Abstract
Literature on categorization often invokes historical legacies to explain why states adhere to statistical categories that inadequately capture their population, and especially minority groups. The failure of the 2011 German census to produce reliable numbers on the country’s largest religious minority, Muslims, could be viewed as a case in point. However, this ignores the fact that in the late 1980s officials successfully counted Muslims. This article traces how officials changed their approach to Muslim enumeration over the course of designing the 2011 census. Drawing on internal ministerial documents and interviews, I show that the reversal of statistical visibility was the result of a recoupling process. Through this process, old state-religion laws that officials had previously ignored now became rigorously applied to the census. An extra-statistical debate on religious education triggered this recoupling by reviving narrow, legal categories of religion and alerting church representatives and legal experts to imprecise census terms. Using the German case and other empirical examples, I describe a more uneven influence of historical legacies than commonly suggested by research on categorization. Rather than viewing legacies as having a stable, or even growing, influence on categorization, I argue that they only take effect when they become politicized and enforced by powerful actors. I call for a more nuanced analysis of the role historical factors play in determining trajectories of census categorization, especially those that are invoked to explain the reluctance of European states to collect ethno-cultural data.
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Notes
A low response rate was particularly problematic in the 2011 census because the census questionnaire was administered to only 10% of the population and then combined with registry information.
Legally speaking, “religious society” (Religionsgesellschaft) and “religious community” (Religionsgemeinschaft) are synonymous. The Weimar Constitution originally spoke of religious societies but today the term religious community is more common.
Within Europe, there is a marked divide between countries of Central and Eastern Europe that have a tradition of “counting in the name of multiculturalism” (Rallu, Piché, and Simon 2006, 536) and those in other regions of Europe that do not. Countries of the first type commonly collect data on ethnicity (or what they call “nationality”), language and religion, while countries of the second type commonly ask only about citizenship and country of birth (Escafré-Dublet and Simon 2011; Simon 2012).
To be recognized as public corporations, religious communities need to undergo a lengthy application procedure and meet high requirements including a minimum presence of thirty years in Germany (Fetzer and Soper 2005). In 2013, a first Islamic organization received what is considered “the form of legal recognition par excellence” (Spielhaus and Herzog 2015, 11).
Laurence (2012) argues that Muslims’ religious accommodation should be read both as policy of recognition and domestication. He documents how governments have sought to reconfigure Islam from an “embassy” religion (ibid, 168) under the sway of foreign states and opaque to local politicians into a domestic, legible institution.
As Johansen and Spielhaus (2012, 83) document, this equation of the Muslim and immigrant subject also characterized most surveys and polls conducted in the 2000s, “upholding a subtle exclusion of Muslims from the national community as always foreign and always potentially in need of integration.”
Particularly well-known cases include the introduction of a Hispanic/Latino category on the 1980 US census (Garcia 2003; Mora 2014), the multi-race response option on the same census in 2000 (Nobles 2000; Perlmann and Waters 2002), and the positive revaluation of the category of “black” in Brazil (Nobles 2000).
Similarly, analysts invoke historical factors to explain the lack of data on religious minorities, and particularly on Muslims, in Germany. For Spielhaus (2013, 3), for instance, the scarcity of religious data reflects “a notion of religious affiliation as private matter” that, in turn, is “the result of European religious wars, the Holocaust and the lengthy emancipation… from religious authorities.” While generally true, this hardly explains all the religious information that the state still does collect on Christian but also on Jewish and, temporarily, Muslim affiliation.
Evidently, path dependent accounts do not necessarily imply that an arrangement remains persistently locked in. As political scientist Pierson (2000, 265) notes, there will always be points at which “something erodes or swamps the mechanisms (…) that generate continuity.” While undoubtedly true, Pierson points to a different kind of change than I refer to. What I propose to study are not the points at which legacies are formed or abolished but their activation and deactivation.
Although each census requires a new law, plenary protocols show that politicians rarely seek to make major changes to the census. Instead they tend to argue for continuity in census practice and rely on formulations from earlier legislation, supplied by ministerial staff.
Missing is thus evidence on phone and face-to-face conversations, which, as staff and interviewees confirmed, also informed decision-making. As a result, there are some unavoidable gaps in the data.
A difficulty in asking about past events was that interviewees did not always remember things in detail or correctly, making it necessary to triangulate all factual claims with document data.
The Islam Conference is a high-profile dialogue platform between state and Muslim representatives that was created in 2006 by the Ministry of the Interior and that shortly after received its own division at the ministry.
