Transnationalism and Religion: Exploring Transnational Religious Configurations

Abstract

This review develops a configurational account of the relationship between religion and transnationalism by addressing a specific analytical limitation in the existing literature: its tendency to oscillate between substantializing religious traditions as already constituted entities that move across borders and segmenting transnational religion into disconnected domains such as networks, migrant communities, diasporic identities, institutions, political mobilization, digital mediation, social support, or pilgrimage. While these approaches have generated substantial empirical insight, they leave undertheorized the relational formation through which religious authority, practice, identity, material circulation, symbolic boundary-making, institutional organization, and mediated presence are assembled and made socially effective across multiple scales. To clarify this problem, the review reconstructs scholarship on religion and transnationalism through five major thematic domains: transnational religious networks, religious identity in transnational contexts, religion as a catalyst of transnationalism, the embedding of religion in transnational social practices, and distinctive forms of transnational religion. This reconstruction shows that transnational religious phenomena are inadequately understood as the spatial extension of pre-given traditions, as residual expressions of ethnicity or migration, or as discrete networks, movements, institutions, or diasporic communities. They are better grasped as historically contingent and relationally ordered formations whose temporary coherence is produced through the interaction of actors, authorities, practices, discourses, infrastructures, legal-regulatory environments, memories, obligations, and material flows. Building on the concept of social configuration, the review therefore proposes transnational religious configurations as a more precise unit of analysis for studying how the religious and the transnational are mutually constituted rather than externally connected. It defines such configurations as historically specific formations in which religious categories, institutions, practices, authorities, material resources, symbolic boundaries, and cross-border conditions of possibility are articulated across local, national, transnational, and global scales. The review operationalizes this approach through three analytical levels—conditions of possibility, construction and characteristics, and social realities and consequences—and illustrates its explanatory purchase by examining a new phenomenon within the contemporary transnational revival of Shi‘i Islam.

1. Introduction

The relationship between religion and transnationalism has become increasingly visible across a wide range of social processes, including migration, diaspora formation, digital communication, political mobilization, humanitarian exchange, pilgrimage, and the reorganization of collective identities across borders [1,2,3,4]. Yet the growing empirical visibility of these processes has not been matched by an equally precise analytical language. Although a substantial body of scholarship has examined religion in cross-border settings, the field remains marked by a basic conceptual difficulty: religion is often treated either as a bounded cultural or national inheritance carried by migrants across borders, or as a secondary variable embedded in other transnational processes such as migration, integration, ethnicity, or globalization [5,6,7]. What is still insufficiently clarified is how the religious itself is reconstituted through transnational relations, and conversely, how transnational social formations are shaped, mediated, and sometimes generated by religious actors, practices, institutions, and imaginaries [2,8,9,10].

This problem is not merely empirical; it is fundamentally analytical. Much of the literature has produced important insights into particular aspects of the relationship between religion and transnationalism—religious networks, diasporic identities, migrant congregations, digital communities, political activism, or transnational ritual practices [2,3,8,11,12,13,14]. However, these studies have often proceeded through fragmented thematic or case-specific lenses that do not adequately theorize the relational unity of the phenomenon under study. In many cases, religion appears as one domain among others within migration studies; in others, transnationalism functions only as background context for the study of religious adaptation [7,15]. As a result, the mutual constitution of the religious and the transnational frequently remains underconceptualized. The central problem, therefore, is not the absence of research on religion and transnationalism, but the absence of an analytical framework capable of grasping their co-constitution without reducing one to the derivative effect of the other.

This difficulty is intensified by the persistence of methodological assumptions that continue to structure large parts of the field. Studies of religion have often remained implicitly tied to nation-state containers, fixed communal boundaries, and territorially bounded understandings of identity, authority, and belonging. Even when scholars explicitly address cross-border phenomena, the categories through which they interpret them often remain shaped by methodological nationalism, statism, and other essentialist or given assumptions and categories [16,17,18,19]. Conversely, studies of transnationalism have often kept religion at the periphery of transnational analysis, where it is reduced to an instrument of ethnic continuity, migrant incorporation, or community support [5,6,7]. Such tendencies obscure the fact that religious life in transnational settings exceeds the simple extension of a pre-existing entity into a new environment. Rather, transnational settings often transform the very meanings, boundaries, institutional forms, and social effects of religion itself [12,20,21,22].

This review argues that the field requires a more precise problematization of the relationship between the religious and the transnational. More specifically, it asks how existing scholarship has conceptualized the transformation of religious practices, institutions, identities, and forms of belonging in transnational contexts; which dimensions of this relationship have been illuminated and which have remained theoretically underdeveloped; and how these dispersed insights might be reorganized within a more robust analytical framework. The task of this review, therefore, is not simply to synthesize the existing literature, but to reconstruct its main lines of inquiry, identify its underlying conceptual limits, and clarify the conditions under which a more adequate framework becomes necessary. In this sense, the review approaches the field as an emerging and still insufficiently consolidated area of inquiry whose epistemological and methodological foundations remain contested [15,18,19,23].

The review engages the broader body of scholarship on religion and transnationalism from the 1990s to the present. This longer temporal scope is important because it allows us to trace both the emergence and the subsequent transformation of the field of transnational studies in general, and of its relation to religion in particular: from its early efforts to move beyond nationally bounded understandings of migration, identity, and community, and to establish itself as a new analytical framework within global studies for examining emerging transnational phenomena and global forces [16,18,24]; through the period in which transnationalism studies faced sustained criticism and relative decline with the rise of competing explanatory paradigms; and finally to its more recent return and reconstruction in response to digital mediation, intensified global interdependence, new forms of mobility and immobility, political polarization, and the reconfiguration of religion under conditions of uncertainty and cosmopolitanization [3,4,23,25,26,27]. Approaching the literature across this extended period makes it possible not only to identify enduring themes and conceptual continuities, but also to examine shifts in problematics, analytical vocabularies, and empirical emphases over time.

Against this background, this review develops two interconnected objectives. First, it offers a systematic reconstruction of the literature on religion and transnationalism by organizing it into five major thematic domains: transnational religious networks; religious identity in transnational contexts; religion as a catalyst for transnationalism; the intertwining of religion and transnational social practices; and distinctive forms of transnational religion. This reconstruction identifies the field’s major contributions while also showing the recurrent conceptual limits of its dominant units of analysis. Second, building on these findings and drawing on the concept of social configuration, the review proposes transnational religious configurations as a more adequate framework for studying the interweaving of the religious and the transnational [19,28,29]. The argument is that transnational religious phenomena are neither fixed extensions of pre-given religious traditions and entities nor merely contingent by-products of migration or globalization. They are better understood as historically specific and relationally organized formations in which actors, institutions, discourses, practices, categories, identities, authorities, material flows, symbolic boundaries, and cross-border conditions of possibility are configured and reconfigured across multiple scales. What is at stake, therefore, is not simply a new label for existing phenomena, but a different analytical orientation: one that treats the religious and the transnational as mutually constitutive dimensions of emergent social formations rather than as separate domains subsequently brought into relation [23,27,28,29,30]. To anchor this orientation operationally, the review illustrates the configurational approach through a worked empirical case—a new phenomenon within the contemporary transnational revival of Shi‘i Islam—showing how the framework reconstructs a complex religious formation that alternative concepts such as network, diaspora religion, transnational movement, or global religion capture only partially.

The review proceeds as follows. Following a brief conceptual and methodological review, the next section reconstructs the literature through five major thematic clusters and identifies the principal ways in which the relationship between religion and transnationalism has been conceptualized. The subsequent section examines the limitations of these approaches and develops the theoretical rationale for a configurational perspective. It then outlines the conditions of possibility, construction, and consequences of transnational religious configurations as a more precise analytical framework, and demonstrates its operational purchase through the empirical illustration noted above.

2. The Religious and the Transnational: Mapping the Field

The relationship between the religious and the transnational has generated a broad and increasingly differentiated body of scholarship. This literature has emerged at the intersection of several overlapping debates: the critique of nationally bounded models of society, migration, and identity; the rise of transnationalism as a distinct analytical paradigm; the reconsideration of religion in the context of globalization; and, more recently, renewed efforts to understand religion under conditions of digital mediation, global interdependence, uncertainty, and cosmopolitanization [1,8,16,18,23,24]. Taken together, these developments have made it increasingly difficult to treat religion as a territorially bounded phenomenon or as a residual cultural variable contained within the framework of the nation-state. At the same time, they have also revealed that the transnational cannot be adequately understood without attending to the constitutive roles played by religious actors, institutions, practices, discourses, and imaginaries.

Yet this field has not developed in a linear or theoretically unified manner. Rather, scholarship on religion and transnationalism has expanded through a dispersed accumulation of case studies, middle-range concepts, and empirically grounded interventions that often illuminate specific dimensions of the relationship without fully theorizing their broader analytical interconnections. Some studies have foregrounded migration and diaspora as the primary sites in which religion travels, adapts, and persists; others have emphasized global religious networks, transnational activism, digital mediation, or new forms of belonging that exceed nationally bounded frameworks [2,4,8,9,10,11]. As a result, the field is rich in empirical insight but uneven in conceptual consolidation. What has emerged is not a single coherent theory of the religious and the transnational, but an internally differentiated body of work structured by multiple problematics, scales of analysis, and disciplinary vocabularies.

This unevenness is particularly important because it reflects a deeper epistemological tension at the heart of the field. On the one hand, the critique of methodological nationalism and nation-state-centred social analysis opened an important space for rethinking religious life across borders [16,17,18,19]. On the other hand, many studies continued to rely—explicitly or implicitly—on fixed categories such as migrant community, ethnic religion, diasporic continuity, homeland orientation, or host-society adaptation. These categories undoubtedly capture important aspects of empirical reality, but they often risk stabilizing what are in fact contingent, shifting, and relational processes. The field has therefore oscillated between descriptive expansion and conceptual containment: it has documented an increasingly wide range of religiously inflected transnational processes, while often lacking a sufficiently flexible framework for grasping how these processes are configured, transformed, and relationally articulated.

This issue becomes even more pronounced in the contemporary global context. The current conjuncture is marked not only by intensified cross-border interdependence, but also by uncertainty, polarization, digital connectivity, institutional destabilization, and new forms of simultaneity and mediated presence. In such a context, older categories of social analysis often lose part of their explanatory capacity, becoming what Beck terms “zombie categories”, that is, concepts that continue to circulate analytically even though the social realities to which they once corresponded have been profoundly transformed [25,26]. This condition has significant implications for the study of religion. Religion no longer appears only as a tradition located within stable territorial, communal, or national containers; it increasingly emerges through mobile, mediated, multilayered, and relational formations that connect actors, institutions, practices, and symbolic worlds across uneven spaces and scales [25,26,27,28,29]. To study religion in such a context requires more than adding cross-border examples to older models; it requires rethinking the unit of analysis through which the relationship between the religious and the transnational is approached.

