Bridging the Divide: Religious Exclusivity and the Local State in France

• In Event: Religion and Right-Wing Populism

Abstract

This research examines why some religious communities encourage "religious exclusivity'"-- or religious beliefs that encourage individuals only to interact with and learn from individuals, groups, and sources within their religion. Religious exclusivity plays an influential role across religions and contexts, from Evangelical echo chambers in the United States to Hindu extremists in Myanmar, and is a central explanatory factor in the relationship between a religion and society more broadly. Grounded in an examination of Islam among densely immigrant communities in France, I demonstrate that pro-immigrant actions and rhetoric by local governments can significantly decrease religious exclusivity in their communities. Conversely, far-right and xenophobic rhetoric and policy only serves to increase religious exclusivity. This research is based on nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Paris' immigrant-heavy banlieues. I test these findings with a variety of causally-identified designs that use machine learning methods to analyze innovative big data sources, including Google Maps, online reviews, Twitter, and Google Trends. In the first design, I use an electoral regression discontinuity design to examine the impact of the election of pro- and anti-immigrant parties to local government on various metrics of religious exclusivity. In the second design, I use a geographic RDD to examine how different policies of church-state alignment influence religious exclusivity. In an additional analysis, I examine how Twitter networks vary with different forms of local government engagement. eThis work provides important insight into how government policies and rhetoric can influence individual level religiosity within the context of densely immigrant communities in France.

Author

• Elizabeth Dekeyser, Massachusetts Institute of Technology