Ethnic, Racial and Religious Inequalities: The Perils of Subjectivity

231 Pages·2011·1.719 MB·English

by  Marie Macey, Alan Carling (auth.)

Migration, Minorities and Citizenship
General Editors: Zig Layton-Henry, Professor of Politics, University of Warwick; and
Danièle Joly, Professor, Director, Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, University
of Warwick
Titles include:
Rutvica Andrijasevic
MIGRATION, AGENCY AND CITIZENSHIP IN SEX TRAFFICKING
Muhammad Anwar, Patrick Roach and Ranjit Sondhi (editors)
FROM LEGISLATION TO INTEGRATION?
Race Relations in Britain
James A. Beckford, Danièle Joly and Farhad Khosrokhavar
MUSLIMS IN PRISON
Challenge and Change in Britain and France
Gideon Calder, Phillip Cole, Jonathan Seglow
CITIZENSHIP ACQUISITION AND NATIONAL BELONGING
Migration, Membership and the Liberal Democratic State
Thomas Faist and Andreas Ette (editors)
THE EUROPEANIZATION OF NATIONAL POLICIES AND POLITICS OF
IMMIGRATION
Between Autonomy and the European Union
Thomas Faist and Peter Kivisto (editors)
DUAL CITIZENSHIP IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
From Unitary to Multiple Citizenship
Adrian Favell
PHILOSOPHIES OF INTEGRATION
Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain
Martin Geiger and Antoine Pécoud (editors)
THE POLITICS OF INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION MANAGEMENT
Agata Górny and Paulo Ruspini (editors)
MIGRATION IN THE NEW EUROPE
East-West Revisited
James Hampshire
CITIZENSHIP AND BELONGING
Immigration and the Politics of Democratic Governance in Postwar Britain
John R. Hinnells (editor)
RELIGIOUS RECONSTRUCTION IN THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORAS
From One Generation to Another
Ayhan Kaya
ISLAM, MIGRATION AND INTEGRATION
The Age of Securitization
Zig Layton-Henry and Czarina Wilpert (editors)
CHALLENGING RACISM IN BRITAIN AND GERMANY
Marie Macey and Alan H. Carling
ETHNIC, RACIAL AND RELIGIOUS INEQUALITIES
The Perils of Subjectivity
Georg Menz and Alexander Caviedes (editors)
LABOUR MIGRATION IN EUROPE
Huub Dijstelbloem and Albert Meijer (editors)
MIGRATION AND THE NEW TECHNOLOGICAL BORDERS IN EUROPE
Jørgen S. Nielsen
TOWARDS A EUROPEAN ISLAM
Pontus Odmalm
MIGRATION POLICIES AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION
Inclusion or Intrusion in Western Europe?
Prodromos Panayiotopoulos
ETHNICITY, MIGRATION AND ENTERPRISE
Aspasia Papadopoulou-Kourkoula
TRANSIT MIGRATION
The Missing Link Between Emigration and Settlement
Jan Rath (editor)
IMMIGRANT BUSINESSES
The Economic, Political and Social Environment
Carl-Ulrik Schierup (editor)
SCRAMBLE FOR THE BALKANS
Nationalism, Globalism and the Political Economy of Reconstruction
Vicki Squire
THE EXCLUSIONARY POLITICS OF ASYLUM
Maarten Vink
LIMITS OF EUROPEAN CITIZENSHIP
European Integration and Domestic Immigration Policies
Östen Wahlbeck
KURDISH DIASPORAS
A Comparative Study of Kurdish Refugee Communities
Lucy Williams
GLOBAL MARRIAGE
Cross-Border Marriage Migration in Global Context
Migration, Minorities and Citizenship
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Ethnic, Racial and
Religious Inequalities
The Perils of Subjectivity
Marie Macey
University of Bradford, UK
and
Alan Carling
University of Bradford, UK
Palgrave
macmillan
© Marie Macey and Alan Carling 2011
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-24763-5
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Contents
Preface viii
Acknowledgements xii
1 Landscapes of Religion or Belief 1
2 Religion and Culture Make a Difference 27
3 Social Injustices of Religion or Belief 57
4 The Trouble with Multiculturalism 90
5 The Problem with Religion 118
6 Towards Equality of Religion or Belief 147
Statistical Appendix 160
Notes 165
References 166
Index 199
vii
Preface
Migration, diversity and inequality
The root of social diversity in most Western European countries lies in
their recruitment of labour from colonies and former colonies to fill
gaps in the labour market following the Second World War (WWII). The
issue is not one of scale, for migration over this period pales into insig-
nificance relative to that of previous eras (Casanova, 2007). It is, rather,
a question of the extent of difference in both cultural and religious
terms between the post-war settlers and the European societies that
they have made home.
It is also a matter of inequality – which is traceable to the use of
labour from outside Europe to do the jobs that Europeans were no longer
willing to do. This meant that settlers – whether migrant workers (as in
Germany) or citizens (as in Britain) – were usually located at the bottom
end of the labour market. This disadvantaged position was exacerbated
by widespread (institutionalised) racism which interacted with socio-
economic positioning to establish a pattern of inequality that has gen-
erally remained stubbornly resistant to change to the present day.
Secularisation and the turn to religion
For most of the post-WWII incomers, religion was, and is, an important
part of identity. But for large numbers of the natives of Western European
societies, religious observance has been in steady decline. The process
of secularisation, that is, is clearly observable – at least in terms of prac-
tice, if not self-identification through, for example, Census results in
Britain. And whilst there is considerable variation by country, Western
Europe can be regarded as secular by any objective measure (Norris and
Inglehart, 2007).
Notwithstanding this, in recent years there has been the widespread
assertion of a global resurgence in religion such as to predict the death of
secularisation (Kepel, 1994; Esposito et al., 2002; Berger, 2007). Certainly,
there has been a ‘turn towards religion’ in public and official discourse,
