Turpin, H. (2019). Book Review: 'Love's Betrayal: The Decline of Catholicism and Rise of New Religions in Ireland' (original) (raw)

Turpin, H. (2019), “Leaving Roman Catholicism”

The Handbook of Leaving Religion, Enstedt, Larsson & Matsinen (eds.). Brill Leiden., 2019

This chapter examines the decline of Roman Catholic practice, belief and affiliation in Ireland, a country long considered Western Europe’s secularisation outlier. Existing literature demonstrates that changes in social expectations led to a collapse in devout, embodied religiosity in favour of laissez faire “cultural Catholicism.” At the same time, the Church retains significant institutional influence. A series of scandals has acted as a lightning rod for the tensions implicit in this situation, morally contaminating the Church and enabling discourse around the rectitude of Catholic affiliation. Together, these contribute to morally charged secularism focussed on severing the default link between Irish ethnic and religious identity to erode lingering Church influence. Against this background, Irish ex-Catholics do not simply leave the Church; many also depict themselves as repudiating “inauthentic” cultural Catholicism which irresponsibly supports the status quo.

Turpin, H. (under review), “Tainted Faith: on the Moral Rejection of Irish Catholicism”

'Cultures of Unbelief' (In preparation). Lanman, J., Lee, L. Bullivant, S. & Farrias, M. (eds.).

Existing cross-cultural work on non-religious attitudes towards religion suggests that some of the non-religious are more likely to adopt an anti-religious worldview which perceives religious influence to be a moral evil, while others tend more towards apathy or ambiguity on matters religious. Thus far, this work on anti-religious attitudes has entailed two serious limitations. One is a tendency to focus on international atheist movements, leading to a homogenous picture that amplifies cross-cultural similarity while underplaying how anti-religious stances are formed in response to local contexts. The other is that existing work sheds little light on how these anti-religious and more ambiguous unbelieving stances relate not just to religion, but to one another. The Republic of Ireland provides one of the most interesting contemporary contexts in which to examine both these issues. While being a ‘good Catholic’ and a ‘good Irish person’ were once coterminous, this is no longer so. Today, the ROI hosts one of the world’s fastest growing populations of ‘convinced atheists’ (WinGallup 2012), and its non-affiliated minority are the most anti-religious in western Europe (Riberink et al, 2013). Crucial to this are a number of factors. First, the Church retains a significant degree of institutional influence, particularly in the educational sphere. Second, after almost 25 years of institutional scandal, the Church has become severely morally tainted in the public eye. My research suggests that in combination with declining religious socialisation, these factors have contributed to the emergence and transmission of a highly self-aware and moralised form of unbelief, which I will call ‘ex-Catholicism’. This stance is one of the clearest contemporary expressions of the relationship between negative moral judgements of religious institutions and the construction of worldviews and identities valorising religious rejection (e.g. Hout & Fischer, 2014). At the same time, this stance exemplifies the degree to which such anti-religious worldviews are deeply culturally constructed rather than simply being the local implementation of global New Atheism: Irish ex-Catholicism is galvanised by a powerful moral narrative which maps smoothly onto existing schema of Irish history as a struggle for freedom from external oppression - this time, freedom from the oppressive hold of the Church. But perhaps most crucially, the ex-Catholic stance cannot be understood without taking into account a key third factor: its relationship to cultural Catholicism, which can be construed as an accommodationist form of privatised unbelief. Despite the collapse in the Church’s moral stature and authority, the majority of the Irish population constitute what might be called ‘cultural Catholics’: while they may have abandoned most of the beliefs, practices, and signature moral stances associated with Catholicism, and while many disapprove of the Church, for a variety of reasons they cleave to a Catholic identity. The newly emergent and rapidly growing stance of ex-Catholicism this chapter describes is defined by an ‘ethic of authenticity’ which positions itself in opposition to this cultural Catholic default, reconstructed as a form of ‘unwoken’ or ‘lazy’ complicity on the part of a majority who are, in truth, agnostics, but who nevertheless allow an immoral and power-hungry institution to claim them as believers. From this perspective, disaffiliation is imperative, metaphysical beliefs are a private side issue, and the maintenance of local traditions and affiliations should not be allowed to interfere with the central moral project of national institutional secularisation. Through the lens of the ROI then, this chapter will shed light on negative moral judgements of religious institutions and their key role as a component of strong religious rejection, the cultural construction of anti-religious worldviews built upon such judgements, and the complex relationship between anti-religious and ambiguous unbelieving stances that can result from such processes.