What Shapes Attitudes Toward Homosexuality among European Muslims? The Role of Religiosity and Destination Hostility

Abstract

Muslim migrants and their descendants in Western Europe have consistently been shown to hold more negative attitudes toward homosexuality, the more religious they are. In this article, we go beyond this mono-dimensional view of religiosity and develop a theoretical framework that combines (a) the role of different dimensions of religiosity in anchoring cultural attitudes and (b) the potential impact of destination hostility and discrimination on the retention of cultural attitudes toward homosexuality among Muslim migrants in Western Europe. For the analysis, we use eight rounds of the European Social Survey, enriched with country-level data. Findings indicate that Muslim migrants’ mosque attendance, as a dimension of religiosity, has the negative effect that was expected. Particularly, Muslims who grew up in Western Europe are negative about homosexuality if they attended mosque regularly, whereas among first-generation Muslim migrants, origin-country norms are a strong predictor of attitudes toward homosexuality. In addition, we find that perceived group discrimination drives the maintenance of negative attitudes toward homosexuality, especially among mosque attendees. These results imply that the development of more liberal attitudes among European Muslims is held back by a combination of socialization in conservative religious communities and hostility from host-country populations.

The impact of anti-Muslim hostilities on how Muslims connect their religiosity to support for gender equality in Western Europe

“…However, these processes have to be disentangled from another societal trend that prominent qualitative scholars have noted has happened simultaneously: the emergence of a more individualized, postmodern "European Islam" over time (Duderija, 2007b;Kaya, 2010;Cesari, 2014). If European Islam has gained ground, Muslims should have increasingly decoupled their religiosity from gender values over the years, even in the face of growing hostilities (Alba, 2005;Güngör et al, 2013;Glas, 2021;Röder and Spierings, 2022). Ultimately, this study sheds further light on the conditions under which Islamic religiosity is a barrier to emancipatory values-and when it can be a bridge (Foner and Alba, 2008).…”

“…The authoritative status of imams makes questioning their conservative religious views difficult and believing what is shared in mosques more likely, catalyzing internalizations (Al-Hibri, 1982;Glas et al, 2019). Second, among Muslim minorities, frequent mosque attendance implies stronger integration into the conservative part of Muslim communities; because norms converge in groups via social pressures and sanctions, this would further hamper support for gender equality (Guveli et al, 2016;Beller et al, 2021;Röder and Spierings, 2022). This leads us to our general hypothesis that more frequent mosque attendance reduces support for public-sphere gender equality (hypothesis 1a).…”

“…Because our theorization is already complex and as little work has been done on how these climates affect minorities' gender values at all (cf. Glas, 2022a;Röder and Spierings, 2022), we do not focus theoretically on how varying manifestations of hostility might have different effects. We instead empirically study a range of hostilities (formal and informal ones enacted by politics, judiciary, and the public, although mostly focused on conscious exclusions) and assess whether and how their effects differ empirically.…”

“…few have turned their attention to whether such hostilities also engender backlashes among Muslim citizens themselves (cf. Glas, 2022a;Röder and Spierings, 2022). How do Muslims connect their religion to women's emancipation in hostile contexts that tell them Islam necessarily opposes gender equality?…”

“…Similarly, an emerging strand of quantitative work has shown that varying dimensions of Islamic religiosity can shape gender values in different and context-dependent ways (Ginges et al, 2009;Glas et al, 2019;Beller et al, 2021;Glas and Spierings, 2021). Some conditions allow Muslim migrants to "decouple" religiosity from gender equality, i.e., combine the two (Van Klingeren and Spierings, 2020;Glas, 2022b;Röder and Spierings, 2022), whereas other circumstances spur reactionary religiosity (Wimmer and Soehl, 2014;Maliepaard and Alba, 2016). This all implies that the ways Islamic religiosities shape support for public-sphere gender equality are (a) multidimensional and (b) conditional.…”