2014 Annual David Stevens Memorial Lecture
Religion and Politics in a Changing Northern Ireland
Professor John D Brewer
Institute for Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice
Queen’s University Belfast
18 June 2014
Abstract
This lecture explores interests central to David’s life and work, the relationship between
religion and politics in Northern Ireland. The many features of this relationship are identified,
with a special focus on the ways in which the several churches in Northern Ireland have both
suffered from and benefitted as a result of this connection. This relationship is then used to
address a special concern that motivated and interested David, the connection between
religious and political change, namely, the shift to greater liberalisation and secularisation in
religious trends and their connection to greater hybridity in people’s sense of their national
and political identity. The lecture tries to tease out whether political change is causing
changes to people’s religious habits, or the other way round.
Biographical note
John D Brewer is Professor of Post Conflict Studies in the Institute for the Study of Conflict
Transformation and Social Justice at Queen’s University Belfast. He was awarded an
honorary DSocSci from Brunel University in 2012 for services to social science and the
sociology of peace processes. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy (2004), a Fellow
of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2008), an Academician in the Academy of Social
Sciences (2003) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (1998). He has held visiting
appointments at Yale University (1989), St John’s College Oxford (1991), Corpus Christi
College Cambridge (2002) and the Australia National University (2003). In 2007-2008 he
was a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow. He has been President of the British Sociological
Association (2009-2012) and is now Honorary Life Vice President, and is also a member of
the Governing Council of the Irish Research Council and of the Council of the Academy of
Social Science. In 2010 he was appointed to the United Nations Roster of Global Experts for
his expertise in peace processes. He is the author or co-author of fifteen books and editor or
co-editor of a further three. His latest books are Peace Processes: A Sociological Approach
(Polity Press, 2010), Religion, Civil Society and Peace in Northern Ireland (Oxford University
Press, 2011), Ex-Combatants, Religion and Peace in Northern Ireland (Palgrave, 2013) and
The Public Value of Social Sciences (Bloomsbury, 2013). He is General Editor of the book
series Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict. He is Principal Investigator on a £1.26
million cross-national, five-year project on compromise amongst victims of conflict, funded by
The Leverhulme Trust, focusing on Northern Ireland, South Africa and Sri Lanka. He
regularly teaches peace and reconciliation workshops in Sri Lanka. In 2013 he gave the
Academy of Social Science Annual Lecture, in March 2014 the Annual Lord Dunleath
Lecture, in April the Annual Lord Patten Lecture, and in May 2014 he spoke at the
Westminster Faith Debate on the motion that religion is a positive force in peace building.
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It is a very great privilege to deliver the second David Stevens Memorial Lecture and I wish
to thank the Community Relations Council for the invitation. Yours is a body I wholeheartedly
support for its excellent work. It is also an honour to be with David’s family this evening to
mark his enormous contribution to community relations in Northern Ireland. I first met David
when he was Executive Secretary to the Irish Inter-Church Meeting. He had an office too
small – or a library too large – and his wispy beard gave him the look of a slightly distant
professor. But you visited David because you knew he was in fact a practitioner, who
combined intellectual curiosity with real-world engagement.
In my lecture tonight I want to reflect on three of the major practical and intellectual
engagements that summarise David’s life and work: namely, interest in Northern Ireland’s
patterns of religious identification, the connection between religion and politics, and the
prospects of a shared society. You can link all three and my argument can be succinctly put
in the form of a sound bite. Religious change is happening in ways that are breaking the link
between religion and politics and are promoting a shared society. I’ll pause here to repeat,
for good news is heard so little: Northern Ireland is changing, and changing for the better. It
just doesn’t feel like it. We have yet to make peace with peace I think.
People’s experience of change is out of kilter with the reality. Of course, even supporters of
the process have had their expectations of peace disappointed – it’s been a harder journey
than the euphoria evident at the signing of the Good Friday Agreement suggested. And the
detractors who want to dismantle the whole process have not gone away. There is another
consideration. If truth is the first fatality of war, perspective is the casualty of peace.
Because there is still some distance to go to realise a shared society, we easily lose sight of
just how far we have come. Perspectives are distorted in peace processes by focusing on
the difficulties ahead and ignoring what we have actually achieved. Our politicians are
particularly prone to this. And so the public sphere, which is dominated mistakenly in the
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media’s mind by politicians, becomes curmudgeonly, cantankerous and crabby, further
disillusioning pro-peace supporters, and buoying its detractors.
Tonight, therefore, it seems worthwhile to take stock by addressing the changes that have
taken place and what they presage for the future. I will focus on the three areas that were
David’s central concerns and celebrate the changes we see occurring. I want to speak up
for progress in other words – and to do so on the basis of empirical evidence rather than by
hope alone. So I trust you will bear with me when I mention the odd statistic or two.
The first question is whether we are still as religious as when the conflict reinforced
identification and observance. Change in levels of identification is clearly a foot. There has
been a rise in what is called religious independents – those who have no religious
identification or refuse to state it in the census or social surveys. Religious independents
have risen by six per cent, from 11% to 17% of the total population in the twenty years
between the 1991 and 2011 censuses. On the other hand, clearly, we still maintain very high
levels of religious identification compared to other Western societies, at 83% in 2011.