It is against this background that the present literature review proceeds. Rather than treating the existing scholarship as a homogeneous body of work, this section reconstructs it as a differentiated field organized around recurring thematic problematics. The aim is not merely reviewing and classifying. The thematic mapping developed here is intended to identify the principal analytical pathways through which the relationship between religion and transnationalism has been studied, to clarify what each pathway makes visible, and to show where each remains conceptually limited. In this sense, the review is both synthetic and diagnostic: synthetic insofar as it brings together diverse strands of scholarship across the period from the 1990s to the present, and diagnostic insofar as it identifies the conceptual fragmentation and asymmetries that continue to structure the field.

Accordingly, the literature is organized into five major thematic domains: transnational religious networks; religious identity in transnational contexts; religion as a catalyst for transnationalism; the intertwining of religion and transnational social practices; and distinctive forms of transnational religion. These domains do not represent mutually exclusive or self-enclosed areas of research. On the contrary, they frequently overlap, intersect, and presuppose one another. Their value lies in their heuristic function: they allow us to reconstruct the main directions along which the field has developed and to identify the shifting analytical vocabularies through which the religious and the transnational have been conceptualized. By moving through these domains, this review highlights both the cumulative contributions of the literature and the absence of a framework capable of adequately theorizing the relational co-constitution of religion and transnationalism across these different registers.

The argument that gradually emerges from this review is that the literature, despite its diversity, repeatedly points toward a common insight that it does not fully conceptualize: namely, that transnational religious phenomena are neither simple extensions of pre-given religious traditions across space nor merely contextual outcomes of migration, globalization, or diaspora. Rather, they appear as historically contingent and relationally produced formations whose meanings, institutional forms, internal hierarchies, social effects, and boundaries are continuously reworked under transnational conditions. This is precisely the point at which the limits of the existing literature become most visible and where the need for a configurational approach begins to emerge.

Methodologically, this review proceeds through a structured engagement with the literature on religion and transnationalism published from the 1990s to the present, with particular attention to works that directly address cross-border religious practices, institutions, identities, networks, authorities, material flows, and forms of belonging. The corpus was identified primarily through Google Scholar and supplemented by targeted searches in JSTOR and leading journals in migration studies, globalization studies, religious studies, and the social sciences. Keyword sets were designed to correspond to the main analytical domains of the review. They combined general field terms such as “religion and transnationalism,” “transnational religion,” “religion and migration,” “diaspora religion,” “migrant religion,” “global religion,” and “religious globalization” with more specific terms related to the major dimensions of transnational religious formation: “transnational religious networks,” “religious diaspora,” “migrant congregations,” “transnational religious identity,” “religious authority,” “religious institutions,” “religious practice,” “lived religion,” “digital religion,” “online religious communities,” “pilgrimage,” “religious tourism,” “religious remittances,” “faith-based transnationalism,” “religion and social support,” “religion and political mobilization,” “religion and integration,” and “religion and boundary-making.” These searches were further refined through tradition- and case-specific terms, including “Islam,” “Shi‘i Islam,” “Shi‘ism,” “Christianity,” “Pentecostalism,” “Hinduism,” “Buddhism,” “diasporic Islam,” “transnational Shi‘ism,” “global ummah,” “African diaspora churches,” “South Asian diaspora religion,” and “Chinese Christian diaspora.” Finally, theoretical and methodological searches included “methodological nationalism,” “transnational social field,” “social configuration,” “religious configuration,” “figuration,” “relational sociology,” “religious authority,” “symbolic boundaries,” “cosmopolitanization,” and “post-foundationalism.” Inclusion criteria were threefold: (i) the work explicitly engaged the relationship between religion and cross-border or transnational processes; (ii) the work was peer-reviewed, including journal articles, monographs from academic publishers, and major edited volumes, or, where institutionally significant, an authoritative report such as Pew Research Center publications; and (iii) the work either advanced a theoretical claim about the religion–transnationalism relationship or provided a substantive empirical analysis grounded in field research, comparative analysis, or systematic data. Studies that treated religion only incidentally to nationally or locally bounded phenomena, and works without empirical or theoretical engagement with cross-border religious processes, were excluded.

After the corpus had been assembled, the selected works were analyzed through a layered thematic analysis. First, they were coded according to the main empirical and analytical dimensions through which the literature has approached religion and transnationalism: cross-border networks, identity formation, religiously generated mobility and solidarity, embedded social practices, institutional and digital mediation, pilgrimage, material circulation, authority, and boundary-making. Second, these thematic clusters were read comparatively in order to examine how each strand defines its unit of analysis, what aspects of the religion–transnationalism relationship it makes visible, and where its explanatory reach remains limited. Third, the analysis moved from thematic classification to conceptual reconstruction by tracing the relations among these clusters and identifying the recurrent problem that cuts across them: the tendency to isolate networks, identities, practices, institutions, movements, or diasporic communities as separate analytical objects, rather than reconstructing how they are relationally assembled within concrete transnational religious formations. On this basis, the review uses thematic analysis not merely as a classificatory device, but as a step toward developing a configurational framework capable of grasping the mutual constitution of religious categories, authorities, practices, material flows, symbolic boundaries, and cross-border conditions of possibility.

Before describing the corpus and procedure, it is necessary to clarify the kind of review this article performs and the methodological tradition that underwrites that choice. The task here is to identify the conceptual architecture of a fragmented interdisciplinary field, expose its analytical limits, and propose a new orientation. Following the typology developed by Grant and Booth, the closest fit is a critical-integrative review, a category whose distinctive contribution lies in moving beyond description toward conceptual innovation and the derivation of new analytical frameworks [31]. Torraco’s account is methodologically central here, since he treats the integrative literature review as a distinctive form of research whose purpose is precisely to generate new conceptualizations from a body of dispersed and partially incommensurable studies [32], an orientation that Snyder’s wider mapping of literature-review methodologies further codifies as a research methodology in its own right, with explicit procedural standards regarding scope, corpus identification, inclusion logic, and analytical synthesis [33]. Within this broader landscape, the present review is best characterized as a meta-narrative configurative synthesis, drawing on two converging methodological traditions: meta-narrative review, as developed by Wong, Greenhalgh, and colleagues, designed for fields where different research traditions have constructed contrasting “storylines” about a shared topic and which proceeds by reconstructing those storylines and their epistemic assumptions [34]; and configurative rather than aggregative synthesis, as formalized by Gough, Oliver, and Thomas, which builds knowledge by arranging findings from heterogeneous studies into a conceptual map rather than pooling them into a single answer [35]. The field of religion and transnationalism studies, with its multiple disciplinary genealogies, mid-range concepts, and unresolved theoretical tensions, sits squarely within the kind of intellectual terrain for which these two traditions were developed.

This methodological grounding is continuous with the way major reviews in the field itself have proceeded. Levitt and Jaworsky’s foundational Annual Review of Sociology article on transnational migration studies set an influential precedent by moving from descriptive synthesis to the identification of conceptual fault-lines and shifting analytical vocabularies across two decades of scholarship [18]; Cadge and Ecklund’s review of immigration and religion did similar work in mapping how a fragmented field had configured its central object [7]; Bava’s Annual Review of Anthropology synthesis of migration-religion studies reconstructed competing analytical orientations rather than tabulating findings [36]; Frederiks treated religion, migration, and identity through a critical-conceptual lens aimed at clarifying their underlying assumptions [15]; and Sheringham and Villares-Varela’s recent synthesis of religion and transnational (im)mobilities reads the field for its theoretical patterns and unresolved problems rather than for aggregable conclusions [37]. The present review takes its place within this established methodological tradition while making one further move: it treats the methodological choice as analytically continuous with the substantive theoretical commitment that the review will eventually advance. A configurative interpretive methodology is methodologically homologous with the configurational analytical orientation that the article develops toward its object of study. An aggregative methodology would have to begin by stabilizing the categories under which studies are pooled—“diaspora religion,” “transnational network,” “migrant congregation,” “religious identity”—and would thereby foreclose precisely the question that the review needs to keep open, namely how those categories are themselves produced, contested, and reconfigured in different research traditions [16,17,18,19]. A configurative interpretive methodology, by contrast, allows the review to track how categories travel differently across these traditions, where they generate explanatory traction, where they conceal relational complexity, and how they might be reorganized within a more adequate analytical framework. In this sense, the methodology is internal to the argument: the way the literature is read prepares the ground on which the concept of transnational religious configurations becomes defensible.

2.1. Transnational Religious Networks

Transnational religious networks constitute one of the most productive entry points for analyzing the relationship between the religious and the transnational. They make visible the organizational, symbolic, and practical infrastructures through which religious ideas, authorities, resources, obligations, and forms of belonging circulate across borders. What the literature repeatedly shows is that these networks should not be reduced to passive channels of cultural preservation. Rather, they operate as dynamic relational formations through which religious continuity, institutional adaptation, identity maintenance, political mobilization, financial transfer, and regulatory negotiation are simultaneously organized [8,9,10,11]. In this sense, transnational religious networks are analytically important not only because they connect dispersed actors and communities, but because they reveal how religion itself is reproduced, transformed, and strategically re-situated under transnational conditions [38,39,40].

2.1.1. Religious Continuity and Cultural Identity

A first major line of research examines how transnational religious networks sustain religious continuity and cultural identity across dispersed social settings. Levitt’s seminal study of Dominican migrants remains foundational here, showing that cross-border religious ties are sustained through reciprocal circulations of practices, symbols, moral expectations, and material support linking migrants and home communities [8]. In this literature, religious institutions appear not merely as sites of worship, but as infrastructures of continuity through which memory, belonging, and collective identity are reproduced across space. Adogame develops this point in relation to African diaspora churches in Europe, demonstrating that such churches function simultaneously as nodes of homeland attachment and as sites of localized adaptation in the host society [38]. Similar dynamics are visible in Csordas’s work on Catholic Charismatic networks, where transnational religious circulation fosters both spiritual cohesion and a broader sense of belonging that exceeds national boundaries [10]. Louër extends this insight to the Shi‘i field, showing that transnational Shi‘i politics in the Gulf is organized through clerical, seminary, and family networks that hold dispersed communities together as a single religio-political field rather than as separate national congregations [39]. Cesari, in turn, demonstrates that contemporary Muslim transnational formations operate through layered institutional and symbolic ties that link local communities to broader religio-political imaginaries beyond any single state [40]. Baffelli and Reader, working on Japanese new religious movements, show how organizational reach and media infrastructures sustain transnational coherence even after periods of crisis and reputational rupture [41]. Recent scholarship has reinforced this line of argument by showing that migrant and second-generation religiosity can remain robust, and in some cases intensify, across European contexts, thereby reshaping the religious landscape of host societies rather than merely surviving within them [42]. Read together, these studies suggest that continuity in transnational religious networks should not be understood as simple preservation; it is a relational achievement produced through ongoing cross-border reproduction of identity, authority, and communal attachment.

