Presbyterian Religion, Historiography and Ulster Scots Identity, c. 1800 to 1914

The links between Presbyterians in Scotland and the north of Ireland are obvious but have been largely ignored by historians of the nineteenth century. This article addresses this gap by showing how Ulster Presbyterians considered their relationship with their Scottish co-religionists and how they used the interplay of religious and ethnic considerations this entailed to articulate an Ulster Scots identity. For Presbyterians in Ireland, their Scottish origins and identity represented a collection of ideas that could be deployed at certain times for specific reasons – theological orthodoxy, civil and religious liberty, and certain character traits such as hard work, courage, and soberness. Ideas about the Scottish identity of Presbyterianism were reawakened for a more general audience in the first half of the nineteenth century, during the campaign for religious reform and revival within the Irish church, and were expressed through a distinctive denominational historiography inaugurated by James Seaton Reid. The formulation of a coherent narrative of Presbyterian religion and the improvement of Ulster laid the religious foundations of a distinct Ulster Scots identity and its utilization by unionist opponents of Home Rule between 1885 and 1914.

The push and pull between religion and ethnicity: The case of loyalists in Northern Ireland

This paper uses a case study of a largely religiously non-practising group, working class loyalists in Northern Ireland, to explore the relationship between religion and ethnicity in divided societies. It finds that loyalists often turn to religion habitually in times of insecurity to provide justification for conflict. But religion does not just prop up deeper ethnic identities. Religion has meaning and content itself that is sometimes tension with oppositional ethnic identities and, in some cases, can transform them totally. This produces a complex set of relationships in which religion and ethnicity push and pull against one another in the lives of individuals, neither dominating fully over the other.

Mixed Religion Schools in NI and Israel

This paper compares the concept of mixed faith/cultural education in Northern Ireland and Israel. It is primarily concerned with the processes that these 'integrated' schools adopt in their quest to improve relations between divided ethnic groups. Drawing on qualitative data collected in two mixed religion primary schools in each jurisdiction the paper shows that the schools' existing cultural norms act as important mediating influences on the way that inter-group relationships are constructed. The paper concludes that attention needs to be paid to both the policy context and the culture if contact initiatives are to be successful.