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Debates about Islamophobia have been blighted by the question of whether the prejudice can be defined as a form of racism or as hostility to religion (or a combination of the two). This paper sheds light on this debate by presenting the findings of a new nationally representative survey, focused on the UK, that contrasts perceptions of Muslims not only with perceptions of other ethnic and religious minorities but also with perceptions of Islam as a religious tradition. We find that prejudice against Muslims is higher than for any other group examined other than Travellers. We also find contrasting demographic drivers of prejudice towards Muslims and towards Islam. Across most prejudice measures we analyse, intolerant views are generally significantly associated with being male, voting Conservative and being older, although not with Anglican identity. We find, however, that class effects vary depending on the question's focus. Anti‐immigration sentiment – including support for a 'Muslim ban' – is significantly correlated with being working‐class. However, prejudice towards Islam as a body of teachings (tested using a question measuring perceptions of religious literalism) is significantly correlated with being middle‐class, as is negative sentiment towards Travellers. Using these findings, the paper makes an argument for supplementing recent scholarship on the associations between racism and Islamophobia with analyses focusing on misperceptions of belief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although spiritual practices such as prayer are engaged by many to support well‐being and coping, little research has addressed nurses and prayer, whether for themselves or facilitating patients' use of prayer. We conducted a qualitative study to explore how prayer (as a proxy for spirituality and religion) is manifest—whether embraced, tolerated, or resisted—in healthcare, and how institutional and social contexts shape how prayer is understood and enacted. This paper analyzes interviews with 21 nurses in Vancouver and London as a subset of the larger study. Findings show that nurses' kindness can buffer the loneliness and exclusion of ill health and in this way support the "spirit" of those in their care. Spiritual support for patients rarely incorporated prayer, in part because of ambiguities about permission and professional boundaries. Nurses' engagement with prayer and spiritual support could become a politicized site of religious accommodation, where imposition, religious illiteracy, and racism could derail person‐centered care and consequently enact social exclusion. Spiritual support (including prayer) sustained nurses themselves. We propose that nursing's equity‐oriented knowledge encompass spirituality and religion as sites of exclusion and inclusion. Nurses must be supported to move past religious illiteracy to provide culturally and spiritually sensitive care with clarity about professional boundaries and collaborative models of spiritual care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though Canada is internationally lauded for the success of its multiculturalism policies, debates about immigrant integration have arisen in recent years. These debates have turned on the extent to which religion should be accommodated in the public sphere. They have also been disproportionately concentrated in the French‐speaking province of Quebec. This paper asks whether this disproportionality is due to the Quebec population being particularly unfavourable to religious accommodation and, if so, whether this disfavour is grounded in racial antipathy toward newcomers or in the province's unique religious history. The findings show that while opposition to religious accommodation is higher in Quebec, and higher among francophones, it is rooted more in the low level of religiosity of the francophone population than in racial animus. These results emphasise the importance of correctly conceptualising distinctions between ethnocentric and culturally based sources of group conflict in multicultural settings such as Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the response of the global Anglican Communion to the issue of homosexuality, drawing on case studies of parishes in three different national contexts (UK, USA and South Africa). It traces some of the complex connections (e.g. through flows of money, resources and discourses) between places differently located within this transnational religious network to identify a complex geometry of power. Through its attention to the deployment of racist, disablist, colonial and sexist discourses in debates about homosexuality, this paper contributes to geographies of difference by showing how prejudices can intersect in complex ways to facilitate but also to undo or cancel each other out. The conclusion reflects on issues of authority, the meaning of 'communion' and how local insights might be scaled-up to imagine a practical response to the institutional crisis about homosexuality in the global Anglican Communion. In doing so, the paper contributes to understanding how differences may be reconciled within a transnational religious context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we explore the extent to which 'discursive deracialization', the removal of 'race' from potentially racially motivated arguments, is taking place in talk about asylum seeking. A discourse analysis is conducted on the part of a corpus of data collected from focus groups with undergraduate students talking about asylum seeking, in which they were asked if they considered it to be racist to oppose asylum. We show that speakers use three arguments for opposing asylum that are explicitly framed as non-racist: opposition is based on (1) economic reasons (2) religious grounds and the associated threat of terrorism and (3) the lack of asylum seekers' ability to integrate into British society. These findings are discussed with regard to the implications they have for our understanding of discursive deracialization in which it is shown that there is a common knowledge understanding, albeit one that needs qualifying, that opposition to asylum is not racist. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]