I’ve found the whole “Troubles” that Ireland has faced to be somewhat unusual, coming from a US background where Christian sectarianism doesn’t generally turn violent or have revolutionary nuances.
In Ireland, with all the issues surrounding (and binding) Catholics and Republicanism and Protestantism and Loyalism, how easy is it, socially, for someone to convert from one to the other? Is simply converting often considered to have political or ethnic overtones, or considered to be social “treason” against your family? Irish (Republic and NI) dopers are especially encouraged to reply.
In the US, I know people who have gone both ways (converted from Catholic to Protestant and converted from Protestant to Catholic) and it is really not considered a significant social or political act at all.
I’m not primarily talking about whether or not it is legal to convert, but whether or not doing so is likely to cause strain in the family or community to a degree that it would not in the US.
P.S. Whether or not switching between Protestantism and Catholicism constitutes a full “religious conversion” in a sociological or psychological sense is out of scope for this question.
My best friend’s mom personally had similar issues of this sort in Nova Scotia (Canada) back when she was a girl back in 1920s or 1930s, not on a wide scale, but she was personally attacked by another girl (with a knife).
Another factor: there are three main religions up there. Logistically and theologically, it is probably easier to covert from Catholicism to Anglicanism or vice versa than it is to convert between Catholicism and Presbyterianism.
Historically, there have been a few Catholic Unionists and more than a few Protestant Nationalists. Not converts though.
I’m not aware of any converts, but have a couple of personal anecdotes to indicate that it might be a huge deal, possibly even requiring emigration, at least a while back. Though I’m happy to be corrected by actual Northern Irish people, and I also acknowledge that things are changing there all the time.
A friend’s brother from a vehemently Nationalistic household in Co. Antrim started going out with a girl from the Unionist community. I had dinner with the family and her, and you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. I mean seriously tense. She was pretty much oblivious, prattling on about this and that, but whenever her conversation touched on anything vaguely ‘political’ (e.g. she was working on a memorial to the victims of an IRA atrocity, and they were all looking horrified, which made me cringe) or ‘religious’, my friend’s family were all exchanging sideways glances that she couldn’t see. The brother was clearly extremely tense. I found it really depressing. (Early '90s)
Despite not being Catholic or Irish, I got married in a Catholic church in the Republic of Ireland. We had to attend church-run pre-marriage classes, and chose to have a 1 1/2 day session rather than spreading it out over several weeks. Apart from me and my (Republic of) Irish fiancee, every other couple there (15-20 couples) was a ‘mixed’ one from Northern Ireland. Chatting to a few of them during coffee breaks, they explained that it was just easier all round to drive down to Dublin for a ‘vacation’ without telling their friends what they were doing, than attend the meetings in North with all the issues that would entail. (Early naughties)
Yes, in most cases it would be a much more loaded act than it would in the US, or any other country in the UK. Religion and political/social affiliation are closely intwined. In some communities it might be positively dangerous.
I first met a girl from Northern Ireland when she came over to England to study at the art college I attended when we were about 18. Within five minutes of meeting, she would ask ‘are you Protestant or Catholic?’. We were all totally non plussed. She quickly discovered that your religion, or lack of it, was of no interest to anyone and certainly didn’t form the basis of who to hang out with.
My Irish family (County Down) are Catholic, but seldom attend church and no longer assume a political connection based upon someone’s church affiliation. I think the two things have been divorced for at least one generation. The kids these days think of the Church as essentially a dying institution, and th IRA as having been taken over by thugs some time ago.
The majority of them would very much like to see a unified Ireland with a social-Democrat political system and a monetary system based upon the Euro.
Conversely, when I first started at uni I was sitting with my aforementioned Nationalist friend, another girl from Northern Ireland, and a girl from Norway.
We were talking about the situation in Northern Ireland, and the Norwegian girl naively asked the Northern Irish girl “Are you Protestant or Catholic?”
“How DARE you!?” the girl from Northern Ireland shot back, outraged.
At which my Nationalist friend said to me with a grin: “Must be a Protestant then.”
I’ve never known anyone to convert from one to the other but mixed marriages are common enough. One way of dealing with the possible tension between say a Church Of Ireland parent and a Catholic parent is to raise their children in a third Christian denomination like Presbyterianism.
If I (living in Dublin) converted to Protestantism of one sort or another, I don’t know if many people would bat an eyelid, except my elderly northern relatives. They might find it at the very least peculiar and one or two might find it vaguely treacherous.
In a sense most people in Northern Ireland have a have an “ethnic” religion, for want of a better term, which exists regardless of observance and their practiced faith whatever that may be. I bet a Northern Catholic who converted to Islam would still be considered a Catholic to those who have issues with Catholicism there, for example. Indeed, I’ve heard that many who consider themselves Protestant, were never baptised.
I consider myself Catholic culturally but I and most of the people I know are atheist or at the least agnostic.
Irish Catholics becoming born-again Christian aren’t all that rare either.
Old joke, which I’ve posted her before to prove a point:
A man was walking through the streets of Belfast late one night, when someone grabbed him from behind and held a knife to his throat. A voice asked, “Are you Catholic or Protestant?”
The man replied, “Why… I’m an atheist.”
The voice snapped back, “Yeah yeah, but are you a CATHOLIC atheist or a PROTESTANT atheist?”
If that joke doesn’t make sense to you, well, it WOULD in many other countries. Very often, what we think of as “sectarian violence” has very, very little to do with theology.
The media often made the civil war in the Balkans out to be a religious conflict, but in reality, VERY few Orthodox Serbians, Catholic Croatians or Muslim Bosnians were deeply religious or even moderately observant! O’Rourke once asked, “Do you know how the tell the Serbs, the Croatians and the Muslims apart? The Serbs are the ones who never go to Orthodox services, the Croatians are the ones who never go to Mass, and the Muslims who, five times a day, DON’T face Mecca and pray.”
“The Troubles” aren’t as severe in Northern Ireland as they were, but don’t kid yourself that unobservant “Catholics” and unobservant Protestants in Northen Ireland like each other any better than their devout ancestors did." The two groups were NEVER warring over the meaning of the Eucharist! They were fighting over many other things, like their perceived places in Northern Ireland’s socioeconomic ladder and their ethnic/political loyalties. Even if he never goes to Mass, a Belfast kid who grows up on the wrong side of the tracks is likely to resent the “Prods” who seem to have more money and power than his people do, and that may lead him to embrace the label of “Catholic,” even if that has no religious meaning to him.
I’ve heard that one of the only ways to tell Bosnian Muslims from Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats was to look at what they eat: the Muslims will usually refrain from eating pork, while the Serbs and Croats have no proscription against it.
If your target is a man, there may possibly be another way as well.
But yes, the labels of “Catholic” and “Protestant” in Northern Ireland are more akin to national identifiers than religious ones. For this reason, I’m not quite sure how one would really convert from one to another.
I went to college in the north and the first person I met asked me if I was Catholic or Protestant. Only he used the charming phrase “What foot do you kick with?” I had no idea what he was talking about so he had to explain, then because I was from the south he said “I assume its the same as me.” The cliques in college were definitely split first by religion, then into other little subsets.
In the south nobody cares, and nobody would ever ask. Its just not an issue.