Accessibility of Religious Resources and Perceived Discrimination of Muslims

• In Event: Religion and the Political Incorporation of Minority Groups

Abstract

Immigrants' access to religious resources such as places of worship, religious clothing stores, or bookshops varies between countries, cities, and neighbourhoods. It is unclear, however, whether the availability of such religious resources in one’s affinity is associated with positive attitudes among immigrants such as decreased grievances or lower levels of perceived discrimination. In this pre-registered study, we examine the effect of accessibility of religious resources on perceived group discrimination (PD) among Muslim immigrants in Western Europe, focusing on a case study of London. We focus on perceived discrimination as there is strong evidence showing that PD of minority-religion immigrants affects key socio-political attitudes concerning adaptation and integration into receiving societies such as trust in institutions, democratic attitudes, and political participation.
To test our hypotheses, we use data from an original survey carried out in London and merge this data with data on physical religious resources in the respondents’ locality that we collected and coded using Google Maps and other sources.

Our study has two goals. First, it aims to establish whether accessibility to religious resources in one’s locality is associated with immigrants’ perceived discrimination. We also develop a number of hypotheses about the micro-level mechanisms underlying the relationship between these two variables and provide an empirical test of these hypotheses. First, based on the discursive opportunity structures theory, we expect religious in-group resources to signify to immigrants that host society is welcoming towards them, increasing trust towards religious out-group and perceived efficacy of the in-group, thereby decreasing PD. Alternatively, religious resources approaches would predict that access to religious spaces provides a sense of physical and psychological safety in one’s neighbourhood, which increases a sense of security and provides social embeddedness that decreases PD. In addition, some approaches view religion as facilitator for integration: According to these perspectives, religious resources may facilitate integration of immigrants into host society by increasing feeling of belonging, thus reducing PD.

We use data from an original survey carried out in London. Data was collected in 2022 from immigrants of Asian/Muslim background residing in different areas in London. We also collected data on the presence of religious resources such as places of prayer, religious clothing and food stores, bookshops etc. by conducting an API keyword search (employing terms such as mosque, masjid, madrassah, Islamic, Muslim, halal, etc.) on Google Maps. We then conduct regression and mediation analyses to provide empirical tests of our hypotheses.

Our research has implications not only for understanding the role of religious resources in immigrant acculturation and integration but also for informing urban and local policies pertaining to the integration of religious groups.

Authors

• Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• Gizem Arikan, Trinity College Dublin