Any room at the inn? The impact of religious elite discourse on immigration attitudes in the United Kingdom
| Author | Ian Paterson |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148118778956 |
| Published date | 01 August 2018 |
| Date | 01 August 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148118778956
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2018, Vol. 20(3) 594 –612
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148118778956
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Any room at the inn? The
impact of religious elite
discourse on immigration
attitudes in the United
Kingdom
Ian Paterson
Abstract
To date, scholarship has neglected the role of elite cues in shaping immigration attitudes. When
included, attention has been limited to political elites and parties. Yet, other societal actors have
the potential to shape attitudes. This article employs mixed methods to analyse the discourse of
the Church of England and attempts to uncover whether this discourse impacts the immigration
attitudes of ‘their’ audience in the United Kingdom during 2005–2015. The discourse analysis
finds that non-threatening migration frames dominate. Using European Social Survey (ESS) data
(Rounds 4–7), regression analysis indicates that greater exposure to elite cues, via attendance at
religious services, is consistently related to more positive immigration attitudes. Thus, for those
most exposed, elite cues may be acting as a partial bulwark against the ubiquitous security-threat
discourse of political elites. Overall, findings imply that despite their previous neglect, religious
elite actors have the capacity to shape immigration attitudes and therefore de/construct issues
of security.
Keywords
elites, immigration, religion, securitisation
Introduction
Across Europe, migration has become entrenched as a security issue (Bigo, 2006;
Huysmans, 2000). In the United Kingdom, migration has been at the apex of the political
agenda and was at the epicentre of the Brexit debate. Continent-wide, right-wing anti-
immigration parties are making political gains, while in the United Kingdom, pre-Brexit,
UK Independence Party (UKIP) had been enjoying unprecedented electoral and polling
success. Amid what has become a divisive and at times toxic debate on immigration, the
College of Social Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
Corresponding author:
Ian Paterson, College of Social Sciences, University of Glasgow, 703, Adam Smith Building, Bute Gardens,
Glasgow G12 8RS, UK.
Email: i.paterson.1@research.gla.ac.uk
778956BPI0010.1177/1369148118778956The British Journal of Politics and International Relations X(X)Paterson
research-article2018
Original Article
Paterson 595
importance of developing a nuanced understanding of how immigration attitudes are con-
structed is more pressing than ever. This article contributes to this enterprise by exploring
the neglected role of elite cues in the process of immigration attitude formation, particu-
larly those cues of non-traditional security actors, focusing on religious elites from the
Anglican faith in the United Kingdom.
To date, many individual-level and contextual factors have been explored as potential
drivers of immigration attitudes (see for example Semyonov et al., 2004; Sniderman
et al., 2004). However, the potential for elite cues to shape public attitudes has been
neglected. Elite cues have at times been explored as a factor in attitude formation in gen-
eral, for example, towards European Union (EU) integration (Hooghe and Marks, 2005;
McLaren, 2001). But as a propeller of immigration attitudes, attention towards the effects
of elite cues has been minimal (Hellwig and Kweon, 2016). In the handful of studies that
have included elite messaging in the analysis, cues have been shown to play a significant
role in shaping immigration attitudes in specific contexts (Jones and Martin, 2017). Yet,
analysis has been limited to political elites and parties.1 This focus is despite other soci-
etal actors having the potential to wield considerable influence in the process of shaping
public attitudes (Karyotis and Patrikios, 2010). Religious elites are one such group.
Migration has now been established in the ‘moral’ realm (alongside abortion and
same-sex marriage) where religious elites and organisations are taking public positions
(Knoll, 2009). Elite rhetoric has arisen as a key factor in the relationship between moral
concerns and public attitudes (Clifford et al., 2015). For the most devout religious, elite
utterances can be understood as direct interpretations of God’s wisdom and desires
(Lausten and Wæver, 2000). Generally focusing on the United States, scholarship has
tried to explore the link between religious elite discourse and the attitudes of their flocks
across a wide range of social and political issues (Djupe and Calfano, 2013a; Djupe and
Gilbert, 2009), including migration (Nteta and Wallsten, 2012; Wallsten and Nteta, 2016).
Evidence has shown that religious elites can indeed be influential, yet overall it is posited
that ‘we know relatively little about the impact of religiosity on the role of religious group
cues in shaping attitudes towards immigration’ (Ben-Nun Bloom et al., 2015: 218).
With migration often presented through the lens of security (Bigo, 2002; Doty, 2007;
Huysmans, 1995), the theoretical framework adopted here draws upon and extends the
Copenhagen School’s (CS) Securitisation theory. Securitisation theory has been one of
the most innovative and prominent attempts to understand how security issues emerge
and dissolve (Bright, 2015). Rather than referring to something objectively ‘real’, secu-
rity is argued to be socially constructed through discourse (Buzan et al., 1998). For the
issue of migration, qualitative studies (Basham and Vaughan-Williams, 2013; Ceyhan
and Tsoukala, 2002) have demonstrated that, across Europe, discourse has presented
migration and migrants as threatening the core of societal wellbeing.
This article adopts a mixed-methods approach. Due to the context of Brexit and the
prevailing threat-based messaging that has characterised political elite debate on migra-
tion, the United Kingdom (2005–2015) has been selected as a critical case (Yin, 2014).2
As the largest faith in the United Kingdom – and with approximately 820,000 weekly
attendees – the Anglican faith is deemed the most prudent to analyse.3 This group is a
substantial minority cohort that has the potential to be affected by elite messaging.
Discourse analysis is used to determine the prevailing migration frames from the
Church of England (CoE) and CoE elites. Crucially, the CoE’s central migration mes-
sages are swimming against an increasingly hostile discursive and attitudinal tide.
Paradoxically, cutting against the dominant discourse presents the CoE with both a
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