Your browser does not fully support modern features. Please upgrade for a smoother experience.
Transnationalism and Religion: Exploring Transnational Religious Configurations: History
View Latest Version
Please note this is an old version of this entry, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Contributor: Abbas Jong

This review develops a configurational account of the relationship between religion and transnationalism by addressing a specific analytical limitation in the existing literature: its tendency to oscillate between substantializing religious traditions as already constituted entities that move across borders and segmenting transnational religion into disconnected domains such as networks, migrant communities, diasporic identities, institutions, political mobilization, digital mediation, social support, or pilgrimage. While these approaches have generated substantial empirical insight, they leave undertheorized the relational formation through which religious authority, practice, identity, material circulation, symbolic boundary-making, institutional organization, and mediated presence are assembled and made socially effective across multiple scales. To clarify this problem, the review reconstructs scholarship on religion and transnationalism through five major thematic domains: transnational religious networks, religious identity in transnational contexts, religion as a catalyst of transnationalism, the embedding of religion in transnational social practices, and distinctive forms of transnational religion. This reconstruction shows that transnational religious phenomena are inadequately understood as the spatial extension of pre-given traditions, as residual expressions of ethnicity or migration, or as discrete networks, movements, institutions, or diasporic communities. They are better grasped as historically contingent and relationally ordered formations whose temporary coherence is produced through the interaction of actors, authorities, practices, discourses, infrastructures, legal-regulatory environments, memories, obligations, and material flows. Building on the concept of social configuration, the review therefore proposes transnational religious configurations as a more precise unit of analysis for studying how the religious and the transnational are mutually constituted rather than externally connected. It defines such configurations as historically specific formations in which religious categories, institutions, practices, authorities, material resources, symbolic boundaries, and cross-border conditions of possibility are articulated across local, national, transnational, and global scales. The review operationalizes this approach through three analytical levels—conditions of possibility, construction and characteristics, and social realities and consequences—and illustrates its explanatory purchase by examining a new phenomenon within the contemporary transnational revival of Shi‘i Islam.

