The push and pull between religion and ethnicity: the case of the Loyalists in Northern Ireland

In: Ethnopolitics, Band 9, Heft 1, S. 53-69

Abstract

This study uses the case of a largely religiously non-practising group, working class loyalists in Northern Ireland, to explore the relationship between religion and ethnicity in divided societies. It finds that loyalists often turn to religion habitually in times of insecurity to provide justification for conflict. But religion does not just prop up deeper ethnic identities. Religion has meaning and content itself that is sometimes in tension with oppositional ethnic identies and, in some cases, can transform them totally. This produces a complex set of relationships in which religion and ethnicity push and pull against one another in the lives of individuals, neither dominating fully over the other. (Ethnopolitics)