The casual theocracy: understanding “Ulster”
Something that has struck me in the many years I’ve been wearily following the sceptical movement, like a slightly disappointed fan who’s caught Madonna lip-syncing, is the marked difference between the American and British sections of the sceptical Anglosphere. There’s definitely a much more ferocious and uncompromising attitude in the US, probably due to the truly inspired nuttiness of American Christianity and its dominance of the political sphere. In the UK, on the other hand, we tend to have a little more nuanced approach: two of our three main political leaders are atheists, unimaginable in the US, and we have nowhere near the same level of clerical meddling in governance (though the established Church is an ongoing stumbling block) as our American brethren.
However, there is a section of the United Kingdom that still is governed with the churches as the eminence grise. It’s typically forgotten or glossed over by many but it still exists. It’s called Northern Ireland, home to about 1.75 million people – not so much a country as a compromise, emerging daily from the red mist of a three-decade-long civil conflict. Neuroses about faith and the sectarian hate that so tarred these six counties characterise every discussion ever held in the political and philosophical arenas here. It’s a topic rather close to my heart, and it’s a topic that people need to be more aware of. There’s a reason why: Northern Ireland is as close as Britain has come since the end of the nineteenth century to a functional Christian theocracy, and serves as a unique cautionary tale for the poisonous effects that well-deployed religion can have on civil society.
Prominent atheists (including Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens) have been guilty of simplifying what we laughably call “The Troubles” into a fight over what kind of Christian you were, while believers like Tony Blair have tried to paper over the religious chasms so as not to offend the two “communities”. Whatever – either way the divisions are easy to see. But the conflict has had a far more insidious and far-reaching effect on Northern Ireland: it, and the decades of tension since the foundation of the state in 1921, has dramatically increased the store which people set in their faith.
For instance, abortion is illegal here. The only exception is if the mother is in mortal danger, as is the case in the Republic of Ireland. Again and again, politicians of both nationalist (primarily Catholic) and unionist (primarily Protestant) have banded together to bar women from their reproductive rights. It was illegal to be gay until 1982, fifteen years after the rest of the UK, thanks to the efforts of Rev Dr Ian Paisley and his Democratic Unionist Party’s “Save Ulster From Sodomy” campaign. We have a single openly LGBT* elected official – one gay councillor out of 582. There is only one (publicly declared) non-Christian in our regional assembly of 108: Anna Lo, a Hong Kong-born Taoist.
Faith isn’t just something that a lot of people have. It’s an assumption: are you Protestant or Catholic? We’re such a polarised country that the idea of someone being atheist or Muslim or Buddhist rarely enters the equation. The churches run large sections of the education sector: Catholic schools are maintained by the Church of Rome, while many state schools (such as mine) have a large Protestant clergy presence on their Boards and are under the British legal obligation to have an act of collective worship every day. This entrenches the division between Protestants and Catholics while simultaneously freezing out those in neither camp.
But since sectarian hate become socially unacceptable, it seems Northern Ireland’s knuckle-dragging scum are switching to other forms of prejudice. That’s why we’re the most bigoted country in the western world. That’s why creationism and climate change denialism are official policy of the largest political party, the DUP. That’s why the Coleraine branch of the National Front, a mere five miles from me, is one of the most powerful in the whole of the UK, despite Coleraine and the surrounding areas being predominantly and overwhelmingly white.
You can see the quandary. It’s not like they’re rounding up the godless and shooting them, and there’s nothing as ludicrously extreme as the personhood laws that the man who would be VPOTUS, Paul Ryan (R-WI), is pushing in the States. But Northern Ireland is a curious anomaly, a relic of a bygone era, when you were defined by your religion and stepping out of it was almost unthinkable, where being gay is a disease or comparable to bestiality. It is this way because since 1921 it’s been the golden mean fallacy in the guise of a nation, splitting one country into two, to stop people killing each other for ethno-religio-politico-social reasons. It isn’t simple or easy to diagnose the problem. But a major contributing factor is religion.
I’m still angry at it. I’ve lost friends over my stance on faith. As a gay man, living here is rather dangerous for me, not even taking account of the fact that the mad First Minister and his madder wife see me as an “abomination”. So this is my problem. I live in a time warp, but I’m on my way out, and hopefully my little corner of the world will continue painstakingly along the road to normality while I’m gone. But it will take a long time, and I worry for the queer people, the atheists, the secularists, who have difficulty talking about themselves, their personal lives, their beliefs, because of how repressive an atmosphere we have here.
