Section Days abstract book 2010.indd - RUB Research School ...

CROSSCUTTING RELIGION
A SURVEY OF RELIGIOUS INTERGROUP RELATIONS
IN DORTMUND
Nelly C. Joppich
Fakultät für Sozialwissenschaft, Nachwuchsforschergruppe Religion vernetzt; Ruhr-
Universität Bochum, 44780 Bochum, Germany
e-mail: nelly.joppich@rub.de
Mainly due to massive immigration, The Ruhr region experiences vital religious pluralism
nowadays. This pluralism has not yet been empirically accounted for in science. Rather, an
exclusive focus on Islam and Christianity as culturally and normatively incompatible
antidotes promotes the perception of a bright and in various aspects of society salient religious
boundary which divides „us“ – the democratic German civil society – from „them“ – the
immigrated strangers who threaten the socio-cultural cohesion of society, the political system
and the established legal order. This does not only obscure the diversity of the religious field
in Germany but also the difference between ascribed and actual social boundaries based on
religion.
Having become salient in the context of immigration, religious boundaries are always being
discussed in combination with integration in Germany. The political awareness of the
relevance of organizations for the integration of people with an immigrant background
recently resulted in an expansion in the research on migrant organizations. 1 But this research
is still rare and has been limited to the political sphere. It is composed of studies about the
relations between migrant organizations and political or state institutions and on the role of
migrant organizations in the general development of migrants’ political integration in
Germany.
Based on the assumption that in a religiously plural society, interreligious cooperation has to
be understood as an expression of integration to the host society, my Ph.D. project tests for
the following hypotheses: 1. The public focus on the conflict between Islam and Christianity
leads to a high integration pressure on these two groups. 2. In order to meet these demands for
integration, Muslim and Christian organizations increase cooperation with each other and
consequently promote integration. 3. Not being addressed by the public and governmental
pressure, other religious groups are excluded from these intensified integration efforts. 4.
These other religious groups cooperate with each other in order to gain more societal
influence. 5. Interreligious clusters of cooperation between the two quantitatively dominant
religious groups on the one hand and smaller religious groups on the other occur.
The theoretical framework for testing these hypotheses is a combination of core concepts
from relational sociology and the study of social boundaries. More Explicitly, I study the
1
Pries, Ludger, und Zeynep Sezgin, hrsg. 2010. Jenseits von ‚Identität oder Integration'. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag
für Sozialwissenschaften.