This change is not across the board. Mainstream Protestant denominations in Northern
Ireland have witnessed the greatest decline. ‘Other’ Christian religions and non-Christian
religions grew marginally. Catholic families, however, transmit their religion much more
effectively than mainstream Protestants, meaning that mainstream Protestant congregations
are more elderly and thus disproportionately affected by higher mortality rates. This poses a
real challenge to the mainstream Protestant denominations which are disproportionately
losing their young.
There is one caveat. As David himself noted in 1998, Ulster Protestantism is characterised
as much by a conservative/liberal theological divide as by denominational cleavages, so the
mainstream Protestant denominations will have some conservative evangelicals and liberal
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charismatics within them, occasionally dominating in local congregations, which serves to
conceal their quite different patterns of growth, family transmission and retention. If
congregational studies were to be undertaken in Northern Ireland, certain religious spaces
within mainstream Protestantism would be shown to be thriving.
The overall statistical pattern, however, is clear: identification is in slow decline for
mainstream Protestantism, holding up for Catholicism and rising amongst small
independent, charismatic and conservative evangelical churches, so that the growth in
religious independents comes at the expense of mainstream Protestant denominations.
Sociologists of secularisation get very excited about this. Their anticipation rises because of
further changes in religious practice in Northern Ireland. Amongst those who do identify with
a religion, religious observance, known as religiosity, has declined across all mainstream
denominations. Census data does not supply any evidence of this kind, but the annual
Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey runs occasional modules on religious practice and
the evidence is unambiguous – religious observance is in decline. It last did so in 2008 and it
showed that church attendance is now less regular, and prayer is done less frequently and
for shorter periods. Two-thirds of the adult population in Northern Ireland attended church at
least weekly in the 1960s, by 2008 it had dropped to just below 40%.
While some analysts confidently describe the changes in religious observance as
secularisation, in my view something slightly different is going on. The number of believers
who declare they never attend church has remained relatively stable over forty years at
around one in six people and the practices of believers have changed only to being less
regularly observant; there has been no increase in the number of those who do not attend at
all. Less regular observance is not the same as growth in non-belief. We should call this
liberalisation rather than secularisation – more liberal practice rather than a rise in non-belief.
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Secularisation, thus, is not yet on the rise and there is no growth of non-belief at the moment
to change the way religion and politics intersect in Northern Ireland. So we cannot look to
secularisation to decouple the link between politics and religion in Northern Ireland. I
contend, however, that the changes in religious identification and practice that I call
liberalisation are nonetheless having the same effect.
Let me turn then to the second of David’s practical and intellectual concerns – the link
between religion and politics. Religion and politics no longer reinforce one another to the
extent they did in the past. Let me address this by posing two questions that are different
sides of the one Janus face. First, what impact is religious change having on Northern
Ireland’s politics? Secondly, what impact is Northern Ireland’s political change having on
religious practice? Let me deal with them in turn.
The 2011 census was the first to ask citizens about their sense of national (as distinct from
religious) identity and it picked up some interesting developments. Two-fifths had a Britishonly identity, a quarter an Irish-only identity, and just over a fifth held a Northern Irish-only
identity. Significantly, only one quarter of Catholics regarded themselves as Irish only. The
2013 Life and Times Survey showed a quarter of Catholics considered themselves to have a
Northern Irish identity, higher than among Protestants. That is to say, no longer it is feasible
to automatically equate a person’s religious identification with their national identification.
This deconstruction of monolithic religious communities and identities is impacting on
political and constitutional matters.
People are beginning to transcend the old Protestant/Unionist-Catholic/Nationalist
dichotomy. In the 2007 Life and Times Survey, nearly one in every three respondents was
experimenting with new combinations of national and religious identities, with 4% describing
themselves as British Catholic, 2% Irish Protestants, 10% Northern Irish Catholics, and 14%
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as Northern Irish Protestants. Furthermore, one-third of the Northern Irish Protestants and
Northern Irish Catholics described themselves as equally British and Irish.
We should not exaggerate the change. It remains significant that in the near decade that
elapsed from the 1998 Good Friday Agreement to the 2007 Life and Times Survey, six out of
ten respondents still utilised traditional and dichotomous notions to describe their identity as
either Irish Catholic or British Protestant. An old sociological truism is relevant here: while
things change, they also stay very much the same. But consider this.
A poll of 1,046 adults undertaken for BBC Northern Ireland across the country in January
2013, a sample size approaching that of the Life and Times surveys, focused directly on the
question of the border. It showed that the proportion of Catholics wishing to retain the Union
was 38%, higher by three percentage points than those Catholics who preferred a united
Ireland. Nearly a quarter of those who identified themselves as Sinn Fein voters said they
would support retention of the Union. More than half of SDLP supporters said they would opt
to stay in the UK if a poll was held tomorrow.
