Online Launch 27 January: The Oxford Handbook of Religion & Europe

The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Europe offers a detailed overview of religious ideas, structures, and institutions involved in the making of Europe. It examines the role of religion in fostering identity, survival, and tolerance in the empires and nation-states of Europe from antiquity until today; the interplay between religion, politics, and ideologies in the twentieth century; the dialogue between religious communities and European institutions in the construction of the European Union; and the engagement of Catholicism, Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism, and Eastern religions with the idea of Europe.

This book launch event will feature a presentation by the two co-editors of The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Europe: Lucian Leustean, reader in politics and international relations at Aston University, and Grace Davie, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Exeter. Berkley Center Senior Fellow Jocelyne Cesari, who contributed a chapter to the volume, will offer her response. Judd Birdsall, Berkley Center senior research fellow and project director of the Transatlantic Policy Network on Religion and Diplomacy, will moderate the discussion, which will explore the enduring presence of lived and institutionalized religion in the social networks of identity, policy, and power over two millennia of European history.

Here’s the short introduction to our chapter on ‘Ireland and the United Kingdom’:

The religion and politics of the islands of Britain and Ireland have been intertwined for centuries. Ireland was a conquest of the British Empire. The most intense period of colonization, the ‘plantations’ of the early seventeenth century, occurred shortly after the triumph of the Protestant Reformation in England, Scotland, and Wales. The Reformation had not taken root in Ireland and had assumed different forms in England and Wales (Anglicanism) and Scotland (Presbyterianism). This ensured that during the plantations, religion became an important component of difference. The Act of Union of 1801 created a new, ostensibly unified state: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The Irish War of Independence (1919–21) resulted in the withdrawal of Britain from the twenty-six southern counties of the island and the creation of the Irish Free State, which became the Republic of Ireland in 1937. The six counties of what is now Northern Ireland, which had a Protestant majority, remained in the United Kingdom (UK).

This chapter examines the role of religion in these neighbouring islands in four stages: (a) the plantations until the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923, when religion was used both to justify colonialism and to oppose it; (b) state-building in the early twentieth century, when religion impacted politics and society in ways that diverged from the wider European Christian democratic movement; (c) a period of secularization in the late twentieth century; and (d) a period of religious change and religious persistence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It concludes by examining the impact of religion on the 2016 Brexit referendum vote, arguing that Brexit has destabilized political and religious relationships between the islands.