Religious assimilation refers to the adoption of a majority or dominant culture's religious practices and beliefs by a minority or subordinate culture. It is an important form of cultural assimilation.
Religious assimilation includes the religious conversion of individuals from a minority faith to the dominant faith. It can also include the religious indoctrination of children into a dominant religion by their converted parents. However, religious assimilation need not involve wholesale adoption of a dominant religious belief system by a minority; the concept is broad enough to include alterations in the frequency of religious participation to match that of the dominant culture. Indeed, religious assimilation among immigrant groups most commonly involves such minor changes, rather than sweeping change in religious belief systems. [1] : 134
In sharp contrast to other aspects of cultural assimilation such as language and nationality, dominant cultures in general tend not to expect immigrants to adopt the dominant religion. [1] : 3 Some researchers, such as Will Herberg, have advanced a thesis of perpetual religious pluralism, to the effect that immigrants their religious affiliation even after complete cultural assimilation in other aspects of culture. [2] : 368 Still, even those who retain their religion are still likely to become less religious over time as a result of assimilation, Herberg says. After a generation or two, formerly devout families may see their original religious identity develop into something more surface-level or symbolic. [3]
Some dominant cultures may exert pressures for religious assimilation so extreme as to amount, according to some researchers, to a form of religious persecution. [4] These pressures may be exerted by making other, more appealing forms of cultural assimilation, such as membership in secular social club activities, so time-consuming that they interfere seriously with attendance at minority religious services, and by discouraging expression of minority religious beliefs in public. [4]
Some examples of this form of religious assimilation can be found throughout Jewish history. In the late 1300s, antisemitic violence forced many Spanish Jews to convert or leave. Then, in 1492, Spain officially ordered the Jewish population of Spain to convert to Catholicism or leave. While some Spanish Jews did leave, others stayed. Those who stayed had to convert, but not all of those who converted fully adopted Catholicism; many of these continued to practice Judaism in secrecy, becoming known as "crypto-Jews." Others converted and began gradually adopting Catholicism over subsequent generations. [5] [6]
Crypto-Judaism is the secret adherence to Judaism while publicly professing to be of another faith; practitioners are referred to as "crypto-Jews".
Assimilation or Assimilate may refer to:
Acculturation is a process of social, psychological, and cultural change that stems from the balancing of two cultures while adapting to the prevailing culture of the society. Acculturation is a process in which an individual adopts, acquires and adjusts to a new cultural environment as a result of being placed into a new culture, or when another culture is brought to someone. Individuals of a differing culture try to incorporate themselves into the new more prevalent culture by participating in aspects of the more prevalent culture, such as their traditions, but still hold onto their original cultural values and traditions. The effects of acculturation can be seen at multiple levels in both the devotee of the prevailing culture and those who are assimilating into the culture.
Cultural assimilation is the process in which a minority group or culture comes to resemble a society's majority group or assimilates the values, behaviors, and beliefs of another group whether fully or partially.
Forced assimilation is the involuntary cultural assimilation of religious or ethnic minority groups, during which they are forced by a government to adopt the language, national identity, norms, mores, customs, traditions, values, mentality, perceptions, way of life, and often the religion and ideology of an established and generally larger community belonging to a dominant culture.
"Who is a Jew?" is a basic question about Jewish identity and considerations of Jewish self-identification. The question pertains to ideas about Jewish personhood, which have cultural, ethnic, religious, political, genealogical, and personal dimensions. Orthodox Judaism and Conservative Judaism follow Jewish law (halakha), deeming people to be Jewish if their mothers are Jewish or if they underwent a halakhic conversion. Reform Judaism and Reconstructionist Judaism accept both matrilineal and patrilineal descent as well as conversion. Karaite Judaism predominantly follows patrilineal descent as well as conversion.
The history of the Jews in Latin America began with conversos who joined the Spanish and Portuguese expeditions to the continents. The Alhambra Decree of 1492 led to the mass conversion of Spain's Jews to Catholicism and the expulsion of those who refused to do so. However, the vast majority of conversos never made it to the New World and remained in Spain slowly assimilating to the dominant Catholic culture. This was due to the requirement by Spain's Blood Statutes to provide written documentation of Old Christian lineage to travel to the New World. However, the first Jews came with the first expedition of Christopher Columbus, including Rodrigo de Triana and Luis De Torres.