2.1.2. Adaptability and the Reconfiguration of Religious Practice

A second sub-theme concerns the adaptability of transnational religious networks and the ways in which religious practices are reconfigured as they move across social, cultural, and technological environments. Hagan and Ebaugh, in their study of Guatemalan and Salvadoran Pentecostal churches in Houston, show that transnational churches remain viable precisely because they do not simply replicate homeland forms; rather, they reorganize leadership, services, and congregational practices in response to migrant needs [13]. This adaptive capacity has become even more pronounced in digitally mediated environments. Campbell conceptualizes “digital religion” as an extension of networked religious life in which online and offline practices are deeply intertwined [3], while Hoover and Echchaibi demonstrate how digital mediation generates “third spaces” where religious circulation, reception, and community formation are reorganized through the interplay of producers and audiences [4]. Baffelli and Reader similarly show how Japanese new religious movements use media infrastructures to maintain transnational reach and institutional coherence after public controversy [41]. In a different but complementary register, Bano and Kalmbach demonstrate that changing forms of Islamic authority and women’s participation in mosque life reshape ritual leadership in diasporic settings, while Baumann and Wilke show how diasporic Hindu temples reorganize ritual calendars, institutional functions, and community activities to balance authenticity and innovation under new social conditions [22,43]. More recent work suggests that digital media do not merely supplement older religious networks but can actively reshape religious authority, practice, and doctrinal influence across borders. Amit’s study of UK–Bangladesh diasporic ties, for example, shows that social media, family trust, and remittance flows work together as mechanisms through which diaspora networks affect religious practice in Sylhet [44]. The broader implication is that transnational religious networks persist through transformation: their durability lies less in formal continuity than in their ability to reassemble religious practice under new communicative, social, and spatial conditions.

2.1.3. Political and Social Activism in Transnational Networks

A third body of scholarship highlights the political and civic capacities of transnational religious networks. Here the central point is that religious networks do not simply preserve identities; they also organize claims, solidarities, and forms of intervention that travel across borders. Vásquez and Marquardt show this clearly in relation to Latin American Pentecostalism in the United States, where religious networks connect spiritual life to immigrant advocacy, labor concerns, and community organizing [9]. Mandaville’s analysis of the global ummah similarly demonstrates how transnational Muslim networks generate a political and moral imagination of solidarity that exceeds national membership [11]. Subsequent research on transnational Islamic formations and diaspora religious politics has further shown that these networks function as channels of authority, mobilization, and social cohesion: Levitt traces how religious institutions extend civic and political action across borders [2]; Louër documents how Shi‘i clerical and political networks link local mobilizations in the Gulf to wider religio-political fields [39]; Cesari analyzes how political Islam articulates religion, secularism, and democratic claims across multiple state contexts [40]; and Bano and Kalmbach show how women’s mosque participation reconfigures the gendered politics of authority within transnational Islamic communities [43]. More recent studies have extended this perspective by showing how transnational religious networks participate in governance, displacement, and contestation. Agensky, for instance, examines the formation of transnational religious networks in contexts of refugee displacement and post-conflict reintegration, showing how faith-based actors connect diasporic populations, NGOs, and public institutions in ways that generate new forms of political agency [45]. Kurt, in a different register, illustrates how transnational mosque networks in Europe can become arenas in which homeland governmentalities, nationalist projects, and internal Muslim critiques are negotiated and contested [46]. Taken together, this literature shows that transnational religious networks are politically consequential not only because they mobilize people, but because they organize moral authority, collective identification, and cross-border repertoires of action in ways that reconfigure the public significance of religion itself [47,48].

2.1.4. Economic Dimensions of Religious Networks

The literature also identifies the economic dimension of transnational religious networks as a distinct but internally related axis of analysis. These networks frequently organize and legitimize the circulation of money, charity, remittances, and institutional support between diasporic communities and places of origin. Earlier studies emphasized the role of religious institutions as trusted intermediaries in financial transfer and community support: Levitt documents how religious obligation organizes cross-border giving among Dominican migrants [8]; Orsi shows how lived religious practice anchors material support within everyday devotional life [21]; Orozco demonstrates that migrant remittances often flow through religiously inflected community institutions [49]; and Levitt and Lamba-Nieves further show that “social remittances” extend beyond money to include religiously informed norms, practices, and institutional models [50]. Eade and Garbin extend this insight by showing that religious networks among Polish and Congolese diasporas in Britain connect economic exchange, sacred spatialization, and entrepreneurial support across pilgrimage and congregational sites [51]. What is increasingly clear in recent research is that such financial circulations are not merely economic transactions; they are morally coded, relationally mediated, and often inseparable from religious obligation and authority. Erdal, for example, shows how remittances and transnational Islamic charity overlap within broader transnational social fields, complicating any sharp distinction between familial support, religious giving, and moral economy [52]. Amit likewise demonstrates that remittance flows may directly sustain religious institutions and shape local religious change [44]. Seen in this way, the economic dimension of transnational religious networks is analytically significant because it reveals how material transfer, trust, obligation, and symbolic legitimacy become intertwined in the reproduction of cross-border religious life. Economic exchange is therefore not external to transnational religion; it is one of the practical forms through which religious networks are maintained, expanded, and socially anchored.

2.1.5. Navigating Regulatory Environments

A final strand of scholarship examines how transnational religious networks persist by negotiating the regulatory, institutional, and boundary-making environments of host societies. This theme shifts attention from internal continuity to the external conditions under which religious networks can operate, expand, and claim legitimacy. Levitt and Jaworsky already noted that transnational formations are shaped by the legal and institutional contexts through which cross-border practices become possible or constrained [18]. Foner and Alba similarly pointed to the differentiated ways in which national contexts affect immigrant religious incorporation, treating religion as a potential bridge or barrier to inclusion depending on the receiving society’s institutional environment [48], while Hagan and Ebaugh showed that adaptation often involves practical reorganization in response to the legal and social environment of the host setting [13]. Recent research has sharpened this problem by focusing on boundary processes, state regulation, and minority religious agency. Koenig shows that religion and immigrant integration in Western Europe are structured by symbolic, social, and institutional boundary dynamics rather than by a simple opposition between religion and integration [53]. Zhao and Hoon’s study of a Chinese temple in Brunei Darussalam demonstrates how a religious institution adapts its practices and sustains transnational ties under restrictive state conditions, thereby preserving both orthodoxy and minority cultural identity [54]. Kurt further shows that transnational mosques in Europe are not simply places of worship but sites where state-linked projects, community authority, and competing Muslim imaginaries intersect [46]. Read alongside earlier work on innovation in institutional adaptation and newer studies of digitally extended religious organization, this literature suggests that the resilience of transnational religious networks depends not only on internal cohesion or symbolic depth, but on their capacity to negotiate differentiated regimes of visibility, legality, recognition, and control [3,43]. Regulatory environments, in this sense, are not merely external constraints; they are constitutive of how transnational religious networks take form, define their boundaries, and reproduce their authority.

2.2. Religious Identity in Transnational Contexts

Religious identity in transnational contexts constitutes a central analytical theme because it shifts attention from the organizational infrastructures of cross-border religion to the ways in which religion is lived, negotiated, transmitted, and re-signified by actors located across multiple social worlds. If transnational religious networks illuminate the channels through which religion circulates, the literature on religious identity shows how such circulation is subjectively appropriated, contested, and reworked in relation to belonging, difference, authority, memory, gender, and intergenerational continuity. Across this field, religious identity does not appear as a fixed inheritance passively carried across borders. Rather, it emerges as a relational and situational construction formed through encounters between homeland attachments, host-society expectations, communal institutions, and broader processes of boundary-making and cultural translation [2,5,55]. What is especially significant here is that transnational settings do not merely test pre-existing identities; they actively reshape the categories, repertoires, and social conditions through which religious self-understanding becomes possible.

2.2.1. Negotiation of Religious Identity

A first major line of research focuses on the negotiation of religious identity in transnational contexts. Here the key issue is how migrants and their descendants reconcile religious commitments with the social norms, public cultures, and institutional environments of host societies. Ebaugh and Chafetz, in their work on South Asian immigrants in the United States, show that religious institutions provide crucial spaces in which such negotiation takes place by enabling migrants to sustain familiar practices while adjusting to new social surroundings [5]. Levitt similarly demonstrates that Dominican migrants do not simply retain or abandon religion; rather, they rework religious identity through ongoing interactions between transnational religious networks and host-country influences [2]. Rogozen-Soltar’s study of Muslim migrants in Spain sharpens this point by showing how religious identity is negotiated under conditions of visibility, stigma, and Catholic-secular cultural dominance [55]. More recent scholarship has further emphasized that this negotiation often unfolds through situated forms of belonging rather than through a simple choice between “origin” and “destination”. Ratnam and Arambewela-Colley, for example, show how religious spaces among Sri Lankan migrants in Australia mediate diasporic belonging by linking memory, emplacement, and community formation [56], while Shabbir et al. demonstrate that Muslim emerging adults in Italy negotiate bicultural belonging through context-dependent articulations of ethnic, national, and religious identities [57]. Read together, these studies suggest that religious identity in transnational contexts is best understood as an ongoing practice of positioning: it is negotiated through institutions, everyday interactions, and boundary encounters that make religion both a resource of continuity and a medium of translation.

2.2.2. Transformation of Religious Practices and Identities

A second sub-theme concerns the transformation of religious practices and identities as they are displaced, translated, and reconstituted in new social environments. Earlier research by Ebaugh and Chafetz showed that immigrant religious communities in the United States adapt their rituals and institutional forms by selectively incorporating elements of the host context while retaining core traditions [58]. McAlister’s study of Haitian Vodou in the diaspora likewise illustrates how religious symbols and practices are transformed through migration, producing forms of religiosity that are neither simple reproductions of homeland religion nor complete assimilations to the host setting [20]. This line of argument is reinforced by Orsi, who insists that religious worlds are remade through lived practice and situated interpretation rather than merely transported intact [21]. Recent research on Hindu diasporas further develops this perspective. Baumann and Wilke show that diasporic Hindu temples balance authenticity and innovation by reorganizing ritual calendars, institutional functions, and community activities in ways that respond to the temporalities and social conditions of diasporic life [22]. Recent work on second-generation religiosity and transnational acculturation similarly indicates that religious transformation often involves selective reinterpretation rather than linear decline. Fleischmann et al., for example, distinguish between religiosity and religious orientations among Turkish Muslims in Germany and show that religion may remain salient even as its meanings and social implications shift in the context of integration [59]. What this literature makes clear is that transformation is not external to religious identity in transnational contexts; it is one of the main processes through which religious identity remains viable, intelligible, and socially effective across changing environments.

