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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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France will endure even if the ethnic French do not

Inch'Allah! So far, it has always been that way, but islam(ism) has shown not only a great resistance to assimilation, but an ability to counter-assimilate parts of the population.

AFAIK immigration in France has only become a hot topic because of immigrants mainly being Muslims. Nobody I know seems to worry about any negative impact from non-muslim immigrants (with the notable exception of Roms from Eastern Europe).

Inch'Allah! So far, it has always been that way, but islam(ism) has shown not only a great resistance to assimilation, but an ability to counter-assimilate parts of the population.

Not according to this, at least.

While there are many reasons for overinflated estimates of religious minority population sizes, several key factors contribute to this overestimation. First of all, any projections like that vastly underestimate intergenerational attrition of religious affiliation and simply assume that all immigrants from Muslim-majority countries and their descendants are Muslim and are going to remain Muslim. However, in the particular case of France, such an assumption doesn’t even remotely reflect reality. For example, North Africa is the most common region of origin for French Muslims. However, only 64% of the descendants of immigrants from Algeria and 65% of descendants of immigrants from Morocco and Tunisia currently identify as Muslim (INSEE, 2023b, Figure 2). Moreover, the survey also found that religiosity declines over time even among those who remain Muslim (INSEE, 2023b, Figure 4).

However, only 64% of the descendants of immigrants from Algeria and 65% of descendants of immigrants from Morocco and Tunisia currently identify as Muslim.

Surely this is either (a) because pieds-noirs (ie colonial white French who settled in North Africa and returned after / during independence) are included and/or (b) because almost the entire Christian and Jewish population of Francophone North Africa decamped to France at the same time?

I checked the source and the numbers, for example, for descendants of Algerians are 32 % no religion - 3 % Catholic - 1 % Other Christian - 64 % Muslim. If pieds-noirs were included I daresay there would be at least double numbers rate of Catholics.

Define "descendents of". If it includes people with X% Muslim ancestry, we should only expect X% of that subgroup to identify as Muslims. If greater than X% do, then Islam is actually growing among that subgroup even though X is less than 100.