An article I wrote on ‘Secularisation, Ecumenism and Identity on the Island of Ireland,’ which was published in an edited collection, Christianity and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Europe (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2016), has now been made freely available via open access.
The chapter addresses this question: Has secularisation or ecumenism, or some combination thereof, contributed to changes in the relationship between religion and national identities in ways that have lessened the oppositional religious content of identities, thus contributing to peace?
Click here to read the whole chapter: Ganiel in Wood 2016
Spoiler alert: I conclude that the data on secularisation and ecumenism that are available cannot fully answer that question. But the evidence hints that neither has been as important as their respective advocates would like to suppose, even if further research is required before that conclusion can be drawn definitively.
While that conclusion may sound unsatisfyingly cautious, I promise that the analysis of the relationships between identity change, secularisation and ecumenism is based on some interesting studies!
You also can download the entire book (choose open access in the ‘output format’ field), edited by John Carter Wood, a historian at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz, Germany. There are chapters that explore relationships between religion and national identity in the UK, Spain, Moldavia, Germany and Poland; as well as the churches and Europeanisation.