| Summary: | This article relies on ethnographic research conducted together with chaplains in charge of spiritual and legal advice for irregular migrants in a German detention centre. The research aimed at understanding the logics that underlie the chaplains’ decision whether or not to develop an assistance relationship with the detainees they encounter. In this matter, the collected observations have notably shown how the chaplains’ religious socialization combines with other normative regimes, such as legal and moral ones, but also with gender prescriptions. The centrality of “familialist” norms in particular constitutes an invitation to question not only the role of gender/sexuality norms in the classification of detainees by chaplains, but also the way the latter position themselves with regard to dominant family and conjugality norms – not forgetting that these have also been strongly affected (maybe more in Germany than in other European countries) by the Church.
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