2.2.3. Maintenance of Religious Identity

A third body of scholarship examines the maintenance of religious identity across generations. The central concern here is not only whether religion survives migration, but how religious identities are reproduced, transmitted, and stabilized under conditions of dispersal, minority positioning, and social change. Vertovec’s work on Hindu communities in the United Kingdom remains important in this regard, showing how temples, festivals, and educational activities function as sites of religious reproduction and collective continuity [60]. Ebaugh and Chafetz similarly demonstrate that immigrant religious institutions in the United States play a key role in transmitting religious heritage to second-generation members by providing structured environments for ritual participation, learning, and communal memory [5]. More recent work has deepened this discussion by focusing more explicitly on intergenerational transmission as a negotiated rather than automatic process. Miglietta, El Brashy, and Ricucci, in their study of first-generation Muslim parents in Italy, show that religious transmission is shaped by acculturation, family strategy, and selective cultural negotiation; what is transmitted is not simply doctrine, but a multidimensional religious orientation recalibrated in relation to the host context [61]. Shen, working on Asian immigrant families in the United States, demonstrates quantitatively that parental religiosity remains an important factor in shaping second-generation adolescents’ adaptation, identity formation, and intergenerational relations [62]. At a broader European level, Guveli and Platt indicate that religious identification may remain particularly salient among migrants and their descendants when religion provides a durable source of continuity, boundary-marking, and transgenerational connection [42]. The cumulative implication of this literature is that the maintenance of religious identity in transnational contexts depends less on static preservation than on institutionalized and familial processes of rearticulation across generations.

2.2.4. Gender and Religious Identity

Gender constitutes another major axis through which religious identity in transnational settings has been analyzed. The literature here shows that religious identity is not negotiated in a socially neutral field; it is deeply shaped by gendered expectations, familial roles, embodied practices, and public discourses. Bano and Kalmbach demonstrate how changing forms of Islamic authority and women’s participation in mosque life reshape religious identity in diasporic settings [43]. Mahmood’s influential work, although not framed primarily through transnationalism, remains crucial because it shows that religious identity is enacted through gendered forms of discipline, agency, and ethical self-formation that cannot be reduced to liberal models of resistance or submission [63]. Rogozen-Soltar extends this line of insight in the context of Muslim migration in Spain, showing how gender mediates the visibility and negotiation of religious identity under secular and Catholic majoritarian norms [55]. More recent scholarship has sharpened the link between gender, stigma, and identity-making in European contexts. Koenig, for instance, situates the reproduction of Muslim religiosity within broader dynamics of symbolic and institutional boundary formation, helping explain why gendered religious identity can become especially salient in stigmatized minority settings [53]. Studies of Muslim women’s religiosity likewise continue to show that gender is not simply one variable among others; it is one of the principal sites through which religious belonging, respectability, moral authority, and public recognition are negotiated in transnational contexts [1,40]. In this sense, gender does not merely affect religious identity from the outside; it is constitutive of the forms through which religious identity is inhabited, displayed, and contested.

2.2.5. Hybrid Religious Identities

A final sub-theme focuses on hybrid religious identities. This literature explores how transnational actors combine, reinterpret, and selectively integrate elements associated with homeland traditions and host-society contexts in order to produce forms of religious identity that are neither wholly inherited nor fully assimilated. Eade and Garbin show this process in relation to Polish and Congolese communities in Britain, where religious identity is shaped through both diasporic attachment and British social life as well as through the spatial reorganization of pilgrimage and congregational life [51]. Leonard demonstrates that South Asian political action and representation in North America link religious identification to layered ethnic and civic affiliations that exceed any single category [64], while Sahoo and Sheffer’s collected work shows how diaspora consciousness and transnational networks among South Asian communities foster identities that are simultaneously religious, ethnic, and situationally reconfigured [65]. Singh’s discussion of Sikhs in the United Kingdom further illustrates how hybrid religious identity is formed through the interplay of continuity, adaptation, and minority positioning [66]. More recent scholarship has made this hybridity more analytically precise by emphasizing intersectionality and bicultural belonging. Shabbir et al., for example, show that Muslim emerging adults in Italy often move between integrated, parallel, and conflictual alignments among their ethnic, national, and religious identities rather than simply blending them into a stable synthesis [57]. Ratnam and Arambewela-Colley likewise suggest that diasporic religious spaces can produce layered forms of belonging in which memory, sacred practice, and social emplacement are intertwined [56]. Understood in this way, hybrid religious identity should not be reduced to a celebratory language of mixture. It is better conceived as a structured and contingent outcome of transnational life, produced through boundary negotiation, selective appropriation, and the uneven coexistence of multiple social and symbolic worlds [17].

2.3. Religion as a Catalyst for Transnationalism

Religion is treated in a significant strand of the literature not merely as something carried through transnational processes, but as a generative force that actively catalyzes them. This perspective marks an important analytical shift. Rather than approaching religion only as an outcome of migration, diaspora, or cross-border circulation, these studies show how religious commitments, institutions, moral obligations, and symbolic universes can themselves initiate mobility, organize transnational linkages, sustain cross-border attachments, and structure forms of solidarity and integration. Historically, religions long preceded the nation-state as vehicles of mobility, community formation, and territorial transcendence. In contemporary conditions, this catalytic role becomes visible in more differentiated ways: religion may motivate migration, provide the infrastructures through which migration becomes possible, generate identities that exceed national boundaries, organize material support across dispersed communities, and produce the forms of cohesion through which transnational life becomes socially durable [2,6,10,11]. In this sense, religion appears not simply as one variable within transnationalism, but as one of the forces through which transnational realities are assembled, stabilized, and normatively sustained.

2.3.1. Religious Motivations for Migration and Transnational Mobilization

A first line of research examines religion as a direct or indirect motivation for migration and cross-border mobilization. In its most explicit form, this argument appears in studies of religious persecution, where migration is driven by the search for freedom of worship, physical safety, or the possibility of life among co-religionists. Finke and Stark stress that persecution has historically driven Christian communities to relocate in order to secure religious freedom [67], while Fox provides broader comparative evidence on discrimination against religious minorities and its role in shaping mobility patterns [68]. Recent syntheses on religion and forced migration have reinforced this point: Goździak and Main, for example, argue that religion intersects with mobility at multiple moments, from persecution and displacement to endurance, meaning-making, and post-migration reorientation [69]. Recent Pew Research Center reports show that government restrictions on religion remain high globally and that religion continues to be closely connected to migration, including in cases involving religious persecution [70]. Beyond persecution, religion can also function as a motivational horizon through which migration is imagined as vocation, mission, ethical obligation, or access to a morally meaningful life. Van Tubergen shows that religiosity may shape both migration-related dispositions and post-migration religious participation across multiple Western countries and within secular receiving contexts [71,72]. More recent work suggests that religiosity can affect migration intentions by shaping perceived risks, aspirations, and moral orientations: Hirschman emphasizes how religious affiliation already structures the early origins of immigrant adaptation [6]; Haynes documents how religion and politics intertwine in African migratory and mobilization dynamics [73]; and Kırkıç, in a study of the MENA region, argues that religious identity and perceptions of religious freedom function as intangible determinants of migration aspirations alongside economic and political factors [74]. Taken together, this literature shows that religion does not merely accompany migration after the fact; in many cases, it helps supply the justificatory and affective grounds upon which mobility becomes thinkable and actionable.

2.3.2. Religion Facilitating Migration Through Transnational Support Networks

A second sub-theme shifts from motivation to facilitation and examines how religious institutions and networks make migration practically possible. Here religion appears as infrastructure: it provides information, housing, emotional support, social trust, logistical assistance, and institutional mediation before, during, and after movement. Hirschman remains foundational in showing how religious institutions assist immigrants in adaptation and settlement by offering practical services alongside symbolic comfort [6]. Cadge and Ecklund further demonstrate that immigrant religious organizations often operate as support structures that extend across borders and across stages of migration [7]. Min likewise shows that congregational networks among Korean immigrants provide belonging, information, and everyday support that reduce the uncertainty of migration and settlement, and that they continue to anchor ethnic continuity across generations [75,76]. In a broader theoretical register, Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton and Levitt and Glick Schiller help clarify why such networks matter: they form part of wider transnational social fields through which resources, obligations, and opportunities circulate [16,17]. Religious networks, in this sense, often operate as a form of social capital that lowers the costs of mobility and increases the probability of successful incorporation: Portes shows how social capital generated within communal institutions functions as a relational resource that channels trust and obligation [77], while Massey and colleagues situate such network-mediated dynamics within broader theories of international migration [78]. Recent work continues to affirm this catalytic role. Sheringham and Villares-Varela synthesize a large body of migration-and-religion research and stress that religion can shape the initial decision to migrate, the journey itself, and migrants’ emplacement in new contexts, especially under hostile policy environments [37]. Religion thus facilitates transnationalism not only by connecting migrants to pre-existing communities, but by building the very relational infrastructures through which mobility becomes viable.

2.3.3. Religion as a Source of Transnational Identity

A third body of scholarship focuses on religion as a source of transnational identity. The central claim here is that religion may provide migrants and diasporic actors with a durable horizon of belonging that is not exhausted by either homeland nationalism or host-society incorporation. Mandaville’s analysis of the global ummah remains central: it shows how Muslim identity can be organized through a religious imaginary that exceeds territorial state membership and creates a sense of transnational moral community [11]. Frederiks similarly argues that religion can become a key medium through which migrants negotiate identity and continuity across different social worlds [15]. Ammerman, though more broadly concerned with lived religion, reinforces the insight that religious identity often works through everyday practices that connect people to wider communities of meaning beyond immediate locality [79]. Pollack and Rosta provide a comparative empirical mapping in which religion remains a salient axis of differentiation across modern societies, including among migrant populations [80], while Cohen’s typology of global diasporas situates religion among the principal symbolic resources through which dispersed communities sustain translocal belonging [81]. New studies suggest that such transnational identification is not simply inherited but actively reproduced in contemporary diasporic settings through religious spaces, mediated attachments, and minority boundary-making. Ratnam and Arambewela-Colley, for example, show how religious spaces among Sri Lankan migrants in Australia function as sites where diasporic belonging is articulated across homeland memory and local emplacement [56]. Guveli and Platt also indicate that religiosity among migrants and their descendants in Western Europe remains a salient marker of difference and continuity, often with transnational implications for belonging and self-understanding [42]. Read together, these studies show that religion can operate as a source of transnational identity because it offers a portable but socially organized framework of belonging that links dispersed communities without requiring a singular territorial anchor.