The memo was originally written in September 2006 – at a time, as I elaborate below, when the term became contentious. Yet, all available evidence indicates that the Department of Statistics did not make use of the memo until the end of May 2008.
A sizeable literature on law and religion argues that secular politics (secularism here defined as equal treatment rather than strict non-intervention) rarely treat religions equally. Instead, definitions and policies tend to be modeled on and favor established religions (Asad 1993; Faller Sullivan 2005; Fetzer and Soper 2005). Also the reluctance of the German state to accord Muslim associations the status of religious community can be read as such a bias. Unaffiliated Muslims, however, argue that the state’s reluctance is justified because associations represent only a minority. Some of the officials I spoke to further maintained that the strict criteria that communities need to fulfill, especially when it comes to documenting membership, are justified because they protect individuals’ religious freedom from unwanted intrusion and representation by organizations. One might ask though whether the state is equally cautious when it comes to the influence of other religious organizations.
Similar to cases over indigenous and racial rights (Espeland 1994; Torres and Milrun 1990; Haney Lopez 2006), identity itself became legally contested and mediated in the debate of education. Paraphrasing Haney Lopez (2006, 89), we might say that “recourse to the law came at the cost of resuscitating [particular ideas of religion].” The Minister of the Interior conceded that the state was demanding a substantial reconfiguration of Muslim associations: “Indirectly we are, of course, acting on Islam. But only indirectly, not in a paternalistic sense” (Schäuble 2008b).
For media reports on Muslim religious education and the status of religious community see for instance Janisch (2007), Rath (2008), Spiegel Online (2008), and Spiewak (2009). In addition, there are countless commentaries, monographs and conferences that revisit state-religion law (Heckel 2009). Courts relied on some of these expert opinions to determine the legal nature of Islamic organizations (see for instance Klinkhammer and De Wall 2012).
Although originally called “state-church law”, most commentators today refer to this set of regulations as “state-religion law” to signal their applicability to non-Christian religions.
Understandably, the former head of the Statistics Department could not recall who had objected to the initial, loose classification. Contrary to his guess though, it was not legal experts from within the ministry who had intervened. All available evidence indicates that the Department of State-Religion-Law only became involved later, when revisions were already under way.
What seems supportive of this reading is the fact that the only Islam-related organization that intervened in the census preparations and encouraged response to the belief question amongst their adherents was the Alevi Federation Germany. Since the belief question listed “Alevi” as separate answer option, to them, the census offered the opportunity to gain visibility as Alevis and differentiate themselves from, what they felt to be, the overpowering dominance of Sunni Islam.
Based on their pretests, the Statistical Bureau later expressed some concern about the quality of the religion measure. However, their misgivings concerned primarily the definition of religious community, which respondents found hard to understand, and the split design, which some pretest respondents (12%) had ignored and wrongly answered both questions (Gauckler 2011). Importantly, the pretests had not indicated that the belief question could depress response rates. One possible explanation, also pointed out by staff from the Statistical Bureau, was that the pretests had not signaled the voluntary nature of the belief question as clearly as the final census and therefore had probably generated more responses.
Other studies (Hallett 2010; Espeland 1998) have described recoupling as an arduous, costly process. Those who seek to realign practices with myths often face resistance from members of the organizations because the work routines and sense of self they have developed in the absence of oversight become threatened.
The Statistics Department briefly worked on another change to the questions. The reason was that the politician who spearheaded the addition of the religion measure thought that both questions, the one on belief and affiliation, should be voluntary to make the results more comparable. But when the Protestant and Catholic Church made, as she put it, “a fuss” and pleaded with one of the leading figures of the CDU group, she had to drop the issue (Interview; July 23, 2018).
In 2017, for example, the states issued another guideline to secure a concerted, legally correct course of action when interacting with Muslim organizations (Hessisches Kulturministerium 2017).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Delia Baldessari, Bhumika Chauhan, Swati Chintala, Nahoko Kameo, Eric Klinenberg, Ann Morning, Sonia Prelat, Iddo Tavory, my Research and Writing colleagues, and the participants of the NYU Culture Workshop for commenting on versions of this manuscript. I also thank the reviewers of Theory & Society for their helpful feedback.
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Glaese, J.C. Making Muslims illegible: recoupling as an obstacle to religious enumeration in Germany. Theor Soc 50, 283–314 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-020-09419-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-020-09419-9