Finding Belonging, Finding Agency: Unaccompanied Refugee Minors Converting to Christianity in the Church of Sweden

Abstract

The arrival 44,617 unaccompanied refugee minors (URM) to Sweden between 2014 and 2016 was met by a large number of civil society volunteers responding to their needs and assisting them in the early stages of their asylum processes, among them the Church of Sweden (CoS). What was not expected was that thousands of these Muslim-background young people would decide to convert to Christianity. Drawing on data collected during fieldwork at two CoS congregations, this article looks at conversion through the lens of two themes, conversion as belonging and conversion as agency, and discusses whether discourses which couple conversion with narratives about acquiring asylum capital are adequate to the complexity of this phenomenon.