Religion, truth, national identity and social meaning: The example of Northern Ireland

Abstract

This article argues that national identity is closely bound up with religion, which in turn is closely bound up with ideas of truth. Different religions will form and transmit different ideas of truth, both moral and cognitive, and transmit them and socialise their members in to holding them. From this a socially exclusive group is formed, which becomes one basis for a nation. This nation becomes morally and cognitively exclusive of non-religious members since they will hold different truths and so cannot be trusted, they cannot be ‘loyal and true’. Ireland and Northern Ireland provide a classic example of this, where Catholic and Protestant were the mediums for transmitting Romantic or Enlightenment versions of the truth and so provided a basis for opposed ideas of nation.

Keywords:

• religion
• national identity
• science
• Northern Ireland

Notes

1. See The Independent, 28 September 2001, p. 14, or 22 June 2001, p. 4 or Sunday Times, 9 September 2001, Focus, p. 13. This was a dispute in Belfast in which Protestants tried to stop Catholics walking their children to school through a Protestant area, where previous and existing sectarian tensions were already high.

2. Most outsiders tend to view the partition as somehow unnatural, but for Irish Nationalists it is an article of faith and they especially tend to regard religion as a false divider of Irishmen. However, very few Nationalists are Protestant.

3. ‘Scholastic’ philosophy (also referred to as ‘medieval’) was the official philosophy of the Catholic Church until the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) reduced it to simply a primary role in the core of its teachings. Scholasticism was derived from the fourth-century work of St Augustine and the thirteenth-century works of St Thomas Aquinas in turn built on the works of Aristotle (modern science and Protestantism both derive from the Renaissance rediscovery of Plato). It tends to argue from the acceptance of the truth of God, as revealed in Christian teaching and the Catholic Church as the sole repository of it. All argument and debate thus became internal to the pre-preconceived schema of the Church as the sole repository of truth. Logic is internal to that schema and contrary empirical evidence denied validity. It went to the heart of Catholic rejections of Galileo and other scientific observations or religious beliefs that contradicted Catholic teaching (Russell, 1961; Kenny, 1998). It is also interesting to note that Islam, too, is derived from Aristotelian philosophy and suffers from the same ‘closed world’ view, which equally creates the same problems in terms of modern science (Economist, 6 July 2002, pp. 25–7).

4. A famous series of advertisements for Zanuzzi electrical appliances ran the catchphrase ‘the appliance of science’.

5. Hence, as Girvin (2002) observes the ‘Celtic Tiger’ only occurred when the Irish government specifically dropped most of the dogma upon which Irish Nationalism was founded (scholasticism, anti-science and Catholic social teaching). From a scientific point of view one may argue from this that there is real world (truth) that may well exist outside of the realms of the subjective and personal, of scientific facts of an objective nature – truths per se, at least if one wants economic development.

6. One objection that may be raised to my analysis is the ‘Celtic Tiger’, or rapid and successful economic development of the Southern economy over recent years. However, as Girvin (2002) has cogently argued, much of the South's success has been precisely because it has dropped its traditional nationalism and embraced modernity in the Enlightenment mode, which in turn has led to criticisms of it being a betrayal of Ireland (Fennell, 1993).