Commitment, Convergence, Alterity

Abstract

This contribution looks comparatively at the everyday pursuit of religious commitment among young, revivalist-oriented Sunni Muslims and Protestant Christians in the Netherlands. In both public debates and academic scholarship, the differences between these groups tend to be stressed, particularly through dichotomies such as migrant/native and minority/majority. This article, by contrast, takes their potential common ground as a starting point by examining the pursuit of religious aspirations under shared conditions of consumer capitalism and cultural pluralism. I argue that my Christian and Muslim interlocutors experienced a noticeably similar dynamic of constraint on and reinvigoration of their faith. Further, I note the different degrees to which they emphasized their moral distinctiveness, and discuss how this disparity is related to dominant public representations of these groups.