2.3.4. Religious Networks, Identity, and Economic Support

A fourth line of inquiry examines how religion catalyzes transnationalism through economic support that is inseparable from identity, trust, and moral obligation. Orozco shows that institutions rooted in migrant communities can channel remittances and financial support back to places of origin, thereby reinforcing transnational ties [49]. Kniss and Numrich extend this insight by demonstrating how religious donations and congregational giving help sustain transnational religious assemblages and civic participation among newer immigrant communities [82]. Portes and Rumbaut likewise show that migrant networks often provide access not only to immediate assistance but also to longer-term economic opportunity and intergenerational mobility [83]. This line of research is particularly important because it shows that religiously inflected economic support is not simply instrumental; it frequently works by mobilizing trust, obligation, and symbolic legitimacy. Light and Gold theorize ethnic economies as relational structures in which trust, kinship, and communal ties facilitate economic action [84], while Light and Bonacich’s earlier work on Korean immigrant entrepreneurs in Los Angeles documents how communal solidarities translate directly into economic infrastructure [85]. Nederveen Pieterse complements this picture by situating migrant economic life within broader processes of cultural mixing under globalization, showing how transnational economic practices articulate cultural and religious resources across hybrid fields [86]. Recent work has sharpened this point by showing that religion-based support can function as part of wider moral economies of migration, where remittances, charity, and communal aid sustain not only households but also religious infrastructures and identity formations across borders [37,52]. What emerges from this literature is that economic support should be understood as one of the practical mechanisms through which religion catalyzes transnationalism: it binds persons and communities across space while materializing the moral ties that make such connections durable.

2.3.5. Religion and Social Cohesion in Transnational Contexts

A final sub-theme considers religion as a catalyst of social cohesion in transnational settings. Here the emphasis falls on religion’s capacity to organize trust, mutual support, belonging, and intergenerational continuity within dispersed communities. Csordas shows that transnational religious practices can generate shared moral frameworks and collective attachments that sustain communities beyond territorial proximity [10]. Warner, in an earlier but still influential formulation, already pointed to religious institutions as mediating structures that help immigrants bridge the gap between cultural continuity and social incorporation [24]. Cadge and Ecklund similarly show that religious institutions often provide a space in which both first- and second-generation migrants negotiate belonging and connection [7]. Hirschman further underscores that religion helps produce both solidarity and practical community life in contexts marked by dislocation and uncertainty [6]. More recent research complicates but also reinforces this picture. Koenig argues that the relationship between religion and integration in Western Europe is mediated by symbolic, social, and institutional boundaries; religion can foster cohesion within migrant communities even when it is marked ambivalently in wider public discourse [53]. Guveli and Platt likewise suggest that continued religiosity among migrants may sustain internal cohesion and collective identity over time [42], while Raissi and Kappmeier contest the common assumption that strong religious commitment necessarily undermines broader integration, showing instead that religious salience can coexist with constructive forms of social adaptation among young Muslim immigrants [87]. In this literature, religion catalyzes transnationalism not only by moving people or resources, but by generating the social density through which dispersed communities become viable, recognizable, and enduring.

2.4. The Intertwining of Religion and Transnational Social Practices

If the previous cluster examined religion as a catalyst of transnational processes, the present cluster focuses on a different but related analytical problem: the extent to which religion is embedded in the very social practices through which transnational life is enacted. The central issue here is not simply whether religion motivates migration or sustains cross-border networks, but how religious beliefs, rituals, norms, institutions, and moral languages are woven into the everyday social, economic, political, cultural, and welfare practices of transnational communities. In this literature, religion does not stand alongside transnational social life as an external sphere; rather, it appears as one of the media through which that life is organized, interpreted, and reproduced. What emerges is a more practice-oriented understanding of the relationship between the religious and the transnational: religion shapes social action, but is also reshaped by the social settings, material constraints, and institutional fields in which transnational actors move [10,88,89,90]. Seen in this way, the intertwining of religion and transnational social practices reveals the everyday density of transnational religion: not only in identity or network formation, but in the practical organization of exchange, sociability, work, activism, cultural continuity, and care.

2.4.1. Religious Practices and Social Networks

A first line of research examines how religious practices are intertwined with the formation and maintenance of social networks in transnational settings. Menjívar shows that Salvadoran migrants in the United States use religious participation not only for worship, but also to sustain ties of reciprocity, information, and mutual support linking them to both co-ethnics and places of origin [88]. Levitt similarly demonstrates that religious institutions among Dominican migrants serve as spaces in which community gatherings, collective rituals, and everyday sociability generate durable social bonds across borders [89]. Wuthnow expands this perspective by showing how religious organizations often operate as social hubs that facilitate connection, recognition, and practical association among immigrants in host societies [90]. In these studies, religion is not merely a symbolic overlay on social relations; it is one of the practical settings in which social relations are produced and stabilized. New work reinforces this insight by showing that religious spaces continue to function as dense sites of relational belonging in contemporary diasporas. Ratnam and Arambewela-Colley, for example, show that religious spaces among Sri Lankan migrants in Australia are not just devotional settings but important nodes of diasporic sociability, attachment, and emplacement [56]. Du and Liu likewise suggest, in the context of Chinese Christians in New Zealand, that religious participation can foster social trust and strengthen communal bonds within immigrant settings [91]. Read together, this literature suggests that the social network dimension of transnational religion is not reducible to formal organization alone; it is enacted and renewed through religious practices that generate trust, recognition, and durable social connectedness, an insight that Ebaugh and Chafetz first systematized for new immigrant congregations [5] and that Vásquez and Williams sharpen by showing how religious identities in the Americas operate as social and political resources binding dispersed communities through shared practice and moral commitment [92].

2.4.2. Religion and Economic Practices

A second sub-theme addresses the intertwining of religion and economic practices. Here the literature shows that religious institutions and communities are often directly involved in the organization of economic life by mediating employment, entrepreneurship, credit, training, and mutual aid. Portes and Zhou already pointed to the role of immigrant organizations in economic mobility [93], while Wood showed that Latino churches in the United States often provide forms of material support and economic brokerage that extend beyond narrowly spiritual functions [94]. Choi’s work on Korean churches in Los Angeles further illustrates how congregational life can facilitate entrepreneurial networks, rotating credit associations, and trust-based cooperation [95]. These studies are complemented by research on ethnic economies and social capital, in which Min documents how Korean immigrant churches structure both spiritual and economic life across generations [75,76], and Light and Gold and Light and Bonacich theorize how communal trust translates into ethnic entrepreneurial infrastructures [84,85]. Connor sharpened this line of argument by explicitly conceptualizing religion as a resource for immigrant economic incorporation, showing that congregations may function as informal job markets, sites of leadership training, and spaces for the accumulation of economically useful social capital [96]. Recent work has extended the discussion beyond congregational support in settlement contexts to the organization of labor within transnational fields. Gallo and Scrinzi, for example, show that religion plays a multi-scalar role in migrant care work by shaping labor recruitment, moral evaluations, and the social organization of care across borders [97]. What this literature makes clear is that religion is intertwined with economic practice not only as a source of values, but as part of the concrete infrastructures through which economic action, cooperation, and mobility are made possible.

2.4.3. Religion and Political Engagement

A third body of work explores the intertwining of religion and political engagement in transnational settings. Levitt shows that religious organizations can mobilize members for political causes in both host countries and homelands, thereby linking migrant incorporation to cross-border public action [98]. Coddou similarly demonstrates that religious networks facilitate political participation among immigrant communities by creating spaces for discussion, recruitment, and collective action [99]. Mooney, in her work on the Haitian diaspora, underscores that religious organizations often provide the communal and moral grounding from which civic and political engagement becomes intelligible and desirable [100]. This literature is important because it shifts the analysis from religion as an identity marker to religion as a practical medium of civic activation. In this context, political engagement is not external to religious life; it is often organized through congregational routines, moral vocabularies, and institutional solidarities. New scholarship has deepened this practice-oriented perspective. Beyerlein and Rodriguez show that congregational context significantly shapes religious leaders’ political activism, indicating that political engagement is conditioned by the social environment of religious communities rather than by individual conviction alone [101]. Kerwin, writing on migrant-serving faith-based organizations, likewise shows that religious commitments can be translated into institutional advocacy, public witness, and practical engagement on behalf of migrants in an era of polarization and forced displacement [102]. Foley and Hoge similarly argue that religious institutions function as crucibles of civic incorporation in which immigrants acquire the dispositions, networks, and language of political engagement [103]. These studies together suggest that religion and political practice are intertwined insofar as religious institutions create the settings, languages, and obligations through which political engagement becomes collectively organized and socially sustained.

2.4.4. Religion and Cultural Practices

A fourth sub-theme addresses the intertwining of religion and cultural practices. Bankston and Zhou show that Vietnamese Catholic institutions in the United States function as repositories of culture as much as sites of worship, preserving rituals, values, and intergenerational continuity while also facilitating adaptation to new settings [104]. Yang and Ebaugh similarly show that Chinese Christian churches promote language, heritage, and cultural education alongside religious practice, thereby linking religion to wider processes of cultural reproduction [12]. Kurien and George further demonstrate that religious institutions often become sites in which migrants renegotiate the relationship between cultural continuity and social integration, with Kurien tracing the development of an “American Hinduism” that interweaves religious and cultural claims [105], and George documenting how gendered space within Indian immigrant churches reorganizes cultural belonging [106]. In this body of work, religion is intertwined with cultural practice because it provides forms, calendars, spaces, and authorities through which culture is preserved, taught, and reinvented. Recent scholarship has further specified this point. Lung, for example, shows how Taiwanese churches in the United States sustain ethnic identity formation by linking Christian community to historically sedimented forms of Taiwanese memory and belonging [107]. Ratnam and Arambewela-Colley similarly suggest that diasporic religious spaces are also cultural spaces in which memory, ritual, and community attachment become inseparable [56]. These studies indicate that religion and culture should not be analytically separated too quickly in transnational contexts: religion often serves as one of the principal practical media through which cultural life is carried, translated, and made durable across borders.

