Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Church of England: a great English consensus?
- 2 The Methodist revolution?
- 3 Evangelical enthusiasm and national identity in Scotland and Wales
- 4 The making of the Irish Catholic nation
- 5 Ulster Protestantism: the religious foundations of rebellious Loyalism
- 6 Religion and political culture in urban Britain
- 7 Religion and identity in the British Isles: integration and separation
- 8 Conclusions
- Select bibliography
- Index
8 - Conclusions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Church of England: a great English consensus?
- 2 The Methodist revolution?
- 3 Evangelical enthusiasm and national identity in Scotland and Wales
- 4 The making of the Irish Catholic nation
- 5 Ulster Protestantism: the religious foundations of rebellious Loyalism
- 6 Religion and political culture in urban Britain
- 7 Religion and identity in the British Isles: integration and separation
- 8 Conclusions
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
The complex relationship between religion and identity in the modern history of the British Isles is not reducible to tidy conceptual frameworks. Professor Robbins, in the most authoritative work on the subject so far, states that
churches have been, in some instances and at some periods vehicles for the cultivation of a ‘British’ identity corresponding to the political framework of Great Britain and Ireland. They have also been instrumental, in part at least, in perpetuating and recreating an English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh identity distinct from and perhaps in conflict with ‘British’ identity, both culturally and politically. Sometimes this role has been quite unconscious, but in other instances it has been explicit and deliberate.
The essence of the problem is that the British Isles is a religious patchwork quilt of immense complexity in which national, cultural, economic and denominational boundaries rarely achieve an exact correlation one with another. Moreover, the pattern alters over time and according to historical circumstances. Only in Ireland, it seems, is there a clear division, based on Reformation polarities, between an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic state and the rest of the British archipelago. This division, according to the Dutch geographer M. W. Heslinga, is essentially religious and represents the real frontier of the British Isles. The fact that there is a political border approximating to this division gives the argument a greater degree of plausibility. There is need for care, however, even in this apparently self-evident division. Not only is there a substantial Roman Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, but there has been a considerable Irish Catholic migration to other parts of Britain.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Religion and Political Culture in Britain and IrelandFrom the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire, pp. 173 - 178Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996