ABSTRACT
This book has explored the ways in which religion gives substantive meaning and content to the communal boundary in Northern Ireland. The argument here challenges previous approaches to religion and politics in Northern Ireland, where an academic consensus had begun to hang around the idea that religion is an ethnic marker that is relatively insignificant in and of itself. However, this research has shown that religion is, in part, constitutive of ethnicity. Far from being an empty marker, it gives meaning to Protestant and Catholic labels. Religion is part of what is signified, rather than just the signifier. Whilst conflict in Northern Ireland has not been about religion per se, religion has given meaning to the overall system of community relationships and to politics. Of course, it is inaccurate to say that these meanings are theological – although sometimes they are – but rather that religious ideas, structures, social practices, powerful agencies and morality, fuse with other dimensions of difference in constructing the meaning of communal identity and membership. Moreover, religious ideas and practices overlap and interact with other differences such as ethnicity, nationalism and inequality. In a context of conflict, together these dimensions have come to constitute communal identities. In this way, religion gives meaning to identity and community just as much as, if not more so than, other dimensions of social difference.