So forgive me. But people from mainland UK who talk about religious interference in politics really have no idea how bad it can be, unless they’ve lived here or in America. This is my attempt to demonstrate that the most distressful country remains so. The furore over the Causeway Coast Visitors’ Centre, a miserably awful episode in itself, comes from decades of political hate and theocratic authority. These things do not take place in a vacuum.
And the people of Northern Ireland don’t really seem to mind.
EDIT: The words “publicly declared” have been placed before the assertion of MLAs’ faith – if anyone has any links to on-the-record avowals of non-Christianity by Stormont MLAs other than Anna Lo, I’d be happy to place them here. I’d be particularly interested in Alliance and Green MLAs.
This would be so powerfully moving and articulate, if only you had life experience.
I seem to remember there was a post here a few days ago about dismissing people based on age. I can’t decide if this comment is ironic or not.
Oh, yeah. Watch our hangout.
Will do, probably tomorrow.
Hi Richard. I am 52 and left NI for good when I was 22. I disagree with Alex; your article is spot on. I am a lifelong Catholic but I agree that the various churches in NI have too much influence in government there. I love visiting NI as it is full of wonderful people but the religion and politics drove me mad when I lived there and I am so glad I managed to escape.
I’ve just re-read the last line of the article and on this I disagree with you, Richard. The people of NI DO mind. I look daily at the Belfast Telegraph online and at readers’ comments and I am reassured by the common sense reflected in the majority of posts and the desire to move on and rid NI once and for all of bigots, homophobes and dinosaurs.
As someone from NI, and who lives here, I agree with the points made in the article, but would like to confirm there are plenty of people who do mind this level of ignorance and prejudice. The younger generation, so disenchanted with the politics of, and arising out of, the Troubles, are mainly just happy simply that the Peace Process has held so solidly. They laregly don’t engage with politics at all. The established parties, churches and media all too often talk and pander to the older generations. I agree that those of us who reject superstition and narrrow-mindedness need to speak louder.
You might be right to a point but I found it uniquely alarming that the votes and seat ratio for the more extreme parties (DUP, Sinn Féin, TUV) went up at the last election, and the Equality Commission thinks the situation for gays and lesbians is getting worse:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/13/homosexual-prejudice-northern-ireland-worse
It’s a mixed bag really. And the Belfast Telegraph is a bastion of regional journalism.
Great article.
I could not agree more, Richard. My father is from Belfast and could not get out of there fast enough when he went to university in the late ’70s to escape the British Isles own version of the Lebanon.
I think you’re very brave, moral, and honest for openly admitting to being a free-thinking atheist and a gay man. If Northern Ireland had more people like you, it would reach something like its full height and potential.
Thoughtful article. I left NI for work and love my life in London. No one questions my atheism, my multi-cultural circle of friends is the norm. I have always felt a bit guilty that I didn’t stay and challenge attitudes more but I felt suffocated by the hate and ignorance, on so many levels. Here is a little snapshot of NI life which I find so sad. A few years ago my sister went out to a ‘gay club’ in Belfast as part of a leaving do pub crawl. She bumped into a member of the team she managed. He asked her please not to tell anyone in the office he was gay. My sister was so upset that her colleague had felt the need to hide who he was. Of course she respected his privacy but it has really made her question how gay people are treated in NI. Of course in more rural parts of the UK with long established communities and little immigration, attitudes towards race and other things can be dreadfully outdated. I have witnessed this on several occassions. The difference is that it is not state or church sponsored which seems too often to be the case in NI.
That’s an interesting point: my comment above has a link to a recent Equality Commission study that makes it clear that all the “indices of prejudice”, as it puts it, are way up. It seems to be entirely grassroots hate, if I may put it that way, which is in some ways heartening and in some ways uniquely depressing.
Curious, isn’t it, the power and control that organised religion has over sex and people’s sex lives. It’s so widespread that we don’t notice it anymore.
And now Lord Morrow wants a “Swedish Model” introduced here to control sex workers and their clients. It’s a ‘model’ which enshrines just about every myth there is around sex work.
And, although these two things were in the south, they could just as easily happened here: look for symphysiotomy and Anne Lovett of Granard.
Richard, as I have said, I took issue with the initial claim that Anna Lo was the only non Christian in the Assembly because you provided no evidence to support that assertion. The onus was not on me to prove that other Assembly were not Christians – as you were the one who, by default, assigned religion to the other 107 MLAs, the onus was on you to provide evidence that they were.
