In reading the excerpt from War and an Irish Town and listening to our class conversation on Monday, I was struck by Eamonn’s telling of his childhood experience with Irish Protestants in Derry. The matter-of-fact way he talked about never having really encountered any Protestants until starting college but being raised in an environment where he was taught to regard them with contempt was a reminder to me about how profoundly sad prejudice and systematic hatred are.
This is not only something I’ve experienced in the context of Eamonn’s story. My family is Irish-American and Catholic. The popular comedic trope about the racist (or misogynistic, or whatever the case may be) old relative that we all have is fulfilled in the case of my family in the older generations and their persisting bitterness toward Protestants. I grew up in an environment where it took me a long time to even realize that being Catholic wasn’t the typical American experience; it didn’t even occur to me until I was in maybe 5th grade that going to Catholic mass and Sunday School every weekend was unusual. I grew up so entrenched in this Irish-American Catholic identity that it skewed my understanding of my surroundings. Of course, young children are the products of the environments in which they exist; I thought being Catholic was normal because that is all I knew. It was difficult for me to understand that historically, being Catholic was seen as bad. That idea was so biblical to me. Religious martyrdom (literally and psychologically) was something that happened hundreds of years ago, how could it be something that dragged people down in a supposedly civilized world, in my life time? As a result of this upbringing, there is this internal wound that flares up when I encounter reminders of the wrongs committed, which perpetuates this bitterness toward the wrongdoers. And my family left Ireland like 150 years ago; my relatives didn’t even suffer the injustices of the 20th century in Ireland.
So this makes me sad. In the grand scheme of the history of the world, two peoples can’t be much more similar than Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants living in the same town. And yet the divide feels enormous. In the breakout room discussions on Wednesday, my group talked about how religious beliefs inform value systems, which play in a significant role in identity formation. From this perspective, the divide between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland seems almost absurd. Two groups of the same race, from the same country, both practicing Christianity should have so much in common in terms of identity. But faith was weaponized and used as a tool for subjugation, and now we are unsure if the world will ever see a united and free Ireland.
I was raised Catholic, yes, but my dad grew up Lutheran. I attended Sunday School every week in elementary school, but when I visited my dads family, I always attended Lutheran services. As my grandparents got older and no longer wanted to commute to their Lutheran church, they became less focused on the specific denomination of Christianity to attend, and rather the community of the people in the Church that felt inviting to them. I lived in many third world countries, each with a different predominant religion, and so I grew up much different than you. I understood at a very young age that all religions and beliefs are valuable and equal. Therefore, I cannot understand the hatred and divide that the Catholics and Protestants felt against each other. The Us vs. Them mentality does not click in my brain. However, as there has been a rise in Islamophobia due to terrorist groups targeting non-Muslims, the idea of using faith to weaponize people has become more prevalent in my mind. It is sad that we still continue to divide based on religious beliefs. I am taking a theology course on Islam this semester to learn more about other religions so that I understand other religions. I think that is extremely important to reduce prejudice, in order to understand identity formation.
There is certainly something profound in realizing how our environment shapes are worldview, which you touched upon in this post. Often times ignorance and/or misinformation can feed into skewed world views and opinions that logically should not be held. For me, who is not Catholic, coming to Notre Dame showed me an entire community of people that I previously knew very little about. I’d like to say I was not prejudiced, but many stereotypes I considered to be true, after actually engaging with Catholics, I found to be false or exaggerated. And often, these views we have about people we’ve never really engaged with are arbitrarily given. That is, like you mentioned, even people who have so much in common can find a disagreement as minute as their sect of the same religion to emphasize and use as justification for hatred. Maybe by popping the social bubbles we find ourselves born into we can come to appreciate people and their world views we otherwise wouldn’t have.
As I was reading your post, although I do not come from an Irish-American background, the last paragraph really spoke out to me as a parallel to what I sense living as a Catholic in our country today. I often find myself asking the question how Christians in our country today (and in the world for that matter) can have such different interpretations of how we should live out our faith and how that manifests itself in the ways we interact with others and the ways we interact politically. I think that the points that you bring out about identity are really interesting because although in our minds we might have labels of how a “Christian” should think or act, we still are each our own individual person and will ultimately make our own choices even if others lump us into a certain group of people. It is an interesting question to ask though that if people are all parts of the same/similar religious/value systems why is there still conflict and difference between us? I think it’s just the fact that in the end we each are our own person and can decide either way what to believe and how to interpret certain things we believe.
Having also come from a big Irish-American Catholic family, I can relate to the struggles that come with being raised Catholic and then growing up and being struck by the harsh reality that a lot of people around the world really hate my religion. I think that religious persecution is a fundamentally paradoxical, as most religions teach values such as kindness, respect, and love. It is interesting to see how people all over the world have misconstrued the teachings of their own religion to justify the persecution of another. I think this comes from the human instinct to divide into groups, forming an “us vs. them” mentality. While all religious people could be productively working together in the world to create good based on their shared values, most of the time this does not happen because we are so caught up in the little differences between us. I agree, it is sad.
Maggie: You touch on something very important in this post, I think, and that is the concept of race. Are they the same “race”? My guess is that the way each group formed their identity was based on them thinking of each other as being of different races. Race is fundamentally a fiction, but a fiction that is based in reality, and how individuals define race changes and has changed over the years (and will continue to change–it is not a stable category, race is a fiction). Thus, at one point in the history of the conflict, it was not just the Catholic feature of the Irish that made them different, it was their Irishness. Whereas, there are many in the North that are Protestant that now see themself as Irish, I do not know (nor do I believe) that was always true. Rather, they were British or English, thus adding another layer to how we understand identity formation and the conceptualization of race within the Irish context.