Religieuze participatie en geloof van immigranten in Nederland:Nieuwe toetsingen van oude theorieën

Religious participation and belief among immigrants in the Netherlands: new tests of old theories. Surprisingly little research has been done on religious participation and belief among immigrants in the Netherlands. In this paper, we use well-known theories within the sociology of religion and migration studies to derive hypotheses on immigrants’ religion. We make use of the SPVA-1998, a specific immigration survey that contains information on 3.950 first generation immigrants from Turkey, Morocco, Surinam, and the Dutch Antilles. Our analyses show that religious participation and belief increases with age at migration, period of residence, and wishes to return. We also found important effects of country of origin, Dutch language proficiency, the presence of immigrants in the neighbourhood, gender and family-composition. The implications of these and other findings for theories in the sociology of religion and migration studies are discussed