Now that you have changed your wording to read “There is only one (publicly declared) non-Christian in our regional assembly of 108″ it is certainly an improvement but it still can’t be substantiated. How can you prove that no other members have publicly declared they are not Christians? I’ve heard and seen Steven Agnew declare it several times. You seem to think that unless I can provide you with handy hyperlinks of such declarations, that you’re assertion is true.
You have made an assumption that all but one of the MLAs are Christian, but you initially declared it as fact and now you challenge others to disprove it instead of providing any evidence that it is true.
As it happens, I am confident that there are other MLAs amongst Sinn Fein & Alliance that are non- religious. If you want to promote a society of secularism, or even atheism, I think it’s important to not assign religion to those who aren’t religious. It seems, frankly, incredibly self defeating.
If I could edit this to improve the grammar, I would. Apologies.
“How can you prove that no other members have publicly declared they are not Christians?”
Very easily, by looking at statements that are on the public record. There’s an addendum to the post asking for precisely that. I’m not going to trawl the BBC website, Slugger O’Toole, UTV and Hansard for an MLA letting the cat out of the bag about his or her non-belief.
If you’d like to challenge my assertion that 107 of the 108 MLAs have *not* publicly declared that they aren’t Christian, all you need to do is find me a reputable link or links. You’re dismissing that as “handy hyperlinks” but the reality is that in Northern Ireland the general assumption is Protestant or Catholic – no in-betweens. You’re going to need significant evidence otherwise.
For example, nobody disputes the fact that the only publicly acknowledged atheist in the US Congress is Pete Stark (D-CA), and this is because of the faith-tinged atmosphere in politics over there. I would need good evidence to believe that any named member of the US Congress is not a Christian, and Stark’s avowal of non-belief is on the record. The same holds true for Northern Ireland. If you want me to retract my default assumption that the MLAs are Christian until proved otherwise, you’ll need to provide a recorded public statement of non-belief. That’s the state of our society right now – your confidence really doesn’t help. I’d be delighted to find these public statements in text or video form. But I’m not optimistic. I’m sorry, but I’m not.
My Twitter account, and this comment thread, is waiting.
“Hansard for an MLA” should read “Hansard for any MLA”. Changes the meaning of that sentence somewhat, I apologise.
All 108 members of the Northern Ireland assembly are fans of the TV show ‘The X-Factor’. If you want to dispute that find me public statements where they have declared they are not.
^ That’s the type of argument you are putting across.
That’s incredibly facetious. You’re not seriously claiming that X Factor watching has a massive impact on how the people of this country vote? You don’t think that lots of politicians loudly broadcast their X Factor watching and how suitable it makes them to govern, especially to keep out those scum who watch Strictly Come Dancing? Please. Religion is important and is an assumed part of the average politician’s repertoire on the part of the highly religious public. These things require a statement to the contrary to be taken as fact. X Factor watching does not – that’s a bit sixth-form, if I may say.
Okay, so:
Stating the 107 members other than the Taoist are all definitely Christians *is* speculation; what we can say is that none is publicly known, as far as reasonable research (Richard’s, I assume) can determine, to have declared themselves non-Christian, and their participation in a clearly Christian politics and public rhetoric gives us reason to assume, tentatively, that they’re either believers or want people to think they are.
The point is, there’s only one member who is ‘visibly non-Christian’ to somebody in Richard’s position.
No, the point is that Richard has something in common with the major Christian churches in NI – they both assume that unless someone declares their atheism, they must be a Christian.
You would know.
Incorrect. My point is as written: there is, as far as I can see, only one MLA whose lack of Christianity is available on the public record. The first version of my wording made a factual assertion I did not intend to state. Like you, I rather suspect that there are some MLAs who don’t believe – but as you rightly say, the major Christian churches are making the assumption that they’re Christian. I would just prefer for there to be public assertions before I start believing hearsay about one politician or another, because the default is Catholic or Protestant.
Richard,
Great article, it’s clear you are “cursed to see both sides” but that is never a bad thing. Too often today people tend to mistake partisanship for debate and as opposed to learning and developing simply get further entrenched in what they believe – look no further than our shared native birth land (is that a term?) for examples.
Getting out of there for what will be the most formative and developmental years of your life you will quickly learn is the best move you have ever made.
Sadly, a lot of what you discuss above lives on the Republic (where I currently reside) but there are signs of progress and small groups like this one can only get bigger and more influential.