Religion and migration

Religious communities face challenges as new generations grow up, as the social needs of the children of immigrants are often different from those of their parents. Young people are often more proficient in the majority language than in that of their parents, and their expectations and understanding of the role of religion and community may differ significantly.

Religions also adapt and change. Some communities are built from scratch without the support of religious experts. The local community supports them financially, paying rent and, where possible, for a religious specialist. Theological innovations may be needed to address questions that were not previously considered. National legislation may require practices that are unfamiliar or even alien to the tradition. Some values may need to be rethought and reformulated. How should communities deal with multifaith partnerships or the social problems faced by their members?

A common observation is that in Western countries, migrant religious associations often begin to resemble Christian churches in the types of activities they offer and in their understanding of the roles and tasks of religious specialists. Even migrants who belong to already established religious organisations often note differences in practice and traditions, if not in creed.

This session welcomes papers discussing the interconnections between religion, migration, and migrant settlement in a new society. We especially welcome papers that examine how religious associations can provide spaces of trust and belonging, while also recognising that they may serve as sites of social control and potentially harmful practices for some of their members.

The presentation is based on an article that examines how social workers construct and justify their professional role and expertise in encounters with religious and cultural diversity, particularly in relation to religious communities. While religiously sensitive practice and religious literacy have received growing international and Finnish attention, less is known about how social workers themselves linguistically negotiate their professional positioning when religious community life becomes salient in client work. The study asks: how is social work’s role and expertise justified, and how does it appear in the context of religious and cultural diversity and community?

The article combines complexity thinking with Faircloughian discourse analysis. Complexity thinking—drawing on concepts such as interconnectedness, non-linearity, and emergence—provides a framework for treating the tensions and contradictions in the data as genuine features of the phenomenon rather than analytical shortcomings, while discourse analysis makes visible how this complexity is linguistically constructed and negotiated. The data consist of written reflective assignments (147 transcribed pages) produced by 18 social
workers during a 2023–2025 specialization course on multicultural and transnational social work, in which practitioners reflected on culturally, linguistically, and religiously diverse client situations.

The analysis identifies nine interconnected discourses through which social workers frame their relationship to religion and religious community, including discourses of privacy, religious neutrality, religious literacy as expertise, community as resource versus community as risk and control, reflexivity regarding professional positioning, and universal human rights. These discourses do not resolve into a single coherent account; rather, tensions—especially between privacy and communality, and between community as resource and as risk—coexist and are activated differently depending on situation. The article argues that professional expertise in this domain is inherently situational and negotiated rather than something that can be exhaustively defined through training alone, and outlines implications for developing community-oriented social work practice.

This study examines how Finnish-African families transmit, adapt, and practice religious beliefs in everyday and how these processes shape identity, values, belonging, and intergenerational relations. The study explores especially how African fathers negotiate religious socialization with their children amid Finnish institutional norms (schooling, welfare, child protection etc.), peer cultures, and transnational ties to countries of origin. The study draws from an original data set of 27 in-depth interviews and observations with Finnish-African couples (mostly at/in their homes) who have all become parents (including 15 single parents) and are largely based in Finland.

Drawing on family practices perspective, the study emphasizes the shift from ‘being’ a family to ‘doing’ family things and to an understanding of family as sets of practices. Family practices therefore comes with a representation of an unprecedented way of thinking beyond, not only because it highlights the routine, everyday and taken-for-granted doing of family, but also because of a renewed radical shift away from ‘family’ as a structure to understanding families as sets of practices which take on particular meanings, associated with family, at a given time. The study
advances scholarship of family sociology and migration by foregrounding religion as a lived, relational practice rather than only a doctrinal system – attending to rituals, moral instructions, language use, limited media consumption etc. By centering Finnish-African families, the study adds granularity to how religious values are embedded in the parents’ family practices i.e., how Christianity is re-made in a Nordic country (in the Nordic space). As well as how it is used as a framework for living as it pertains to the upbringing of children, guiding their moral choices, shaping, and framing daily family activities and encounters, including their online activities.
Keywords: Family practices, sub-Saharan Africans, religion, belonging, and close reading.

How do migrants build and sustain trust in contexts marked by precarity, exclusion, and mobility? In what ways do Pentecostal Christian practices shape moral economies of trust, belonging, and aspirations of migrants? And how does gender mediate the production, performance, and fracture of trust in migrant religious communities? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Zimbabwean Pentecostal migrants in Johannesburg, this paper conceptualises
trust as a dynamic, relational, and contested process embedded in everyday life. Migrants confront xenophobia, legal uncertainty, and labour market marginalisation, conditions that erode trust in state institutions while necessitating alternative trust formations grounded in faith communities, kinship, and transnational networks.

Pentecostal Christian Churches (PCCs) emerge as critical infrastructures for the production and regulation of trust. Ritual practices such as prayer, prophecy, testimony, deliverance, and tithing cultivate affective bonds and moral accountability while offering a framework for rendering uncertainty meaningful. Testimonies and prophetic declarations circulate shared imaginaries of breakthrough and divine favour, while practices of giving and sacrificial commitment materialise trust in spiritual reciprocity. Yet these practices also discipline believers, embedding
expectations of respectability, prosperity, and moral conformity. Gender plays a central role in shaping these dynamics. Women often sustain relational trust through care work, prayer networks, and emotional labour, yet remain subject to intensified moral scrutiny, particularly through gossip and expectations of sexual propriety. Men, by contrast, are often evaluated through their ability to perform economic success and spiritual authority, making trust contingent on visible markers of provision and leadership. These gendered dynamics reveal how trust is
unevenly distributed, negotiated, and contested within Pentecostal sociality. Through the lens of “hope as coping,” the paper shows how trust simultaneously enables resilience and obscures structural inequality. It ultimately argues that “good relations” in mobile futures are precarious achievements, forged through gendered, moral, and affective labour in conditions of ongoing uncertainty.