Living in the Borderland - Young Migrant Converts in the Church of Sweden
Ph.D. Thesis by Jonathan J. Morgan
Centre for Theology and Religious Studies, Lund University, Sweden
The dissertation challenges the view that conversion of asylum seekers is merely a strategy to boost asylum chances. Also, it shows that the Swedish migration agency’s working definition of religion falls short of the importance of the social aspect of belonging.
Abstract
From 2014 to 2016, 44,617 unaccompanied refugee minors (URMs) arrived in Sweden and sought asylum. The Church of Sweden has received hundreds of these young people seeking to join the church and be baptised as Christians. Conversion to Christianity among asylum seekers in Europe is a well-documented phenomenon that is often dismissed as merely a strategy to boost asylum chances. This dissertation challenges such views, revealing the intricate reality behind these conversions.
Grounded in three years of ethnographic fieldwork, and drawing on participant observation and first-hand narrative accounts, this study follows a Bible study group in the Church of Sweden made up predominantly of URM-background Hazaras from Afghanistan. The study draws on Wenger’s situated learning theory and Honneth’s recognition framework to provide a conception of religious conversion that is highly contextual and emerges from social practice. Mapping the participants’ trajectories in terms of belonging, behaving, and believing, it proposes that belief should be understood as practical knowledge constituted through social participation, rather than according to a form of dogmatic cognitivism. This finding is at odds with the Swedish migration agency’s working definition of religion.
The dissertation furthermore addresses the nested precarities that characterise the lives of asylum seeking youth, and the invisibility that accompanies the bureaucratic processes in which they are caught up. This is juxtaposed with the visibility and recognition that the participants encounter in the community of the church.