet other Syrians and Arabs and the kids go to the mosque and learn Quran and Arabic language. All these are nice in the big city and are not available in the villages”. It is noteworthy that both interlocutors do not address the spiritual or liturgical dimensions of a mosque, but focus on the social and pedagogical functions of the mosque community instead. Despite of all bridging social capital, which (mainline) Christian communities might have in store through their networks, mosques and other religious communities, such as ethnic churches, still appear to remain important sources of recreation and socialization. In this regard, the rural or urban shape of the environment matters as an intermediate variable since mosques in Germany are much more often to be found in urban settlements. Although our interlocutors do not frequently address the distinction between rural and urban conditions of reception, some of them also consider their location in a small city as an advantage in terms of support, orientation and belonging.
6 The Role of Religious Differences
In this section, I will focus on the organizational handling of religious and cultural differences in the process of refugee reception and its repercussions with individual perceptions of refugees. Once more, I will begin with an organizational perspective on interreligious conflicts in refugee accommodation centres and in a second step concentrate on individual experiences of religious differences, such as discrimination, alienation and conversion.
As mentioned earlier, most of the refugee accommodation centres in our sample adopted a restrictive notion of religious neutrality in response to religious pluralization. In practice, this meant that they did not allow any form of visible religious practice on their premises and referred residents who wanted to take part in religious gatherings to religious communities in the neighbourhood.39 In interviews with staff members, the theme of interreligious conflicts within accommodation centres turned out to be a complicated one. Regardless of their professional branch (administration, social worker, security, chaplaincy) all of our interlocutors dismissed the notion of group-related interreligious conflicts and pointed to personal and structural causes of conflict instead.
As far as the staff did take note of religious conflicts, they mainly referred to intrareligious quarrels concerning the correct religious conduct of life (e.g. with regard to veiling and fasting) or occasional Sunni-Shiite animosities. As a consequence (and in opposition to claims in public debates), no spatial separation of refugees was pursued based on religious lines. At the same time, however, several of our interview partners had observed conflicts, which they attributed to differences of culture, language and nationality. A recurrent pattern in this regard were assaults against refugees from Sub-Saharan Africa by asylum seekers from Northern Africa, which the staff framed as racist attacks. Other intercultural conflict lines included tensions between Afghan and Pakistani refugees and a violent conflict between a Lebanese security person and Syrian residents. In terms of organizational behaviour, these ‘ethnic’ differences translated into various forms of spatial separation depending on the local conditions: In some facilities, chambers or floors were reserved for refugees from a particular state or region, in others Afghans and Pakistanis were assigned different sanitary and kitchen areas in order to prevent conflicts.
In many cases, it was evident that the restrictive stance towards (non- Christian) religions was associated with a sense of uncertainty on behalf of the staff regarding religious diversity and, most notably, Islam. Several interlocutors articulated their hesitation to collaborate with Muslim communities, as they were afraid of religious indoctrination and radicalization of refugees or, as the director of an emergency shelter put it, not able to ‘distinguish the good Muslims from the bad’. This sceptical stance was rooted in a lack of religious literacy and a highly securitized internal discourse about Islam, which took form in training measures on Islamism and Salafism. In effect, this constellation led to a fundamental structural asymmetry in the practice of religious neutrality, namely a profound reluctance of the staff to collaborate with Muslim organizations (despite the high proportion of Muslims among the asylum seekers) and a prominent Christian presence through seasonal celebrations (such as Christmas), chaplains and welfare associations, such as Diakonie and Caritas.
In general, individual experiences of religious and cultural differences resonate with the perspectives from the staff. In our interviews with refugees, interreligious conflicts in accommodation centres were rarely mentioned explicitly. As far as our interview partners did address instances of interreligious conflict, they were related to the country of origin as in the case of a mixed (Muslim/Christian-Orthodox) couple who had to flee the Kosovo because of her interfaith marriage. At the same time, our interlocutors pointed to a number of other conflict zones mainly related to the country of origin, but also to age differences.
