Interesting analysis.

The demographer Emmanuel Todd wrote a similar study of exogamy in his books, Le destin des immigrés and La nouvelle France (which seem to be honest, contrarily to his wishful thinking polemic against the US, Après l’empire)

I’ve been meaning to read more of Emmanuel Todd for a while now. I’ve heard similar criticisms of Après l’empire.

I’ve reviewed Après l’empire here, actually.

In modern France, someone who wants, for whatever reason, to be religious is only being barely more contrarian by choosing Islam instead of Catholicism.

Is this really the case?

Thus, I expect to see children and grandchildren of mixed-background homes adopting Islam.

I don’t disagree. I’m skeptical, though, about how fervent the children of these mixed-background marriages will be (indeed, are already) about their religion. In my academic and my personal (Catholic and Protestant) experience, these children tend not to take religion so seriously. (They’re hardly likely to condemn Grandma or Uncle Mark to an eternity in hellfire, perhaps?)

I think that one of the things that is different about the 21st century is that while […] the cost of building new cultural frameworks rather than assimilating, I think the costs are far smaller than they were a generation ago.

This is true. A corollary of this, though, is that it’s much more difficult to build exclusive networks impermeable to the effects of the outside world. We’ve seen that in the United States, where increasingly evangelical Christians have been borrowing elements wholesale from the secular world, while the evangelical Christians themselves behave more-or-less the same way as non-evangelicals.. Given the more recent arrival and much greater heterogeneity of French Muslims, the same issues will apply to a still greater degree.

Does this not mirror the (reasonably well) documented of assimilation of second and third generation asians into UK society?

Randy, tremendous post; thanks for putting it together. I made some comments (and threw in a link to my blog) over at CT. But one quick point here though:

“We’ve seen that in the United States, where increasingly evangelical Christians have been borrowing elements wholesale from the secular world, while the evangelical Christians themselves behave more-or-less the same way as non-evangelicals.”

I think this really needs to be qualified, or else you need to explain how much leeway you’re including in that “more-or-less.” The adaptation by evangelicals to modern styles of economy and social interaction; that’s absolutely true. Evangelical families have created networks that incorporate all sorts of media, music, civic organizations and the like which replicate contemporary American life. But I don’t think that nearly justifies the idea that evangelical “behavior” is now mostly identical and assimilated to that of secular America. On the contrary, given that the substance of many of their home-grown forms of life radically departs from dominant American ideology (in terms of the market, family, sexual morality, art, etc.), one might say that evangelicals have been able to achieve even greater alienation from the American mainstream as they have borrowed mainstream niche-building strategies. (Harry and Tim Burke and I went around and around about this on CT a while ago.) This, obviously, has a lot of relevance to thinking about how and in what way the Muslim population in Western Europe may choose to (or be allowed to) incorporate themselves into the evolving societal culture, or else build alternatives to it.

In modern France, someone who wants, for whatever reason, to be religious is only being barely more contrarian by choosing Islam instead of Catholicism.

Is this really the case?

Sure. Being a devout catholic in this country of non-churchgoing catholics is definitely contrarian.

Being young, muslim, and devout, is rather more contrarian but the contrarian element of such a combination is definitely devotion to their religion in what’s largely a secular society.

Patrick G:

Fair enough. But, if you’re an average French resident, are you as likely to become religious in Muslim fashion as in Christian fashion?

Russell:

Interesting point. I’ll address this in my reply on my blog.

Fair enough. But, if you’re an average French resident, are you as likely to become religious in Muslim fashion as in Christian fashion?

The average French resident is largely without a tendency towards greater devotion within their own nominative religion (hence why such is contrarian). The exception seems to be muslim youths who seem to have greater religious tendencies than their parents generation, but they are not converting away from Islam.

I go into more detail on my perspectives on marginalzed and assimilating minorities in my Honours thesis on Canadian literature. Rough and polished segments of it are available here.