2.4.5. Religion and Social Services

A final line of inquiry examines the intertwining of religion and social services. Fetzer and Soper show that religious organizations in Europe often provide services that assist immigrant populations in navigating settlement, legal complexity, and social vulnerability [108]. Hondagneu-Sotelo demonstrates that Latino Catholic churches in Los Angeles provide health care, legal aid, and educational programs that directly address migrants’ everyday needs [109]. Ebaugh and Chafetz similarly show that immigrant religious organizations in Houston offer childcare, elder care, and welfare-related support, thereby functioning as institutional anchors for community well-being [5]. In this literature, religious institutions are not simply places of belief; they are active providers of care and mediation in contexts where state provision is partial, exclusionary, or difficult to access. Recent work has reinforced this practical dimension. Kerwin highlights the central role of migrant-serving faith-based organizations in providing accompaniment, advocacy, and institutional support to migrants under contemporary conditions of forced displacement and political hostility [102]. Adonteng-Kissi and colleagues likewise demonstrate that Christian religious participation can serve as a coping mechanism for migrants confronting mental health challenges in Australia, with significant implications for social work practice [110]. McMichael’s ethnographic study of Somali women in Melbourne shows how Islamic everyday practice—prayer, fasting, mutual aid—itself becomes a form of welfare addressing dislocation and exclusion [111], while Stepick, Rey, and Mahler demonstrate that immigrant churches in Miami operate as central nodes of charity and civic engagement linking spiritual obligation to concrete community provision [112]. What emerges from this literature is that religion is intertwined with transnational social services because care, welfare, and support are often embedded in religious institutions, moral obligations, and communal routines. Religion, in this sense, is not only a symbolic resource but part of the practical architecture of service provision through which transnational communities endure and reproduce themselves [88].

2.5. Distinctive Forms of Transnational Religion

A final major cluster in the literature moves beyond the analysis of networks, identity, or practice in isolation and focuses instead on distinctive forms of transnational religion as relatively specific configurations of religious life that emerge under cross-border conditions. The analytical importance of this cluster lies in the fact that it does not merely ask how religion circulates transnationally, but how transnational conditions generate recognizable forms of religiosity, organization, mediation, and sacred mobility that cannot be fully reduced to pre-existing national or local religious models. In this literature, transnational religion appears as an adaptive and often innovative formation: shaped by migration, media, diaspora, mobility, and institutional reassembly, yet also capable of producing relatively durable patterns of worship, movement, authority, and belonging. What distinguishes this cluster from the previous ones is its emphasis on form. Rather than treating religion simply as a factor within transnational processes, these studies identify specific transnational religious modalities—hybrid ritual forms, transnational movements, diasporic institutions, virtual communities, and pilgrimage circuits—that crystallize the interplay between mobility and religion into relatively distinct social and symbolic arrangements [3,12,113,114].

2.5.1. Transnational Religious Practices

A first line of research examines transnational religious practices as distinctive ritual and devotional forms produced through the encounter between homeland traditions and host-society conditions. Tweed’s work on Cuban Catholicism in Miami remains foundational here, showing how diasporic religious practice emerges through a creative blending of Catholic devotion, exile, memory, and Afro-Cuban religious elements [113]. Yang and Ebaugh similarly show that Chinese Christian communities in the United States develop forms of worship that combine Christian teaching with Chinese cultural repertoires, thereby producing practices that are neither simple reproductions nor assimilative departures [12]. Levitt and Vásquez and Marquardt further underscore that cross-border religious practices are sustained through circulation, translation, and situational adaptation rather than through static continuity alone [2,9]. More recent work reinforces this understanding by showing that diasporic religious spaces continue to produce distinctive forms of embodied and spatially situated worship. Ratnam and Arambewela-Colley, for example, demonstrate that religious spaces among Sri Lankan migrants in Australia operate as sites where practice, memory, and belonging are fused into specifically diasporic religious forms [56]. Shi’s work on maritime Chinese sea temples in the Indian Ocean similarly shows that religious practice becomes transnational through the layering of migration history, ritual continuity, and contested heritage politics [115]. Read together, these studies suggest that transnational religious practices are distinctive not simply because they travel, but because they are reconstituted through cross-border negotiations of ritual form, sacred meaning, and communal belonging.

2.5.2. Transnational Religious Movements

A second sub-theme concerns transnational religious movements: forms of organized religious expansion and circulation that link dispersed followers across multiple countries while generating shared repertoires of authority, spirituality, and community. Robbins identifies Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity as particularly important in this regard, emphasizing their extraordinary mobility, adaptability, and capacity to connect local religious life to global spiritual imaginaries [114]. Csordas makes a similar point in relation to the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, showing how a movement oriented around spiritual renewal becomes transnational through networks of circulation, ritual commonality, and shared religious aspiration [116]. Rajagopal likewise demonstrates that religious movements such as Hindu nationalist televisual culture can adapt to diasporic conditions while retaining a portable and recognizable spiritual core [117]. Coleman shows that the globalization of charismatic Christianity proceeds through the trans-local movement of doctrines, prosperity narratives, and devotional repertoires [118], while Bava traces how migration and religion in France have generated a distinctive religious anthropology of movement in which devotional intensity is rescaled across multiple settings [36]. More recent survey work on African Pentecostalism by Kaunda continues to stress that transnational religious movements are marked by a capacity for constant recombination across doctrinal, media, and spatial registers rather than by mere expansion into new territories [119]. What defines these movements, then, is not only their geographic spread, but the emergence of mobile religious formations able to sustain recognizable ritual, doctrinal, and organizational coherence across highly differentiated settings.

2.5.3. Transnational Religious Institutions

A third line of research focuses on transnational religious institutions. Here the emphasis falls on organizational forms that provide continuity, authority, and support across borders while adapting their internal structures to the needs of dispersed communities. Sánchez Walsh shows how Latino Pentecostal churches in the United States function as transnational institutions by connecting migrants to churches and communities in Latin America while simultaneously responding to local conditions of settlement and incorporation [120]. Wuthnow similarly demonstrates that Buddhist and Hindu temples in the United States often combine worship, social service, and cultural preservation in ways that make them institutionally transnational [90]. Beckford, Joly, and Khosrokhavar further show that Muslim mosques in Europe frequently operate not only as ritual centers but also as educational, legal, and social institutions for migrant populations, including in carceral contexts where institutional Islam responds to state regulation [121]. Truitt, Hien, and Cadge deepen this picture by showing how Vietnamese and Thai Buddhist temples sustain transnational ties while functioning as community anchors in the host society: Truitt traces the making of a Vietnamese Pure Land formation in the U.S. Gulf South [14], Hien documents the cultural-spiritual work of transnational spirits within the Vietnamese diaspora [122], and Cadge maps the institutional first generation of Theravada Buddhism in America [123]. New work strengthens the argument that such institutions are not merely transplanted religious organizations but distinct transnational formations. Zhao and Hoon, for example, show how a Chinese temple in Brunei sustains transnational religious connections while adapting to restrictive state conditions, thereby illustrating the institutional flexibility required for transnational religious continuity [54]. Show, in turn, demonstrates how gender politics and grassroots Buddhist associations have historically shaped the institutional life of transnational Chinese religion [124]. Taken together, this literature shows that transnational religious institutions are distinctive because they combine organizational durability with adaptive re-scaling across multiple legal, cultural, and communal environments.

2.5.4. Virtual Religious Communities

A fourth sub-theme addresses virtual religious communities, one of the clearest contemporary forms of transnational religion. Campbell’s work on digital religion remains pivotal in showing that online religious life is not a secondary supplement to offline practice but part of an integrated networked religious environment [3]. Dawson and Cowan, Helland, and O’Leary had already pointed to the internet’s capacity to generate religious communication, ritual participation, and forms of community beyond territorial proximity, with Dawson and Cowan mapping early online religious culture [125], Helland tracing how diaspora populations build virtual connections with sacred homelands [126], and O’Leary theorizing cyberspace itself as sacred space [127]. Hoover and Echchaibi extend this insight by showing how digital “third spaces” create new arenas of reception, circulation, and interaction through which religious belonging is mediated and reconfigured, particularly among younger populations [4]. Cheong and colleagues map how digital religion, social media, and culture intersect to produce new modalities of religious presence [128], while Bunt’s work on “iMuslims” shows how digital infrastructures rewire religious authority, debate, and community formation across the Muslim world [129]. More recent scholarship suggests that virtual communities are not merely technologically enhanced versions of older religious ties; they can constitute distinctive transnational forms in their own right by integrating mobility, mediation, and community formation into a single religious environment. Kazira and Pasura, for example, show that transnational Nigerian and Zimbabwean youth in the diaspora actively reconfigure religious authority and practice through digital platforms, blending homeland repertoires with new mediated forms [130]. Zhu, in a different register, argues that intangible cultural heritage—including religiously inflected forms—now circulates through transcultural digital governance regimes that exceed national heritage frameworks [131]. In this sense, virtual religion is distinctive not only because it is deterritorialized, but because it reorganizes presence, authority, ritual access, and community under digitally networked conditions.

2.5.5. Pilgrimage and Religious Tourism

A final body of scholarship examines pilgrimage and religious tourism as distinctive forms of transnational religious practice organized around sacred travel, ritual gathering, and the circulation of persons across religiously significant spaces. Eade and Sallnow show that pilgrimage sites are often contested sacred spaces in which different actors and meanings converge, making pilgrimage a particularly rich site for analyzing transnational religious dynamics [132]. Coleman and Eade reframe pilgrimage as a culturally productive form of mobility rather than a mere movement toward a fixed sacred center [133], while Morinis emphasizes how pilgrimage is socially organized to generate temporary communities, ritual intensity, and intercultural encounter [134]. Stausberg shows how pilgrimage and religious tourism intersect at multiple crossroads, sustaining ties to homeland sacred geographies even as they produce new forms of mobility and consumption [135], while Nolan and Nolan highlight how modern transport and communication have transformed Christian pilgrimage in Europe into a more extensive transnational field [136]. Collins-Kreiner further demonstrates that religious tourism combines spiritual, cultural, and economic dimensions in ways that render sacred mobility a distinct transnational phenomenon [137]. Recent work on maritime temples, diasporic heritage, and new transnational pilgrimage circuits also suggests that pilgrimage and religious travel increasingly intersect with heritage politics, postcolonial memory, and global religious diplomacy: Shi’s work on maritime sea temples illustrates how sacred travel layers migration history with contested heritage [115], while Hall examines how the Hindu right has incorporated diasporic religious circulation into India’s official religious diplomacy, mobilizing pilgrimage circuits and sacred geographies as instruments of contemporary statecraft [138]. These studies indicate that pilgrimage and religious tourism are distinctive forms of transnational religion because they spatialize religious belonging through movement itself: sacred travel becomes a mode of reproducing identity, ritual community, and cross-border religious attachment.

3. Toward a Configurational Approach: The Conditions of Possibility, Construction, and Consequences of Transnational Religious Configurations

The literature reviewed above has made one point clear: the relationship between the religious and the transnational cannot be reduced to a single domain, scale, or causal sequence. Across the five thematic clusters, religion appears as network, identity, catalyst, social practice, and distinctive cross-border form. It circulates through institutions and media, is negotiated in relation to memory and stigma, generates mobility and cohesion, becomes embedded in economic and political practices, and crystallizes in hybrid, institutional, virtual, and pilgrimage-based formations. Taken together, these studies have decisively displaced the assumption that religion remains territorially contained within the nation-state or that it can be treated as a secondary cultural residue within migration and globalization. They show instead that religion is continuously reconfigured under transnational conditions and that transnational social life is, in many cases, partly constituted through religious practices, institutions, and imaginaries [2,3,4,8,10,11].