Other interlocutors brought up instances of structural racism within the reception system. E.g., a Turkish woman in her 30s, who was on vacation in Germany during the coup in Turkey and spontaneously decided to stay, pointed to the conflictual relationship between asylum seekers and the security personnel:
There is another tactic here, all the security were refugees, who were newcomers, like Syrian or Arab, and learned the language. Most of them had Arab roots. They were tramping down so badly. They treated you according to your clothes, if you are a person from Eritrea, Sudan, Iraq or Afghanistan and dressed poorly, they even used physical violence against you.
As the term “tactic” suggests, our interview partner embeds the theme of intercultural conflict in a wider organizational perspective of structural racism. She describes how the security staff with “Arab roots” who used to be refugees themselves were mistreating asylum seekers, particularly those who were materially deprived. In her perspective, these ethnic quarrels among immigrants are part of a perfidious strategy of deterrence vis-à-vis refugees: “The aim here is to discourage you and I think it is a psychology that makes you tire out”. Other interlocutors also took a more systemic or reflexive stance to racism among refugees. A young Syrian woman shared the following reflection on racist attitudes in her own family:
Mom is against the Syrian regime but sometimes she gives racist statements that shock you. You should not be against the regime and at the same time be a racist. But this racism is part of our environment (how do you eat from a shop owned by a black person?), but at the same time […] they are my parents, so even if I disagree with them in everything they are still my parents.
The quote illustrates the intersection of intercultural and intergenerational conflicts. The young woman complains about the “racist statements” by her mother, which are particularly directed against “black” people. She wonders, how a person can hold progressive (being “against the Syrian regime”) and reactionary attitudes at the same time.
In addition to these instances of intercultural conflict and racism, some of our interview partners reported on experiences of religious discrimination in a narrower sense. For example, many of our female interlocutors from Syria mentioned incidents of discrimination related to their hijab. In most cases, negative experiences were situated in the domains of work or education, such as the following account of an internship of a young Syrian woman in a hospital:
Ok, once I got rejected because of my hijab. But that was a minor incident. The majority were positive. It is nice that the doctors accepted me, specially that I have to communicate with the patients. Only once a patient did not accept me because of my hijab and he said that he will not enter the room if I don’t exit it. There was a shared clinic and a doctor was always coming to me and saying: ‘Burqa’. I was pretty new and I didn’t know how to go into discussions. But I was understanding everything. I was not comfortable in dealing with him.
The statement is embedded in an overall positive narrative of feeling welcome. Yet, it points to several incidents of discrimination, which are connected to her veil. First, she has not been admitted for an internship, which points to the hijab as a potential burden for structural integration. Second, she has experienced occasional, but harsh instances of rejection by patients and colleagues, which points to the hijab as a potential burden for social integration. It is noteworthy that these perceptions of discrimination related to the veil are not only reported by the victims, but also by women who decided not to wear a hijab. In this regard, a 35-year-old woman from Syria noted: “I do not wear a veil and this really made it easier. I realized that the veiled women I know suffer much more”. Others reflected on the German rejection of the hijab as part of a wider resentment against the “Arab” culture: “A lot of Germans think that Arabs are not developed and are far behind of any development. Maybe if I was Christian and did not wear the hijab, things could be easier and better for me”. Her reaction, however, is not to drop the veil, but to engage in interreligious dialogue: “So while having lunch with a German woman, she started asking me why do I wear the headscarf? I explained to her that this is part of my religion beliefs and also my identity and personality”.
On the other hand, and in line with some of the meso-level observations of intrareligious conflict, I found occasional instances of religious admonition. A Syrian woman of 49 years and mother of two grown-up sons shared the following story about religious education in the German diaspora:
Once in the camp, it was a Sunday in the month of Ramadan, a kid who was in grade 7 was drinking water. I asked him why he was not fasting and that he could try because it is a weekend. He said he does not like fasting. I asked him if he likes to go to heaven or to hell. He asked me what the difference is. I was shocked. Imagine, an Arabic Muslim boy, even if only on the identity card, does not know the difference. I explained for him. He speaks perfect German and goes to all the trips of the school but he does not anything about his background. He does not even know how to write in Arabic.
