The MIGRANTCHRISTIANITY project involved comparative qualitative fieldwork (life histories, semi-structured interviews, observations, and documentary data).
The main findings of the MIGRANTCHRISTIANITY project are summarised below:
• international migration questions dominant understandings and practices of Protestantism, and more broadly, Christianity, in Europe, pushing historical native churches to come to terms with Eurocentric/racialising implicit assumptions underpinning their material and symbolic organisation;
• religious participation is empowering in different ways: migrant believers use religion and religious networks to negotiate settlement in immigration contexts and to resist racialisation; but they also engage in transnational religious (as well as socio-economic and political) practices and networks; migrants do not simply reproduce identities and practices from their churches in the home countries, but renegotiate them, forging new meanings and experiences of Protestantism in the immigration context or in the diaspora;
• age/generation significantly shapes church participation among migrants and their attitude vis-à-vis their inclusion into established native churches;
• Protestant migrants use religion to negotiate the transnational families they live in and the challenges which these raise in terms of gender norms and of changing practices and understandings of femininity/masculinity, motherhood/fatherhood;
• Ecuadorian and Ghanaian migrants’ have distinctive experiences of religion influenced by their specific socio-economic conditions. While the latter are more established, the former tend to have an unstable migration status and precarious jobs ; further, Ghanaians are the target of stronger and more overt discrimination while Ecuadorians are perceived as ‘culturally closer’ to Europeans;
• in Italy and Spain, the mainline Protestant communities are challenged by the spectacular expansion of the Evangelical and Pentecostal ‘reverse mission’ coming from the Global South. As the native membership is shrinking, immigration provides an opportunity for membership growth. However the relationships between the native mainline Protestant leaderships and migrant believers are fraught with suspicion and fear that the migrants’ ‘unorthodox’ rituals (for instance, Evangelical/Pentecostal practices such as healing practices and speaking in tongues) might undermine the public legitimacy of a minority faith such as Italian/Spanish Protestantism. In addition to expressing specific needs in terms of liturgy, the migrant believers hold theological positions which often differ from those of mainline Italian/Spanish Protestants.
The MIGRANTCHRISTIANITY project achieved a series of training objectives:
• the fellow expanded her expertise to a new field of study - religion;
• she developed her skills in outreach communication;
• she consolidated her management skills;
• she acquired new language skills (Spanish), which she used for the purpose of fieldwork and desk-based research.
• she further developed her skills in writing large funding applications
The MIGRANTCHRISTIANITY project’s findings were disseminated through a total of 23 outputs targeting both academic and non-academic users.