which is reflected in many areas of debate, policy and legislation.
At one level, these trends are evidently contradictory. On the one
hand, there has been a continued movement of secularisation, and of
viii
Preface ix
further disengagement from organised (or institutionalised) religion
within the state and civil society. On the other hand, there has been a
renewed recognition of the importance of religion as a focus of personal
identity, and – for good or ill – as a source of social action, extending at
the extreme to terrorism (Awan, 2007).
But the renewed focus on religion by many states, including, but not
only, Western European ones, predates by some margin the recent (ab)use
of religion to justify violence. In Britain it was linked to growing concern
about ethno-religious inequality and social exclusion and the develop-
ment of broader conceptions of human rights. It was also linked to chang-
ing demands at the grassroots level and the shift in identity politics from
a focus on racial equality to one on religious equality (Malik, 2009).
Whatever the reasons, or combination of reasons, there seems,
nonetheless, to be a common concern among Western democratic
states to address the ‘question of religion’ in new ways against the back-
drop of a widely shared conviction that some of the older ways are inad-
equate to the new circumstances (Sané, 2007). In particular, the
post-Enlightenment location of religion in the private sphere is now
challenged by a multicultural ideology that demands its inclusion in
the public arena. Indeed, to the extent that government policies, includ-
ing legislation, now place religion on an equal footing with other equal-
ity issues (of race, gender, sexuality, disability and age), religion is
already firmly located in the public arena. And this has far-reaching
implications for the operation of secular, liberal democratic states.
The purpose of this book
The purpose of this book is to explore some of the issues raised by this
new landscape of religion in its international context, with special ref-
erence to the experience of Britain. We are interested in both sides of
the equation – what changes have been taking place in the religious
allegiances or practices of the population ‘on the ground’, and what
policies have been adopted to deal with these new developments. And
underpinning this, to ask about the role of religion in relation to minor-
ity ethnic inequality.
Our research has brought home to us an important problem in the
sphere of ethnicity and religion. This is in addition to the inherent dif-
ficulty of separating religion and ethnicity in research terms to estab-
lish, for instance, whether discrimination is based on religion or
ethnicity, or, indeed on race in the sense of physical differences. This is
the extent of the discrepancy that exists between what is believed to be
x Preface
the case and what is actually the case about the social correlates of reli-
gious faith.
This discrepancy applies not just to incidental details of the broad
picture, but to such key features as the real extent of religious observ-
ance and the incidence of injustice suffered by religious minorities. And
it applies not just to the beliefs entertained by some religious or cam-
paigning groups, but to those of many academics and politicians, as well
as the general public. The relevance of this finding is that where a dis-
crepancy exists between a social phenomenon and the beliefs held about
it by influential social actors, policy can go awry. For example, legisla-
tion may be passed to address social problems which are assumed by
policy-makers to loom much larger than they actually do. And generally
speaking, it seems to us to be preferable to base policy and practice on
the facts of the matter (insofar as these are available), rather than on
unfounded presuppositions. This is because, as Miles notes: ‘As has been
said on countless occasions concerning the unity of theory and practice,
if the analysis is wrong, then it is likely that the political strategy will not
achieve the intended objectives’ (1989: 5). Miles’ cautionary note applies
directly to one of the key issues addressed in this book, that is, the con-
cern to enhance equality between minorities and majorities.
But another of our key concerns in this book is to balance investiga-
tion of the harms that may be done to minority ethnic groups on the
basis of religion with the question of the harms that both institution-
alised religion and its cultural interpretations may inflict on others.
These include both believers (of the same and different faiths) and non-
believers, and in the book we have concentrated particularly on women
and non-heterosexuals. This is not to suggest that these are the only
areas of concern within a wider focus on equalities, but it is to propose
that in both cases, religion plays a powerful role in legitimising dis-
crimination against them. And this raises two fundamental questions
in relation to the (re)introduction of religion into the public sphere. The
first concerns the conflict between the widespread religious condemna-
tion of homosexuality and legislation designed to protect the rights of
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transexual (LGBT) individuals. The second
concerns the potential impact on women of the erosion of the ‘secular
spaces’ which Patel and Siddiqui (2010) claim are an essential pre-
condition of women’s struggle for freedom in the personal and public
spheres (a point made by Sahgal as early as 1992).
Moreover, the potential effects of these issues are not restricted to
minorities within either (or both) majorities or minorities but have
implications for wider society at a number of different levels. For example,