I provide the statement in full length in order to convey its various layers of meaning. The main narrative is our interlocutor admonishing an adolescent boy to keep the fast, an instance which was also reported by some of the staff of accommodation centres. It culminates in her realization that “an Arab Muslim boy” does not know the soteriological foundations of his faith. In a wider frame, this instance illustrates how religious identities are negotiated in an overarching discourse of assimilation and preserving the culture of the homeland.40
Finally, another instance of individual religious transformation and intensification is conversion. Despite of media reports about mass baptisms of Iranian refugees, the sample only includes one instance of conversion. After the death of her fiancé, an Iranian woman in her 30s decided to leave Iran with false documents. She was arrested at the airport of Montenegro and took a dangerous journey through the Balkans until she could set foot to the EU in Croatia. In a camp in Zagreb, she had an experience which led her to convert:
In Croatia I was really running on empty and did not want to live any more. […] I had a roommate who came from the Eastern part of Iran and gave me the holy book [Bible] which I still possess. She said: ‘read it. It will calm you down’. I did not know anything about this religion, only that you believe in Jesus Christ. At the beginning, I did not think that it would thrill me as much, but I just wanted to keep on reading and I liked it.
In the subsequent course of the interview, our interview partner identifies many fortunate incidents as acts of divine providence and, indeed, receives concrete support by a Christian congregation in Germany (see above). She seeks to allay any doubts about the sincere nature of her conversion and appears to be a regular and active church attendant. At the same time, she reports feeling lonely and miserable.
All in all, the vignettes in this section indicate that religious differences rarely lead to group-related conflicts among refugees. At the same time, they point to the ongoing salience of religion as a personal and collective identity marker which may be associated with experiences of faith-based hospitality – or discrimination. In the following section, I will briefly discuss the repercussions of these findings for wider debates on the “refugee crisis” as an opportunity structure for faith-based organizations.
7 Conclusion
In this article, I explored the role of FBO s and religious differences in the reception and early integration of refugees in Germany between 2011 and 2018. Based on interviews with the staff of refugee accommodation centres and refugees from various countries of origin, I aimed at a synergetic analysis of the organizational and individual level of faith-based refugee support in two dimensions: measures and schemes of support and the role of religious and cultural differences.
With regard to faith-based schemes and measures of support, I found peculiar differences between religious communities: Representatives from the Christian mainline churches emphasized the division of labour between confessional welfare associations and their own role of chaplaincy. Despite the clear Christian profile of these efforts, they were explicitly open to (and requested by) non-Christian refugees. In contrast, Muslim and Yezidi organizations provided basic measures of situational support for refugees from their own community. Reasons for this narrower scope of refugee aid were a lack of resources and full-time staff as well as reservations of accommodation centres to collaborate with local mosques. Based on the analysis of individual experiences I identified three types of faith-based refugee support, namely 1) concrete personal assistance in terms of economic (money) or cultural capital (skills, time), 2) access to religious networks in terms of bridging social capital, be it situational, episodic or through long-term support relationships and 3) (ethnic) religious communities as spaces of personal recreation and conviviality.
On a more general note, the findings suggest that faith-based refugee support was often marked by an inherently relational and personal approach. Instead of isolated and commodified instances of assistance, refugees enter a personal relationship with their supporters, which may involve mutual obligations. Some of our interlocutors referred to a sense of gratitude or indebtedness vis-à-vis the “host society” as a whole or towards specific supporters. Whereas proponents of the relational approach of religious care have argued for its effectiveness and sustainability,41 it has been criticized by others to neglect the structural conditions of indigence or compromise the freedom of speech of employees and beneficiaries.42 While earlier studies have pointed to the missionary impetus of some religious communities in the domain of refugee aid,43 neither incidents of proselytization nor of conversion feature prominently in our data.
