International Migration and Religious Participation: The Mediating Impact of Individual and Contextual Effects¹

Supported by previous empirical work, theory from sociology of religion and migration provide testable hypotheses in predicting changes in immigrant religious participation surrounding the migratory event. Due to data constraints, however, these hypotheses have escaped broad‐based analysis. Using the New Immigrant Survey (NIS), religious participation from pre‐ to postmigration time periods is found to decrease among recent immigrants to the United States. Individual‐level characteristics (i.e., gender, familial conditions, employment) do not substantially explain this decline; alternatively, contextual‐level factors (i.e., religious pluralism and religious concentration) partially mediate this drop in immigrant religiosity.