Unite Against Hate Seminar
Queen’s University
18 September 2014
Sectarianism, racism and religion
John D Brewer
I have entitled my brief talk, “sectarianism, racism and religion”, because I want to do three things:
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Define sectarianism
Outline its parallels and differences with racism
Show how they both relate negatively to religion
One of the reasons why the Northern Irish conflict is so difficult to understand compared to racebased conflict, both for the analyst and lay person, is because sectarianism is less well analysed and
understood than racism. Sectarianism is more problematic than racism because it is less universal,
uses less easily recognisable social markers to define group boundaries, and does not receive the
same popular, academic or policy attention.
Sectarianism invokes a social boundary marker – sect/religion – whose saliency was long thought to
have declined in the West, unlike that at ‘race’. Instances where religion remains a potent social
marker are either thought to be a developing or third-world problem (India, Sri Lanka, the Middle
East) or an aberration of modernity (the Lebanon, Northern Ireland). This sectarianism is thought to
be peculiar to the context in which it occurs (captured in the Northern Irish phrase, “unless you’re
from the place you can’t understand it”) and is unintelligible (captured in the Northern Irish phrase,
“anyone who isn’t confused here doesn’t know what’s going on”).
This leads to two unfortunate consequences. First, analysts have not put much effort into
understanding sectarianism and, secondly, lay people make up their own meaning of it, giving us
many “folk models” of sectarianism that parallel people’s “folk models” of what ‘race’ means. Let
me unpack their meaning analytically.
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Racism and sectarianism are both systems of social stratification. That is, they produce inequality,
injustice and discrimination in a structured manner not just randomly or as a consequence of
people’s natural talents and capabilities. They do so by using a social boundary marker that comes
to shape the whole society – its politics, culture, and economy. In the one case this social boundary
marker is ‘sect’ or religion, in the other ‘race’. This results in people being categorised into groups
by which their life chances are determined according to this marker.
I am not saying that race or religion cause inequality. This is important. Race and religion are used to
allocate scarce resources unequally. Racial or religious differences are mobilised in a competition for
scarce resources that they do not cause. It is social beliefs about racial or religious differences that
matter not those differences in themselves. Sometimes these differences are real, sometimes
assumed. Even where real, though, say differences in beliefs about communion, what matters is the
significance placed on these differences.
This means that sectarianism can be defined as the determination of actions, attitudes and practices
by beliefs about religious differences, which results in these religious differences being invoked as the
boundary markers to represent social stratification and inequality.
Substitute ‘race’ for religion and we could be describing racism. Each occurs at the same three
levels:
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That of ideas (being stereotypes, myths, attitudes and beliefs about race or religion, and
about racial or religious differences
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That of individual behaviour (being the actions of people towards others based on their
beliefs, myths and attitudes about race or religion, and about racial or religious differences)
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That of the social structure (being the form of social, cultural, political and economic
relations built on these real or assumed racial or religious differences).
There are therefore many parallels between the two that I just don’t have the time to draw out. But
there is a very fundamental difference that lies in the contrast between ‘race’ and ‘sect’ or religion
as boundary markers. ‘Race’ is reduced to phenotype – to colour and outward physical appearance.
This is a poor understanding of race but outward physical appearance, usually colour, populate folk
models of race. Racial differences therefore involve cognitive skills in picking up perceptual cues to
differences in outward physical appearance.
Religion is not marked physically. It uses stereotypical cues not cognitive ones. That is, it is based on
stereotypical generalisations that are said through common-sense and experience to differentiate
religious differences. Sometimes these differences are real – differences of dress for example – but
mostly they are assumed. They are based on socialisation and learning not perceptual skills. These
stereotypical cues are themselves sectarian; they can only function as cues because of sectarian
beliefs about the assumed differences between groups or because of the social significance placed in
real religious differences. Perceptual cues however no not necessarily presuppose racism.
Whatismore, religion is a confessional label. This means it can be avoided or discarded. People
change religions and can abandon it altogether. Race is not confessional; it is absolute. Changing
phenotype or colour is impossible; it cannot be given up. You can be a lapsed Catholic but colour is
not affected by choice. Two consequences follow.
This means that people are better able to avoid the disadvantage, inequality and discrimination
associated with their religious group (or former religious group). It is therefore also results in it being
more difficult to identify a sectarian system than a racist one.
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There is one further difference. Racial differences intersect more closely than religious ones,
meaning that it overlaps with other social boundaries like class, gender and age. This is not the case
for stereotypical and confessional religious differences. Intersectional inequalities tend to cut
deeper in their effects, extending the inequalities, resulting in racist systems of stratification being
more unequal, unjust and disadvantaging than sectarian ones.
I need to draw my comments to a close. How does religion fit in this as a negative? Religion ought to
undercut and undermine injustice and inequality. But religion has three effects that allow it too
easily invoke the use of race and sect as social markers in systems of stratification.
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Religion lends itself to the process of ‘othering’, by which I mean the process of
distinguishing between insiders and outsiders, marking some people as strangers and
marginal to the core group. After all, what is religion about but distinguishing between
those who have and bear the religious truth, and those who do not. This sense of
righteousness can easily distort into self-righteousness that makes others heathens.
Religious justifications for apartheid or slavery are examples, as are forms of antiCatholicism and anti-Protestantism.
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Religion often elides with territory and chosen nation/chosen people status, which naturally
qualifies other nations, or other peoples who share that territory, as unequal and second
class. There are elements of this in Israel-Palestine, and in other nations rooted in
covenantal understandings of religion.
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Religion can create a justice and democratic deficit, that is to say, religious difference can be
the reason why governments withdraw or refuse services and rights to certain groups,
services or rights to welfare, aid, education, housing and the like. This after all lies behind
the threat that religion poses to human and civil rights.
Thank you.
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