Acculturation, decoupling, or both? Migration’s impact on the linkage between religiosity and gender equality attitudes

Abstract

Turkish migrants are one of the largest minority groups within Europe, the majority of which is Muslim. Radical right politicians stress the threat of Islam for what they consider European culture. Yet we know that migrant communities can adapt to the destination society culturally, albeit not always and in complex ways. This study aims advance our understand of this complex matter, as it analyses how such attitudinal developments take place and in what way religion plays a role. Through acculturation processes, where Muslim migrants become more secular and consequently more open to gender equal norms, and/or through decoupling, where migration leads to weaker connections between religious identity and patriarchal gender norms. With the use of the 2000Families data on Turkish Muslim European-migrants and Turkish-Muslim stayers, we find that the connection between religiosity and gender equality attitudes is gender-dependent. Across the board findings indicate limited support for both mechanisms. However, we do cautiously conclude that we find both acculturation and decoupling processes among migrant men with regard to individual religiosity, while we find decoupling between communal religiosity and gender-equality attitudes in migrant women. This suggests migrants undergo a range of acculturation processes simultaneously, but that the linkages for men and women differ between these dimensions.