Cultural Muslims, also known as nominal Muslims, non-practicing Muslims or non-observing Muslims, are people who identify as Muslims but are not religious and do not practice the faith. They may be a non-observing, secular or irreligious individuals who still identify with Islam due to family backgrounds, personal experiences, ethnic and national heritage, or the social and cultural environment in which they grew up. However, this concept is not always met with acceptance in conservative Islamic communities.
The history of the Jews in Mexico began in 1519 with the arrival of Conversos, often called Marranos or "Crypto-Jews", referring to those Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism and that then became subject to the Spanish Inquisition.
Jewish assimilation refers either to the gradual cultural assimilation and social integration of Jews in their surrounding culture or to an ideological program in the age of emancipation promoting conformity as a potential solution to historic Jewish marginalization.
An ethnoreligious group is a grouping of people who are unified by a common religious and ethnic background.
A dominant culture is a cultural practice that is dominant within a particular political, social or economic entity, in which multiple cultures co-exist. It may refer to a language, religion or ritual practices, social value and/or social custom. These features are often a norm for an entire society. An individual achieves dominance by being perceived as belonging to that majority culture which has a significant presence in institutions relating to communication, education, artistic expression, law, government and business. The concept of "dominant culture" is generally used in academic discourse in fields such as communication, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies.
In sociology, symbolic ethnicity is a nostalgic allegiance to, love for, and pride in a cultural tradition that can be felt and lived without having to be incorporated to the person's everyday behavior; as such, a symbolic ethnic identity usually is composed of images from mass communications media.
The history of the Jews in Chile dates back to the arrival of Europeans to the country. Over time, Chile has received several contingents of Jewish immigrants. Currently, the Jewish community in Chile comes mainly from the migrations occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries, mostly of Ashkenazi background.
The History of the Jews in Colombia begins in the Spanish colonial period with the arrival of the first Jews during the Spanish colonization of the Americas.
Symbolic religiosity is a term coined by sociologist Herbert Gans.
América Ladina is a 2011 documentary film directed by and starring Israeli independent filmmaker, Yaron Avitov.
Sephardic Bnei Anusim is a modern term which is used to define the contemporary Christian descendants of an estimated quarter of a million 15th-century Sephardic Jews who were coerced or forced to convert to Catholicism during the 14th and 15th centuries in Spain and Portugal. The vast majority of conversos remained in Spain and Portugal, and their descendants, who number in the millions, live in both of these countries. The small minority of conversos who emigrated normally chose to emigrate to destinations where Sephardic communities already existed, particularly to the Ottoman Empire and North Africa, but some of them emigrated to more tolerant cities in Europe, where many of them immediately reverted to Judaism. In theory, very few of them would have traveled to Latin America with colonial expeditions, because only those Spaniards who could certify that they had no recent Muslim or Jewish ancestry were supposed to be allowed to travel to the New World. Recent genetic studies suggest that the arrival of the Sephardic ancestors of Latin American populations coincided with the initial colonization of Latin America, which suggests that significant numbers of recent converts were able to travel to the new world and contribute to the gene pool of modern Latin American populations despite an official prohibition on them doing so. In addition, later arriving Spanish immigrants would have themselves contributed additional converso ancestry in some parts of Latin America.
The history of the Jews in Peru begins with the arrival of migration flows from Europe, Near East and Northern Africa.
Most measures of religiosity, such as church attendance and affiliation, are positively correlated with the authoritarian personality cluster, which includes submission to authority, conventionality, and intolerance of out-groups. The correlation is especially strong between religious fundamentalism and authoritarianism, both of which are characterized by low openness to experience, high rigidity, and low cognitive complexity. In particular, authoritarianism "is positively associated with a religion that is conventional, unquestioned, and unreflective".
While religious identity would persist, religiosity would decline with assimilation, Herberg predicted. The religion of assimilated Americans would be largely symbolic and rather thin: "…without serious commitment, without real inner conviction, without genuine existential decision" (260). Of the second and third generations, Gans (1994) observed that the descendants of European immigrants practiced a "symbolic religiosity." They had a poor knowledge of religious doctrine and low levels of religious observance compared to their more devout, albeit less assimilated, immigrant ancestors.