  • transnationalism
  • religion
  • transnational religious configuration
  • religious identity and practice
  • transnational network
  • Shi‘i Islam
The relationship between religion and transnationalism has become increasingly visible across a wide range of social processes, including migration, diaspora formation, digital communication, political mobilization, humanitarian exchange, pilgrimage, and the reorganization of collective identities across borders [1][2][3][4]. Yet the growing empirical visibility of these processes has not been matched by an equally precise analytical language. Although a substantial body of scholarship has examined religion in cross-border settings, the field remains marked by a basic conceptual difficulty: religion is often treated either as a bounded cultural or national inheritance carried by migrants across borders, or as a secondary variable embedded in other transnational processes such as migration, integration, ethnicity, or globalization [5][6][7]. What is still insufficiently clarified is how the religious itself is reconstituted through transnational relations, and conversely, how transnational social formations are shaped, mediated, and sometimes generated by religious actors, practices, institutions, and imaginaries [2][8][9][10].
This problem is not merely empirical; it is fundamentally analytical. Much of the literature has produced important insights into particular aspects of the relationship between religion and transnationalism—religious networks, diasporic identities, migrant congregations, digital communities, political activism, or transnational ritual practices [2][3][8][11][12][13][14]. However, these studies have often proceeded through fragmented thematic or case-specific lenses that do not adequately theorize the relational unity of the phenomenon under study. In many cases, religion appears as one domain among others within migration studies; in others, transnationalism functions only as background context for the study of religious adaptation [7][15]. As a result, the mutual constitution of the religious and the transnational frequently remains underconceptualized. The central problem, therefore, is not the absence of research on religion and transnationalism, but the absence of an analytical framework capable of grasping their co-constitution without reducing one to the derivative effect of the other.
This difficulty is intensified by the persistence of methodological assumptions that continue to structure large parts of the field. Studies of religion have often remained implicitly tied to nation-state containers, fixed communal boundaries, and territorially bounded understandings of identity, authority, and belonging. Even when scholars explicitly address cross-border phenomena, the categories through which they interpret them often remain shaped by methodological nationalism, statism, and other essentialist or given assumptions and categories [16][17][18][19]. Conversely, studies of transnationalism have often kept religion at the periphery of transnational analysis, where it is reduced to an instrument of ethnic continuity, migrant incorporation, or community support [5][6][7]. Such tendencies obscure the fact that religious life in transnational settings exceeds the simple extension of a pre-existing entity into a new environment. Rather, transnational settings often transform the very meanings, boundaries, institutional forms, and social effects of religion itself [12][20][21][22].
This review argues that the field requires a more precise problematization of the relationship between the religious and the transnational. More specifically, it asks how existing scholarship has conceptualized the transformation of religious practices, institutions, identities, and forms of belonging in transnational contexts; which dimensions of this relationship have been illuminated and which have remained theoretically underdeveloped; and how these dispersed insights might be reorganized within a more robust analytical framework. The task of this review, therefore, is not simply to synthesize the existing literature, but to reconstruct its main lines of inquiry, identify its underlying conceptual limits, and clarify the conditions under which a more adequate framework becomes necessary. In this sense, the review approaches the field as an emerging and still insufficiently consolidated area of inquiry whose epistemological and methodological foundations remain contested [15][18][19][23].
The review engages the broader body of scholarship on religion and transnationalism from the 1990s to the present. This longer temporal scope is important because it allows us to trace both the emergence and the subsequent transformation of the field of transnational studies in general, and of its relation to religion in particular: from its early efforts to move beyond nationally bounded understandings of migration, identity, and community, and to establish itself as a new analytical framework within global studies for examining emerging transnational phenomena and global forces [16][18][24]; through the period in which transnationalism studies faced sustained criticism and relative decline with the rise of competing explanatory paradigms; and finally to its more recent return and reconstruction in response to digital mediation, intensified global interdependence, new forms of mobility and immobility, political polarization, and the reconfiguration of religion under conditions of uncertainty and cosmopolitanization [3][4][23][25][26][27]. Approaching the literature across this extended period makes it possible not only to identify enduring themes and conceptual continuities, but also to examine shifts in problematics, analytical vocabularies, and empirical emphases over time.
Against this background, this review develops two interconnected objectives. First, it offers a systematic reconstruction of the literature on religion and transnationalism by organizing it into five major thematic domains: transnational religious networks; religious identity in transnational contexts; religion as a catalyst for transnationalism; the intertwining of religion and transnational social practices; and distinctive forms of transnational religion. This reconstruction identifies the field’s major contributions while also showing the recurrent conceptual limits of its dominant units of analysis. Second, building on these findings and drawing on the concept of social configuration, the review proposes transnational religious configurations as a more adequate framework for studying the interweaving of the religious and the transnational [19][28][29]. The argument is that transnational religious phenomena are neither fixed extensions of pre-given religious traditions and entities nor merely contingent by-products of migration or globalization. They are better understood as historically specific and relationally organized formations in which actors, institutions, discourses, practices, categories, identities, authorities, material flows, symbolic boundaries, and cross-border conditions of possibility are configured and reconfigured across multiple scales. What is at stake, therefore, is not simply a new label for existing phenomena, but a different analytical orientation: one that treats the religious and the transnational as mutually constitutive dimensions of emergent social formations rather than as separate domains subsequently brought into relation [23][27][28][29][30]. To anchor this orientation operationally, the review illustrates the configurational approach through a worked empirical case—a new phenomenon within the contemporary transnational revival of Shi‘i Islam—showing how the framework reconstructs a complex religious formation that alternative concepts such as network, diaspora religion, transnational movement, or global religion capture only partially.
The review proceeds as follows. Following a brief conceptual and methodological review, the next section reconstructs the literature through five major thematic clusters and identifies the principal ways in which the relationship between religion and transnationalism has been conceptualized. The subsequent section examines the limitations of these approaches and develops the theoretical rationale for a configurational perspective. It then outlines the conditions of possibility, construction, and consequences of transnational religious configurations as a more precise analytical framework, and demonstrates its operational purchase through the empirical illustration noted above.