In the 2013 Life and Times survey, released only last week and which is yet to be fully
analysed, some headline figures stand out dramatically. More than half of Catholic
respondents were pro-Union and only 28% supported a United Ireland, a substantially
changed proportion than in the BBC’s border poll. Perhaps equally ground-breaking, 52%
of the respondents under 44 years of age described themselves as neither Nationalist or
Unionist, compared to 36% amongst the over 45s, the generation that lived through ‘the
Troubles’ as adults and perhaps hang on most to its mindsets. What is more, 44% of
Catholics and 32% of Protestants described themselves as neither Nationalist nor Unionist.
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Clearly there is a weakening of the link between politics and religion for a significant
proportion of the population. This takes me neatly to the other side of the Janus face. Does
political change encourage people to be more liberal in their religious observance?
Let me address this by looking solely at the religious independents, since they are
undergoing the most religious change. This group is much more likely to reject the labels of
Unionist and Nationalist. Is this because those who seek to break away from a religiouslybased political system feel they have to break away also from religion itself, or do people
who have already moved on from religion find it easier also to transcend the conventional
politics of their former co-religionists? Which is chicken and which egg? Does political
change precede religious change, or does religious change predicate political change? I will
not labour the multivariate statistical analysis behind this, but let me just say that of the two
possibilities, researchers opt for the view that disaffection with the old identity politics is
driving the rise in religious independents.
That is to say, dissatisfaction with identity politics is creating disaffection with institutional
religion and is promoting religious change. Alienation from old style identity politics alienates
people from old style institutional religion that is thought to underpin it.
Of course, religious change is not only motivated by political change. The institutional church
is facing a crisis of legitimacy that is affecting its moral authority in Northern Ireland, which is
potentially very threatening given that rejection of institutional religion is one of the
motivations of religious change. This crisis is rooted in several broad social changes. Anticlericalism has grown in parallel with revelations about the extent of sexual and child abuse
in the Church. The conservative moral agenda of the churches, on issues such as women’s
rights, abortion, and LGBT issues runs counter to the trend to moral liberalism amongst the
young, who are precisely the people churches are finding it hard to retain.
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These broader social changes will in themselves alter the dynamics of religion and politics in
Northern Ireland, further weakening the traditional shibboleths and introducing a more
diverse political and religious landscape.
I believe that the break in the link between religion and politics is already setting in motion a
chain reaction that will eventually become very profound. Let me emphasise two impacts in
particular, since they touch on matters that motivated David’s life and work, the effects of the
rupture of this link on religious practice, and on community relations. I present them in the
form of questions. First, what will be the consequences of the decoupling of religion and
politics for religion? My answer is that it will promote secularisation.
Peace threatens religion in Northern Ireland. The churches unintentionally benefited from
‘the Troubles’ because the violence helped maintain remarkably high levels of religious
identification and practice as a form of identity formation and defence in a conflict that had a
religious form despite its political substance. Patterns of religiosity are now undergoing
change, as the political landscape shifts and as broader social and moral changes occur.
The peace process threatens to weaken taken-for-granted religiosity and to make religious
identification and practice a choice of conscience rather than an obligation of identity politics.
I will reiterate this point to strike home its significance. By separating religion and politics,
religion is made a matter of personal conscience rather than political identity, leaving
religiosity to a decision of taste rather than buoyed by a distorted form of identity politics.
This will result I think in increasing liberalisation and will accelerate the process of
secularisation. We can expect observance to decline further and non-belief to increase as
identity politics weakens.
I would like now to move to my second question. What are the consequences of the
weakening ties between religion and politics for community relations? My answer is that it
promotes a shared society. As I have shown, some people are beginning to reject traditional
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ethno-religious identities and the number with hybrid identity combinations is growing. Vote
transfers in our recent elections are another reflection of this; I will not test further your
patience with a statistical analysis, just let me say that while many people still vote on an
ethnic tribal basis to keep ‘”them ‘uns” out, there are others who transfer their votes in ways
that transcend traditional identity politics. When people separate religion and politics like
this, they normalise politics; and normal politics makes a shared society imaginable.
Imagining the future as a shared one – not necessarily agreeing the future, but agreeing that
it will be shared – is the first step in learning to live together after conflict. To imagine a
shared future, to contemplate a better society for ourselves, our children and our
grandchildren, to want a society in which the conflict never happens again – all this requires
that the link between religion and politics be broken.
Despite our frustrated and disappointed expectations of the peace process, and regardless
that many have yet to make peace with the idea of peace, there is incontrovertible empirical
evidence that the link between religion and politics has been ruptured for a significant and
growing number of people. We might not be at the point where the shared future of which
David Stevens dreamed is here, but we are no longer living a nightmare and the numbers
who share his dream are expanding.
Let me conclude, though, in a way that David would lament. What is Northern Irish society’s
gain is the Church’s loss. People are not being persuaded to the principle of a shared
society by religious faith, as was the hope of the Ecumenists in the community relations field
from the 1960s onwards. Rather, it is the rejection of institutional religion that is inspiring
today’s dreamers of a shared society as a result of their dissatisfaction with identity politics.
Breaking the link between religion and politics foreshadows more enlightened politics but
promises to threaten the practice of religion. David’s shared society may well be a secular
one. Thank you.
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