In your book, you compare Irish Catholicism to ‘a frog slowly boiling to death’. Can you elaborate?
We think of post-independence Catholicism as permeating deep into people’s values, thoughts, and everyday behaviour. But because the Church was in control, reality was more ambiguous.
Many presented themselves as more involved than they really were, creating a religious mirage underpinned by simmering disgruntlement. Change gathered pace in the late 20th century: cultural globalisation, the feminist movement, and the shift to an extremely open economic system.
But because Catholicism did double duty as an ethnic identity, even though the Church came to hold less outright control, the urge remained to keep phoning in Catholicism. It became less relevant but couldn’t be cast aside. The result is often described as ‘cultural’ Catholicism: whether out of a desire to keep older relatives happy, for the sake of your kids’ education, because you have fond memories, or because it doesn’t matter much, you continue to call yourself Catholic. That is the majority connection these days.
It goes on partly because there’s no great advantage in challenging it. You may be consciously Catholic a couple of times a year, maybe when your kids have some ritual in school or if you still go to mass at Christmas, but there isn’t any regular connection to it.
But when that disengaged stance collided with the emergence of the abuse scandals, in a population that was liberalising and no longer so religiously immersed, it was a perfect storm: if the Church is corrupt and an impediment to social progress, is it still right to baptise little Oisín just to get him into Clongowes or shake the rellies down for a First Communion iPhone?
Habitual routines get dragged into scrutiny, and many choose to drop them. The result is tension not only between secularists and conservatives but also amongst the ambiguous, disengaged majority.
In that battle of the fringes for influence over the middle, the advantage is now very much on the secular side. There’s a tipping point looming, but vertiginous collapse is ironically blocked not by devotion, but the sheer peripherality of Catholicism for most people: why bother to reject what is only occasional?
And in a further irony, the more institutionally secularised society becomes, the less moral pressure there might ultimately be to drop passive identification. The frog might end up gently simmering away forever on the verge of blacking out.
With all this change, what sort of person is an Irish Catholic today?
Very difficult to say. We tend to categorise people as ‘believers’ or ‘non-believers’, but the reality is more complex. People fluctuate in and out of different stances, and in many cultures, it’s normal for people to be half-tied to an affiliation, or to belong without really believing. This gets moralised a lot by belief-fixated Christians, but people are contradictory, they change, they’re ambiguous. That’s their nature.
The ‘Catholic’ status of the cultural Catholic majority is only contested at the ideological poles, not by most of the population. In that sense, most Irish Catholics are just like other contemporary secularised Europeans, only they still tick a denominational box on surveys. However, there’s definitely a division between liberal and conservative Catholics.
Many people from the conservative wing of the Church see modern society as decadent and degenerate, and the Church as being victimised, yet also (since Vatican II) too weak to stand up for itself because it has diluted its own principles. This stance includes a small, somewhat alt-right younger male subculture who want to see certainty in the world and their own identities bolstered – they feel they can’t be proud of who they are, so they’re rebounding off secular progressivism towards identities that reject it.
Then there are people that disapprove of the Church’s conservatism, are pro-marriage equality and perhaps even pro-choice, but remain staunch Catholics in a different way. I often find there’s a sense of moral struggle about these people. They are angry, betrayed, and ashamed of the institution – but because of their deep levels of religious socialisation, particularly at home, they can’t leave. They’re tugged back and forth: they want to wrestle control from the hierarchy and push those Vatican II changes further to have a truly liberalised church, but it is unclear how much they believe this is possible.
Morality is often discussed as being inextricably tied to religion. Where does morality stand in Ireland if the population is moving away from Catholicism?
At a fundamental level, we are a species that relies on social co-operation. Religion is not being displaced by nihilism: much of the popular backlash against religion is extremely moralised. At the same time, these norms need to be coordinated somehow.
The great religions played a central role in expanding the size of social groups: if centralised doctrine ensures that what is right and wrong on one side of a landmass is the same as on the other, you can more effectively build a coordinated mega-society out of strangers.
This top-down coordination seems less relevant now: the internet mediates people’s sense of right and wrong far more than any official institution, and we see new moral stances spreading incredibly rapidly and with great fidelity through this lateral transmission. But at the same time, this contemporary secular morality has an enormous amount of sublimated Christianity within it.
For example, the idea that humans have an intrinsic equality, that everybody is, in some ineffable sense, of equal worth, has Christian roots (at least in the West). Of course there are indelible imprints of this religion that’s been so central to European existence for millennia. Secular humanism, progressivism, etc, are continuations of Christianity – usually without God, but with related moral values. Even though they are pitched against one another, it’s almost like a new reformation. One worry, of course, is whether cohesion is still possible.
There are visible efforts to fill the vacuum supposedly left by the decline of homogeneous ethno-religiosity in Ireland. The GAA, for example, have the poster campaign ‘Where We All Belong.’ The implication is that instead of churches, it’ll be GAA clubs where everyone, no matter their background, can experience community in a distinctively Irish but non-partisan way.
There are also things like Pride: Dublin is festooned in rainbow flags at the moment, its train stations sport slogans about change, moving forward, things like that. The idea that change is inherently good is accepted implicitly – at least publicly.
Young Ireland is now very anti-nostalgic. Pride symbolises more than LGBTQ+ rights. It stands in for some collective sense of having ‘escaped’ from the past. As elsewhere in the West, there is official convergence around watchwords such as inclusivity, diversity, tolerance.
We’re all familiar with these concepts, and many people say they are important to them. But we must remember that the 1950s saw many people paying lip service to Catholicism, and wonder to what degree this is happening again. Probably far more than we’re willing to acknowledge. Ireland is particularly good at morally exemplary self-presentation.
Many go along, while being adept at private subversion – and perhaps are barely even aware of this subversion. We are experts at sidestepping cognitive dissonance, and who knows where that comes from. We could speculate about it all day.
This could make Ireland prone to having a sudden backlash to the backlash among certain subsections of the population. I think this is currently blocked by the sheer moral contamination of the Church, but as memories fade or unpredictable social pressures emerge, that could change.
Hugh Turpin is an anthropologist who studies Irish secularisation. He is the author of Unholy Catholic Ireland: Religious Hypocrisy, Secular Morality, and Irish Irreligion (Stanford University Press).
