How to spot a Christian : Asylum seekers' religious conversions in Finnish media

Abstract

Along with the increase of forced migration in Europe in the late 2010s, Finland has become a country where tens of thousands of people have sought asylum. The unexpected number of asylum seekers has sparked various public reactions, one of them being the worry of how to evaluate the need for international protection when asylum is sought based on grounds that are difficult to prove, such as religious conviction or sexual orientation. Meanwhile, approximately one thousand asylum seekers have converted from Islam to Christianity and sought international protection based on religious persecution that they would face in their countries of origins due to their new Christian conviction. The conversions have gained wide media attention with the key questions circulating around expertise and who has the best knowledge to assess one’s religious conviction.

This study pays attention to the media discussion around asylum seekers who have converted to Christianity in Finland. The main purpose of this study is to analyze how religious conversion amongst asylum seekers is framed in Finnish news articles, and special attention will be put on the construction of authority concerning the topic. Theoretically this study draws on the tradition of governmentality with the particular focus on epistemic governance and ontological authority. Ontological authority offers a tool to scrutinize the picture of reality of the phenomenon constructed by experts. Methodologically this study is based on frame analysis. The data consists of news articles that deal with religious conversions amongst asylum seekers in 14 Finnish news outlets with altogether 67 news articles over the period of 2015–2019.

Three frames were found regarding the news reporting of converted asylum seekers: threatening conversion frame, authority frame and morality frame. Threatening conversion frame illustrates the converted asylum seekers as a substantially untrustworthy group of people that shake the national order by insincere behavior and by causing economic burden. Authority frame depicts the conversion as a conflict between experts and diminishes the agency of asylum seekers: on the one hand, there is a conflict between the state and the church and on the other hand, the Christian churches debate with each other about the best practices regarding the assessment of conversion. Morality frame highlights the converted asylum seekers as a group of victims who need to be encountered through humanitarian values.

One of the key findings of this study is the constant requirement for better credibility assessment practices that both the Finnish Immigration Service and church officials emphasize in the news articles. Even though they had different motives and methods for finding out the true religious conviction, they both shared the idea of finding the ‘truth’ about inner conviction and therefore about asylum seekers’ true identity. Religious leaders and church representatives highlight their knowledge on two main grounds: personal and educational knowledge, whereas Finnish Immigration Service emphasizes their knowledge that they produce themselves: for example reports, statistics and precedents. These two main authorities do not share the ontological premises on how to assess religious conversion which depicts the entire discussion as a never-ending authoritative conflict between a nation-state and a church where asylum seekers themselves play a side role.