This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/encyclopedia6050108

References

  1. Vertovec, S. Transnationalism; Routledge: London, UK, 2009.
  2. Levitt, P. God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape; The New Press: New York, NY, USA, 2007.
  3. Campbell, H. Understanding the relationship between religion online and offline in a networked society. J. Am. Acad. Relig. 2012, 80, 64–93.
  4. Hoover, S.M.; Echchaibi, N. (Eds.) The Third Spaces of Digital Religion: From Production to Reception; Routledge: New York, NY, USA, 2023.
  5. Ebaugh, H.R.; Chafetz, J.S. Religion and the New Immigrants: Continuities and Adaptations in Immigrant Congregations; AltaMira Press: Walnut Creek, CA, USA, 2000.
  6. Hirschman, C. The role of religion in the origins and adaptation of immigrant groups in the United States. Int. Migr. Rev. 2004, 38, 1206–1233.
  7. Cadge, W.; Ecklund, E.H. Immigration and religion. Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2007, 33, 359–379.
  8. Levitt, P. The Transnational Villagers; University of California Press: Berkeley, CA, USA, 2001.
  9. Vásquez, M.A.; Marquardt, M.F. Globalizing the Sacred: Religion Across the Americas; Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ, USA, 2003.
  10. Csordas, T.J. Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization; University of California Press: Berkeley, CA, USA, 2009.
  11. Mandaville, P. Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma; Routledge: London, UK, 2001.
  12. Yang, F.; Ebaugh, H.R. Transformations in new immigrant religions and their global implications. Am. Sociol. Rev. 2001, 66, 269–288.
  13. Hagan, J.; Ebaugh, H.R. Calling upon the sacred: Migrants’ use of religion in the migration process. Int. Migr. Rev. 2003, 37, 1145–1162.
  14. Truitt, A.J. Pure Land in the Making: Vietnamese Buddhism in the US Gulf South; University of Washington Press: Seattle, WA, USA, 2021.
  15. Frederiks, M.T. Religion, migration, and identity: A conceptual and theoretical exploration. Mission Stud. 2015, 32, 181–202.
  16. Glick Schiller, N.; Basch, L.; Blanc-Szanton, C. Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered; New York Academy of Sciences: New York, NY, USA, 1992.
  17. Levitt, P.; Glick Schiller, N. Conceptualizing simultaneity: A transnational social field perspective on society. Int. Migr. Rev. 2004, 38, 1002–1039.
  18. Levitt, P.; Jaworsky, B.N. Transnational migration studies: Past developments and future trends. Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2007, 33, 129–156.
  19. Jong, A. Modern episteme, methodological nationalism and the politics of transnationalism. Front. Polit. Sci. 2023, 5, 1172393.
  20. McAlister, E. Rara!: Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora; University of California Press: Berkeley, CA, USA, 2002.
  21. Orsi, R.A. Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them; Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, USA, 2005.
  22. Baumann, M.; Wilke, A. The Hindu temple in the diasporas. In Hindu Diasporas; Jacobsen, K.A., Ed.; Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2023; pp. 304–327.
  23. Jong, A. The post-secular cosmopolitanization of religion. Religions 2025, 16, 334.
  24. Warner, R.S. Work in progress toward a new paradigm for the sociological study of religion in the United States. Am. J. Sociol. 1993, 98, 1044–1093.
  25. Beck, U. We do not live in an age of cosmopolitanism but in an age of cosmopolitisation: The “global other” is in our midst. Ir. J. Sociol. 2011, 19, 16–34.
  26. Beck, U. The Metamorphosis of the World: How Climate Change Is Transforming Our Concept of the World; Polity Press: Cambridge, UK, 2016.
  27. Jong, A. Grounded nationalism in the context of cosmopolitanization: The case of transnational revival of Shi‘i Islam. Sociol. Focus 2026, 59, 66–100.
  28. Jong, A. Social configurations in the moment of post-foundationalism. Front. Sociol. 2023, 7, 1078011.
  29. Jong, A. Social theory and navigating indeterminacy: A configurational analysis of Iranian youth’s identity construction in contemporary Iran. Societies 2024, 14, 32.
  30. Jong, A. Social Theory and Encountering Indeterminacy in the Flux of Cosmopolitanization; Logos: Berlin, Germany, 2025.
More
© Text is available under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy.
This entry is offline, you can click here to edit this entry!
Academic Video Service
Feedback

Quick Survey

Encyclopedia MDPI is conducting a targeted survey to identify the specific barriers hindering efficient research. We invite you to spend 3 minutes defining the priorities for our next generation of structured knowledge tools.
Take Survey