The Rise of ‘No Religion’

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines religious disaffiliation on the island of Ireland. It focuses first on ex-Catholics in the Republic, describing how they fit a global pattern of rising non-religion. After this, the distinctive normative stance of Irish ex-Catholicism is explored using qualitative data from fieldwork and interviews carried out in Dublin. These suggest that for these ex-Catholics, disaffiliation means the moralized relinquishment of an increasingly casual, capacious, and amorphous form of ethnically linked collective identification: ‘cultural Catholicism’ for short. The roots of this stance lie in the country’s trajectory of economic growth, social liberalization, attenuated domestic religious socialization, the moral collapse of the church, and its lingering influence in social institutions and laws. In Northern Ireland, in contrast, things are quite different. There, it is Protestants rather than Catholics who primarily choose to opt out of their natal designations.