Let’s start celebrating the demise of the Catholic Church in Ireland. We’re an example to the rest of the world.
Ireland was, until recently, a smug religious country. Self-congratulation went with the package. We called ourselves the land of saints and scholars. The rest of Europe was pagan and damned – especially our English neighbour – but we were still close to God. The holiest people in the world were among us and we just loved ourselves for being so good.
Every bus stop queue had a nun or two. We all went to Mass every week, some every day, and cooler than having a new car and a colour television set was having done the Nine First Fridays or Lough Derg and being as sure of a happy death as of a wet summer.
All that changed just a generation ago. We might have come later than Germany or England to the insight that institutional religion is a con, but, by Christ, when the message sank in, it sank deep, and Ireland ditched religion faster than anyone had done before. It was not because we were shocked to discover that priests and brothers had been tinkering with boys and girls in their care. It was more to do with our sex lives, not theirs. It happened when the Church over-reached its influence by banning contraception.
And there was more to it than a crusty old pope hoping to save the church by keeping the birth rate up. The Vatican had restated the potty theology of old Saint Augustine in order to kill off any suggestion that sex was for anything but procreation. Concede the alternative, thought the Pope, and any sexual activity at all might be legitimate, from wanking to sheep shagging.
Ireland’s innate country savvy kicked in there: Rome had overreached herself. And not because we all wanted leather and thongs, but because the people saw plainly that ordinary, boring, heterosexual married couples were being made the scapegoats of a theology that winced at sodomy.
Strangely, Ireland does not remember that commonsense moment with pride. Ireland does not congratulate herself on dispensing with the Catholic Church. The country has gone through a remarkable, non-violent and commendable social revolution, away from conformity and obedience into secular freedom, and yet it does not mark the transition with flag-waving and a special day, or really with anything at all.
In fact, mention the church in the new Ireland and it is all just an embarrassment. We don’t like to think that we once took the musty men in black too seriously. We are happy to have a civic culture in which religious values do not need to be considered much, but we don’t talk much about how we got here.
And we should. Because we did a fine thing in getting the Church off our backs. And because, for want of a naked celebration of that achievement, the church is left free to harbour the fantasy that secular culture is merely consumerist and immoral, the rest of us having decided not to even engage in that argument.
But there is a better reason still. Ireland’s experience is potentially reassuring to a world that is again afraid of religion. For if a country that was as dominated by a dark and rigorous religious culture as Ireland was 40 years ago, can be secularising and diversifying as rapidly as Ireland is today, then why needn’t we imagine that Saudi Arabia and Iran might change as quickly?
I suspect that the Republic is still not quite at ease with its decision to divest itself of a big dark church. There is a suggestion of this in the fascination we have with the arguments of the new atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
In 2006, Fergal Tobin of Gill & Macmillan studied the sales figures for anti-religious tracts by Dawkins and Hitchens over the busiest fortnight of the year – the two weeks before Christmas – in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Over 90 per cent of sales of Dawkins’ The God Delusion were made in the part of the island with only 70 per cent of the population, leading Tobin to conclude:
“The sorts of people who buy books in the Republic of Ireland are in the vanguard of post-Catholic secular sensibility. No similar movement animates the North. It is hard to explain these figures otherwise; harder still to explain the continuing success of Dawkins’ polemic in the South into 2007; and almost impossible to draw any other conclusion when one sees a similar pattern of sale for Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great... what might be called the matter of God marks a clear North-South divide, at least among the relatively elite element of the population that buys books.”
The real appeal of the new atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens – who packed out the Gate Theatre on a Sunday afternoon one day last year – is not, I suspect, to established secularists, but to people in transition. People who give no thought at all to whether a God above has expectations of them will not read books about religion and will not read books about secularisation either. But people growing out of religion uneasily will relish the arguments of Dawkins much as pubescent teenagers relish discussion about sex.
If we could look plainly at our achievement and be comfortable with that, two things would follow.
First, we would cease to be mystified and appalled by other religious
cultures. We would know from memory what it is to be religious, and we
would not therefore think of Islamic Jihadists as weird. We would
recall that we were always more humane and pragmatic than devout
ourselves, and we would trust that most of them would be the same.
This should lead us then to conclude not only that a similar revolution might occur in Islam but it might also come as rapidly.
“How sweet would be their children’s fate, if they, like them, could die for thee.” That’s what our parents used to sing in the pews. Of course they didn’t mean a word of it. We had to pretend that we relished martyrdom and some poor saps took it too seriously. No other country knows from such recent experience how a religious culture can be deflated. We should value that experience and share it.
Empty Pulpits: Ireland’s Retreat from Religion is published this month
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