With regard to the role of religious and cultural differences in the process of accommodation and early integration of refugees the findings underline that the staff of refugee accommodation centres has adopted a restrictive understanding of religious neutrality, which is associated with the prohibition of public and visible religious practice on the premises of the centres. The interpretation of religious freedom as being “free from” religion is clearly at odds with the general benevolent model to religious neutrality inherent in the German system of religious corporatism. As a matter of fact, this restrictive approach purports a profound asymmetry between different religious actors since Christian presence (through chaplaincy, welfare associations and seasonal celebrations) is widely considered as part of the ‘tradition’ of refugee reception whereas Muslim presence is perceived as a potential threat and source of interreligious conflicts.
In terms of conflict, both the staff and refugees themselves pointed to the intersectional nature of personal and group-related tensions. There were several instances in the data where ‘religious’ and ‘cultural’ or ‘national’ and ‘generational’ differences were blended and could not be disentangled easily. As far as the organizational domain was concerned, the staff in our sample denied group-related religious conflicts and therefore dismissed the idea of spatial separation along religious lines whereas separation based on ‘culture’, ‘nationality’ or ‘language’ was quite common. The analysis of individual experiences underlined the prevalence of intrareligious quarrels about the ‘correct’ religious conduct of life which were embedded in discourses of maintaining one’s cultural identity under diaspora conditions. At the same time, our interviews with refugees revealed numerous instances of racism, both internal (e.g. Northern African vs. Sub-Saharan African, ‘Arab’ vs. Turkish), external (resentments of the local population) and structural (e.g. being denied access to an internship because of the hijab).
The main research gap which I intended to work on in this article was to bring the perspective of refugees on faith-based service provision and the role of religious differences to the fore. While refugees conceive of faith-based organization as an important source of support during the phase of reception, some of them are also sceptical of the patriarchal nature of faith-based support measures. With regard to the role of religious differences, the refugees in our sample by and large confirm the perspective of the staff that group-related interreligious conflicts are an exception. At the same time, they allude to conflict lines (e.g. between Shiite and Sunni Muslims) that are not even visible to the staff, which points to the significance for a basic religious literacy of social workers, security staff and administrators in the domain of refugee reception. While our data offers preliminary insights on how refugees experience religious differences in faith-based support and accommodation centres, further research is needed to explore how their religious life develops and transforms as they move out of the early stages of reception and establish themselves.
Finally, what lesson can be learned from the case of refugee accommodation for wider debates about the comeback of religion in the crisis of late modern welfare states? First of all, religious actors clearly filled a gap of public welfare during the ‘emergency phase’ of refugee immigration in 2015 and 2016. In line with earlier observations of a return of FBO s in post-secular cities, their public involvement was more than welcome, so much so, that some religious umbrella associations felt the need to emphasize that support for refugees still was a genuine responsibility of the state. At the same time, however, the increase of religious diversity in general and the securitization of Islam in particular have led to restrictions of the public presence of religion within refugee accommodation centres. In opposition to the German legal model of benevolent religious neutrality, this restrictive approach prevents a level playing field between religious communities as it exacerbates Muslim support while redefining Christianity as a (non-religious) matter of folklore and tradition.
Biography
Prof. Dr. Alexander-Kenneth Nagel is Professor for the Social Scientific Study of Religion at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Göttingen, Germany. His research interests include Migration and religious pluralization, interreligious and intercultural opening of public institutions and apocalypticism in modern societies. He has published widely on the handling of religious diversity in German refugee accommodation centres and patterns of religious change among refugees.
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I am grateful to Veronika Rückamp, Thorsten Wettich and Mehmet Kalender for conducting the interviews and for the inspiring exchange.
The project was funded under a grant from the European Commission between 2017 and 2020 (grant agreement 770564). An overview of results can be found in Barthoma/Cetrez, RESPONDing to Migration.
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