At the same time, the literature’s major contribution also marks the point at which its analytical limits become visible. What the field has generated in abundance is empirically rich insight into different dimensions of religion under cross-border conditions. What it has yet to produce is a sufficiently robust conceptual language for grasping the relational unity of these dimensions without collapsing them into one another. The five clusters illuminate different aspects of the same broader configuration, but they often do so through partially disconnected vocabularies. Network-oriented studies emphasize circulation and connectivity; identity-oriented studies foreground negotiation, transmission, and hybridity; catalyst-oriented approaches stress generative force; practice-oriented analyses focus on embeddedness in everyday action; and studies of distinctive forms isolate relatively stabilized modalities such as virtual communities or transnational institutions. Each of these approaches captures something indispensable. Yet precisely because they privilege different entry points, they often leave unresolved the question of how these dimensions are articulated together in concrete historical formations.

This fragmentation reflects deeper methodological and epistemological tendencies that continue to shape the field. A first limitation lies in the persistence of residual essentialism. Even where scholars successfully move beyond methodological nationalism, they frequently retain units of analysis that stabilize what are in fact contingent and relational processes: “diaspora community”, “religious network”, “migrant congregation”, “homeland orientation”, “religious identity”, or “transnational movement” often function as if they were internally coherent and externally bounded entities. Such terms are heuristically useful, but they can also obscure how the very boundaries, meanings, and internal hierarchies of these phenomena are themselves produced, contested, and transformed in historically specific conjunctures [16,17,18,19].

A second limitation concerns analytical segmentation. Much of the literature isolates one dimension of transnational religion for explanatory purposes—identity, institution, politics, digital mediation, social services, pilgrimage, or economic support—without fully accounting for how these dimensions co-constitute one another. Yet the cases reviewed in the previous section repeatedly show that what appears as identity in one analytical frame is inseparable from institution in another; what appears as network is simultaneously a moral economy; what appears as a religious practice is also a political claim, a social service, a technology of continuity, or a boundary-making mechanism. The problem, then, is that its specialized insights often remain insufficiently recomposed into a relational account of the phenomenon as a whole.

A third limitation lies in the temporal and ontological assumptions that underwrite many existing analyses. Even when change is acknowledged, religion is still often imagined as a tradition that subsequently adapts to transnational conditions, as though the religious were first given and only later re-situated. The literature reviewed here points in a different direction: under transnational conditions, religion is often constituted precisely through movement, translation, mediation, and cross-border interaction. Its institutional forms, practical meanings, claims to authority, social boundaries, and symbolic repertoires are not simply preserved across space; they are reassembled through contingent encounters among actors, norms, infrastructures, histories, and unequal fields of power. In this respect, the field has already generated the empirical basis for a more radical inference than it usually states explicitly: transnational religion is best grasped not as the external extension of an already-formed religious entity, but as an emergent formation whose temporary coherence is itself an outcome of historically specific relational processes.

A fourth limitation concerns scale and context. A large portion of the literature remains organized around bounded empirical sites—particular congregations, ethnic communities, cities, states, or diasporic populations. Such work is often excellent and indispensable. Yet because its unit of observation often becomes its implicit unit of analysis, it can struggle to capture how local, national, transnational, and global processes are articulated within the same religious formation. This problem becomes more acute in the present conjuncture of intensified interdependence, digital mediation, geopolitical instability, and cosmopolitanization. Under such conditions, religion appears less as a phenomenon exhausted by a single scale or by stable institutional coordinates, and more as a multi-sited, mediated, and unevenly connected process whose coherence has to be reconstructed across registers rather than assumed at any one of them [25,26,27,29,30].

These four limitations converge on a single analytical demand. The field now requires a unit of analysis capable of holding together contingency, relationality, heterogeneity, and temporary stabilization without presupposing fixed essences, single scales, or closed social containers. This is the point at which the concept of social configuration becomes analytically productive. As formulated in recent post-foundational work, social configurations are not pre-given entities but historically emergent constellations of relations, categories, practices, institutions, positions, and discursive articulations that achieve temporary determination under specific conditions of possibility [28,29,30,139]. They are neither universal abstractions nor singular particulars, but formations at the level of the particular whose coherence is contingent, incomplete, and relational. Their analytical advantage lies precisely in the fact that they do not begin by assuming which element—identity, institution, network, discourse, practice, economy, or authority—is primary. Instead, they reconstruct how such elements are composed, ordered, and rendered effective within a given historical formation.

This configurational perspective is especially useful for the study of religion under transnational conditions. It allows us to suspend several assumptions that limit much of the existing literature. First, it suspends the assumption that religion is a bounded substance that then enters transnational space. Second, it suspends the assumption that the transnational is merely an external context surrounding otherwise stable religious entities. Third, it suspends the tendency to isolate one analytical register—identity, network, mobility, institution, practice, or discourse—as the privileged key to the phenomenon. A configurational approach begins instead from the premise that transnational religious phenomena emerge through the contingent articulation of multiple dimensions: actors and institutions, symbolic repertoires and moral claims, histories of migration and legal regulation, mediated communication and embodied practice, material support and boundary-making, memory and aspiration. What matters analytically is not any one of these dimensions in isolation, but the specific way they are composed and temporarily stabilized.

From this perspective, the concept of “transnational religious configurations” can now be formulated more precisely. A transnational religious configuration is a historically specific and relationally constituted formation in which the religious is organized, articulated, and rendered socially effective across multiple scales through the contingent interplay of practices, institutions, discourses, actors, material flows, symbolic boundaries, and cross-border conditions of possibility. What makes such a configuration “religious” is not the mere presence of belief or institution, but the way religious categories, authorities, practices, claims, and forms of belonging are arranged and made operative. What makes it “transnational” is not simply movement across borders, but the fact that this arrangement is constituted through relations that exceed a single national container and are shaped by simultaneity, circulation, mediation, and uneven cross-border entanglement.

The advantage of this concept is that it can incorporate the insights generated across all five thematic clusters without collapsing them into a single dimension. What appears in one study as a network may, within a configuration, also be a structure of authority, a channel of remittance, a mode of doctrinal circulation, and a medium of political mobilization. What appears elsewhere as religious identity may also function as a boundary mechanism, an intergenerational transmission process, and a situated response to legal or symbolic exclusion. What appears as a transnational institution may also be a site where culture, care, regulation, and sacred practice are reassembled under new historical conditions. The configurational approach thus does not replace the insights of the literature review; it recomposes them by asking how they are articulated together in concrete formations.

This approach also clarifies why the concept of transnational religious configuration is more adequate than several existing alternatives. Concepts such as “religious network”, “diaspora religion”, or “transnational religious movement” each capture important empirical forms, but each tends to privilege one aspect of the phenomenon. “Network” privileges connectivity; “diaspora religion” privileges displacement and homeland orientation; “movement” privileges organized expansion; “community” privileges belonging; “institution” privileges organizational form. A configuration, by contrast, refers not to one substantive component but to the relational ordering through which different components are temporarily combined, stabilized, and rendered meaningful. In this sense, the concept is analytically more elastic and empirically more exacting: it requires us to reconstruct the formation rather than assume it.

3.1. Operationalizing the Configurational Approach: Three Analytical Levels

To translate this orientation into a workable research framework, the analysis of transnational religious configurations can be organized along three analytical levels that together constitute its operational architecture. The first is the level of conditions of possibility. Here the task is to reconstruct the historical, social, political, legal, technological, and discursive conditions that make a given transnational religious formation possible. This includes migration histories, regulatory environments, communicative infrastructures, geopolitical conjunctures, and broader processes such as cosmopolitanization, crisis, minority positioning, and the destabilization of older institutional orders [23,25,26,27,29]. The second is the level of construction and characteristics. At this level, the analysis asks how the configuration is actually composed: which actors and institutions are involved; which categories, boundaries, and hierarchies are operative; how authority is distributed; how practices are ordered; how meanings are articulated; how material flows are organized; and how different scales are connected. The third is the level of social realities and consequences. Here the question concerns what the configuration produces: which identities, collectivities, solidarities, exclusions, forms of action, symbolic hierarchies, and social effects emerge from it.

Operationally, configurational analysis proceeds through five interlocking research moves. (i) Bounding the formation: identifying the cross-border religious phenomenon under study not as a closed unit but as a relationally produced formation whose internal coherence is itself an empirical question. (ii) Mapping the elements: cataloguing the actors, institutions, practices, discourses, categories, material flows, and infrastructures that participate in the formation, including those that operate across scales and sites. (iii) Reconstructing the relations: tracing how these elements are connected, hierarchized, and rendered mutually intelligible—through authority claims, ritual obligations, financial and informational circulations, regulatory frameworks, and shared symbolic repertoires. (iv) Situating the conjuncture: locating the formation within its historical, geopolitical, and technological conditions of possibility, attending to crises, ruptures, and openings that re-orient the configuration. (v) Analyzing the effects: identifying the identities, collectivities, exclusions, and forms of social action that the configuration generates, and assessing how these effects feed back into the conditions and construction of the formation itself. This protocol is fully compatible with multi-sited ethnography, comparative-historical analysis, network analysis, discourse analysis, and digital methods, and can be combined with mixed methods depending on the empirical scope of the case.

3.2. An Empirical Illustration: The “Transnational Karbala” Campaigns and the Reconfiguration of Husayni Public Religiosity in Europe

To clarify what the configurational approach offers in analytical practice, it is useful to focus on a specific empirical case. A particularly demanding test is provided by what Mirshahvalad has recently named “transnational Karbala”: a wave of public information campaigns initiated by young Shi‘i Muslims since the early 2010s across European, Russian, and Armenian cities—most prominently the NGO Arbaeen [Arba’īn] Europe (founded 2011 by an Iranian professional in the Netherlands), the Who Is Hussain? campaign, and the Ashura Worldwide Campaign—which translate the Karbala mourning tradition into photo exhibitions, street outreach, multilingual handouts, social-media content, and even 3D virtual reconstructions of the Najaf–Karbala walk for non-Shi‘i European publics [140]. The case is analytically demanding precisely because it cuts across the very registers that single-axis concepts in the field tend to handle separately: a dispersed second-generation diaspora, a classical clerical authority structure (the marja’iyya), an Iraqi mass ritual, European integration regimes, sectarian boundary-making vis-à-vis Sunni publics, digital mediation, and competing homeland projects (Iranian, Iraqi, Lebanese, Bahraini). It is also genuinely problematic in the field’s current debates: scholars are actively divided over whether such initiatives constitute a depoliticization of Husayni piety, a continuation of its protest tradition under new conditions, or a new modality of religious activism altogether [140,141,142].

