Abstract
Abstract How religion shapes migrants’ integration is often analysed either through institutional participation or as a marker of cultural distance. Yet in secularising contexts where national belonging remains racially coded, religion can operate as a resource for belonging and as a site of boundary making. Drawing on interviews with twenty first-generation migrants in Ireland – ten Polish Catholics and ten Thai Buddhists – this article examines the functions of religion in migrants’ everyday cultural integration and how these functions become racialised. Guided by a model of five sources of religious effects (identity marking, content, resources, signalling, and discrimination triggers), the analysis shows that religion works as (i) a cultural anchor supporting continuity and transnational belonging, and (ii) a catalyst enabling engagement with Irish cultural institutions, relationships, and moral norms. For Polish Catholics, shared affiliation with the dominant church provides ‘religious proximity’ that can ease inclusion, especially in localities, while also generating tensions around liberalising Irish Catholicism and expectations of respectability. For Thai Buddhists, minority religious positioning intersects with racialisation and misrecognition, yet the pragmatic and portable character of their practices fosters striking religious flexibility, enabling intercultural participation even when institutional access is limited. Across both groups, migrants’ narratives suggest that cultural integration is domain-specific and power-laden: racialised norms of Irishness determine which religious performances ‘count’ as belonging. The article contributes a relational account of religion and race in migrant integration, arguing for research that treats religious change, racialisation, and acculturation as mutually constitutive processes rather than separate explanatory variables.