1 God Bless our Children? The role of generation, discrimination and religious context for migrants in Europe Koen Van der Bracht, Bart Van de Putte and Pieter-Paul Verhaeghe Department of Sociology, Ghent University koen.vanderbracht@ugent.be ABSTRACT This paper deals with individual and contextual effects on the religiosity of first and second generation migrants in Europe. Determining that little attention has been directed towards intergenerational transmission of religion in processes of integration, we argue for an intergenerational perspective on immigrant religiosity. Social integration theory is used to derive the hypothesis that second generation immigrants are less religious than the first generation. Perceived discrimination is introduced in the immigrant-religion research to account for the stress buffering capacities of religion. On the contextual level we suppose a positive effect of native religiosity and religious diversity. Three aspects of religiosity are examined: (1) religious affiliation, (2) inner religiosity and (3) praying. We use four waves (2002-2008) of the European Social Survey (ESS) in a 3-level random intercept multilevel model with 19,567 individuals, 235 regions and 26 countries. All three aspects point to the same conclusions. Among others, the most interesting results are that (1) second generation immigrants are less religious than their first generation counterparts, (2) perceived discrimination has a positive effect on immigrant religiosity and the effect is greater for the second generation, (3) native religiosity has a positive effect on immigrant religiosity with a greater effect on the second generation too and (4) the influence on migrant religiosity is more salient at the regional than at the national level. INTRODUCTION In Europe, religion is generally considered as an obstacle to the integration of ethnic minorities. A populist statement in the public debate is the presupposition that Muslims have failed to integrate in the European society because Islamic and Western cultures are irreconcilable (Lucassen, 2005). In any case, there is no doubt that religion is an important factor for both migration and integration (Hirschman, 2004).