At the level of conditions of possibility, the transnational Karbala configuration becomes thinkable only at a specific historical conjuncture. The collapse of the Ba’thist regime in 2003 lifted decades of state suppression of the Arba’in pilgrimage, allowing the walk from Najaf to Karbala to grow from roughly two million participants in 2003 to more than twenty million by 2014–2023 and to acquire a globally visible scale [143]. This Iraqi opening intersects with a longer modern reconfiguration of the marja’iyya: Walbridge’s documentation of the institution’s adaptation to the modern nation-state already shows a clerical field that had been pushed into transnational form well before 2003 [144], and Corboz’s political sociology of the al-Hakim and al-Khu’i families demonstrates how that field is now routed through Najaf, Qom, London, and beyond as an interlocking set of family, scholarly, philanthropic, and political networks [145]. A second condition of possibility is the post-1979 geopolitical realignment of the Shi‘i field, which has institutionally connected Iranian state actors, Najafi marāji’, and Lebanese, Iraqi, and Bahraini diasporic constituencies to European publics through media and migration [27,39,40,146]. A third condition is the European context itself: minority-Muslim positioning under secular-liberal regimes, post-9/11 securitization of Islam, and the fact that Shi‘i communities in Europe lack many of the gathering places and legal recognitions available in their countries of origin, which forces ritual practice into improvised, semi-public, and mediated forms [53,140,147]. A fourth condition is digital and visual mediation: the Arba’in itself has been thoroughly remediated, with mawkib hospitality, walking processions, and shrine devotion now circulating through smartphones, Telegram channels, and live broadcasts that make co-presence possible at distance [3,4,143]. A fifth is post-foundational uncertainty about religious authority, in which classical clerical hierarchies are no longer the sole arbiters of public Shi‘i action; second-generation activists, NGO professionals, and lay convert networks have become legitimate—though contested—mediators of the tradition [28,29,30,140]. None of these conditions explains the configuration on its own; their articulation does.

At the level of construction and characteristics, the configuration is composed of a heterogeneous but internally ordered set of elements. Actors include the Iranian-European founder of NGO Arbaeen Europe, second-generation organizers in Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam, Italian cities, German cities, Moscow, and Yerevan; Shi‘i converts who curate exhibition photographs to fit “European standards of good photography”; Hamburg- and London-based clerical advisors; academic interlocutors whose written work circulates through Telegram preparatory groups; marja’ representatives (wukalā’) operating in London, Qom, and Najaf; and visiting non-Shi‘i European publics whose questions and reactions feed back into campaign design [140]. Institutions include diasporic ḥusayniyyas, Shi‘i community centers in northwest London, the Al-Khoei Foundation in London, and ad hoc exhibition spaces in European city centers; behind these stand the ḥawzas of Najaf and Qom and the offices of leading marāji’ (most prominently Sistani and Khamenei), which provide the doctrinal backstage even when they are not visibly present in the campaign itself [145,147]. Categories operative in the configuration include marja’ allegiance (Sistani, Khamenei, Shirazi), generation (first-generation Iraqi/Iranian/Lebanese exiles versus second-generation European-born activists), gender (with women campaigners often leading photographic curation and outreach), ethno-national origin, convert status, and citizenship in the host state. Practices run from the Najaf–Karbala walk and ziyārat al-Arba’īn in Iraq, to mawkib hospitality, to lecture circuits and majlis recitation in European ḥusayniyyas, to street-level photo exhibitions where flowers, sweets, sanitizers, or facemasks are distributed in context-sensitive ways (flowers welcomed in the Netherlands, avoided in Germany and Italy where they are read as street vending), to virtual-reality reconstructions of the walk for those who cannot travel [140]. Discursive articulations include a strategic translation of Karbala from a sectarian language of mazlūmiyya into a universalist humanitarian register of justice, dignity, and resistance to tyranny; an internal Shi‘i contest over whether such translation reconciles the tradition or empties it; and a defensive boundary work vis-à-vis European publics who associate Muslim mourning with “religious violence” [140,141]. Material flows include khums and charitable donations channeled through marja’iyya offices and diasporic foundations [52,145], remittance and exhibition-budget circuits between Iraqi shrine cities and European hubs, and the digital infrastructure (Telegram groups, exhibition websites, VR equipment) that holds these together. Symbolic boundaries are simultaneously drawn against Sunni majoritarian readings of Husayn, against Iranian state instrumentalization of Arba’in as “soft power,” against intra-Shi‘i sub-currents (notably Shirazi networks that defend bloody self-flagellation), against the U.S. and Israeli wars and military interventions in the region, and against European secular suspicion of public religion [140,142,147]. The configuration is not a single network and not a single movement; it is a relationally organized field whose elements are co-produced and whose internal cleavages run primarily along clerical allegiance and ideological orientation rather than along ethnic or sectarian lines alone [147].

At the level of social realities and consequences, the configuration generates effects that exceed any of its components. It produces a recognizable form of transnational Husayni public religiosity that is neither a transplant of Iraqi mass ritual into Europe nor an assimilation to European civic culture, but a third form whose practices, vocabularies, and material supports are calibrated to host-society publics while remaining anchored in Najaf and Karbala [140]. It rearticulates religious authority by inserting NGO professionals, second-generation curators, and digital intermediaries into a chain that previously ran more directly through clerical hierarchies; this insertion is contested—Dogra’s London ethnography shows how rival groups of Twelver Shi’is of South Asian background “pick and choose” marāji’ to support competing positions on self-flagellation, reformism, and political alignment—but it is constitutive of how the configuration now operates [142]. It refracts homeland politics by simultaneously providing a stage for diasporic dissent (Marei and Shanneik document how Bahraini and Lebanese Shi‘i liturgies in Europe carry transnational political critique into Husayni mourning) and an arena into which Iranian state-affiliated narratives of Arba’in as Shi‘i soft power are also inserted [141,146]. It reorganizes the spatial and temporal experience of the ritual: VR pilgrimages, livestreamed mawkib, and city-center exhibitions allow simultaneity of co-presence with Karbala across legal regimes and visa restrictions, in line with the broader cosmopolitanization of religious experience [4,25,26,27,143]. It generates new gendered and generational subjectivities, with second-generation women curators and converts becoming legitimate spokespersons for the tradition in ways that classical clerical authority alone could not produce [43,140]. And it produces measurable European public effects: shifts in how non-Shi‘i publics in Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam, Hamburg, and Italian cities encounter Muharram, with implications for minority recognition, anti-Muslim stereotype work, and the legal-political environment in which Shi‘i institutions operate [53,140].

Working through this case allows us to specify the explanatory yield of the configurational approach against single-axis alternatives. Reading the phenomenon as a transnational religious network foregrounds connectivity—correctly registering the Najaf–Qom–London–Amsterdam circuits and the marja’iyya—but underspecifies the doctrinal authority claims, the gendered curation, the regulatory environments, and the discursive translation work that turn connectivity into public effect [11,145,147]. Reading it as diaspora religion presupposes a homeland-diaspora dyad that flattens the multi-centered architecture of the formation, in which converts, second-generation organizers, and European publics are constitutive participants rather than peripheral recipients [140]. Reading it as a transnational religious movement implies organized expansion under a unified banner, which the plural and competitive Shi‘i field consistently exceeds: NGO Arbaeen Europe, Who Is Hussain?, the Ashura Worldwide Campaign, and rival London-based factions operate with overlapping but distinct doctrinal allegiances and political horizons [140,142]. Reading it as digital religion alone captures the mediation but misses the regulatory, doctrinal, and material dimensions through which mediation acquires its specific shape [3,143]. Reading it as pilgrimage alone captures the Najaf–Karbala walk but misses the European exhibition circuits, the doctrinal contests, and the second-generation activism that the configuration requires to be socially effective [135,143]. The configurational reconstruction, by contrast, holds these registers together by treating authority, ritual, mediation, regulation, identity, and material flow as jointly constituted within a single formation. It thereby makes visible what alternative concepts dissolve: the historically specific way in which a Husayni public religiosity is currently being assembled at the intersection of Iraqi shrine cities, European urban contexts, classical clerical authority, lay activist initiative, and digital mediation. This is the kind of analytical reconstruction that the field’s empirical record now demands and that the concept of transnational religious configurations is built to deliver.

4. Conclusions

This review has argued that the relationship between religion and transnationalism cannot be adequately understood through analytically isolated categories such as migration, diaspora, network, identity, institution, or religious practice taken on their own. The review of the field from the 1990s to the present has shown, instead, that the religious and the transnational are repeatedly articulated through historically specific and relationally organized formations in which mobility, mediation, authority, belonging, practice, and material support are intertwined. What emerges from the literature is not simply the growing visibility of religion across borders, but the inadequacy of the dominant conceptual vocabularies through which this visibility has often been described. Existing scholarship has generated substantial empirical insight into transnational religious networks, identity negotiations, catalytic religious forces, religion’s embeddedness in everyday social practices, and distinctive cross-border religious forms. Yet it has also remained marked by fragmentation, residual essentialism, bounded units of analysis, and insufficient attention to the ways in which these dimensions co-constitute one another. The central analytical implication of this review is therefore that transnational religious phenomena cannot be grasped as the external extension of already-formed religious entities, nor as secondary outcomes of migration or globalization alone. They are better understood as contingent and relational formations whose meanings, boundaries, internal hierarchies, practical effects, and institutional forms are continuously produced and reworked under transnational conditions.

On this basis, the review has proposed the concept of transnational religious configurations as a more precise and operational analytical orientation for studying the mutual constitution of the religious and the transnational. The contribution of this concept is twofold. Conceptually, it moves beyond static notions of community, diaspora, network, or movement without losing sight of the empirical richness that these notions have helped illuminate; it treats transnational religious life as a relationally produced formation whose coherence is contingent, multi-scalar, and historically specific. Operationally, it organizes inquiry along three analytical levels—conditions of possibility, construction and characteristics, and social realities and consequences—and provides a five-step research protocol (bounding the formation, mapping the elements, reconstructing the relations, situating the conjuncture, analyzing the effects) that can be implemented through multi-sited ethnography, comparative-historical analysis, network analysis, discourse analysis, and mixed methods. The worked illustration of the contemporary transnational revival of Shi‘i Islam shows how this protocol reconstructs a complex religious formation that single-axis concepts—network, diaspora religion, movement, global religion—capture only partially: authority, ritual, mediation, regulation, identity, and material flow appear as jointly constituted within a single relational field [27,140,143,144,145]. The concept of transnational religious configurations thus opens a path for future research to examine religion not as a bounded residue within transnational life, but as one of the principal relational forms through which contemporary transnational realities are organized, contested, and made socially consequential.