Gradual decline or sudden collapse? Religious change in Ireland
I was pleased to see my commentary on Hugh Turpin’s excellent Unholy Catholic Ireland (Stanford University Press, 2022) come out a couple of weeks ago — I wrote it during spring break earlier this year.
You can find this wonderful book here — for your own purchase or to order to your library!
Turpin’s book combines analysis of his own survey, using innovative techniques like the ‘free list’ method, and ethnography, including of online spaces. He provides a wonderful integration of approaches to answer the big question of what religion and secularity mean in Ireland today.
My commentary, ‘Gradualist Decline or Sudden Collapse?’ is now available via open access in the journal Religion, Brain and Behavior — part of a special edition of review pieces on this important book. My response was accompanied by quantitative analysis of religious change in Ireland using the European Values Study.
I was interested in a specific question: how far is Irish religious change down to cohort replacement, or period effects?
Religious change is made up of some combination of age, period and cohort effects.
The scandals breaking from the 1990s led to a sea-change in perceptions of the institutional church. Irish religiosity shifted dramatically in response — suggesting that religious change in Ireland might well be characterised by substantial period effects, operating across society at the same time point.
I therefore looked at the European Values Study samples for Ireland, from surveys fielded in 1981, 1990, 1999 and 2008, to see whether period or cohort effects mattered more for Irish belief, belonging, practice, and confidence in ‘the church’.
I began by looking at religious belief, as a key dimension of religiosity — but not the only dimension, particularly in an orthopraxic context, which we might argue Ireland was until recently. Respondents were asked whether they believed in God, heaven, hell, and the existence of sin and an afterlife. The average number of beliefs were graphed by birth cohort and survey year. Belief levels look stable within birth cohorts until the 1999 wave, then fan out.
Mass attendance however shows clearer evidence for ‘period effects’, namely decline within birth cohorts. Attendance looks stable over time on average for pre-1940 birth cohorts, but each later cohort shows decline over time.
A notably high percentage nevertheless still agree that it’s important to mark a baby’s birth with a religious service. There is evidence of small differences between birth cohorts, though they are in the direction of decline. However, there is no clear evidence of decline within cohorts. Religious nominalism may still be important, with the institutional churches still claiming ownership of baptisms and funerals.
By contrast, confidence in churches shows clear, sizeable differences between birth cohorts, with evidence of decline within cohorts between 1990 and 1999. Note that the Y-axis scaling differs between graphs, so that the decline in confidence for those born in the 1950s and 1960s is substantial.
There appear to be two mechanisms of decline at play, working in combination on each indicator of religiosity. The revelations of the 1990s and 2000s led to a dramatic decline in practice — on top of a slower, inexorable process of detachment already underway. Multivariate regression, reported in the full paper’s appendix, is consistent with this story.
However, infant baptism continues to have a ‘pull’, with evidence of more limited period- or cohort-related decline in the European Values Study. Or at least this was the case in 2008, the latest wave for which we have data. Unfortunately, Ireland didn’t take part in the most recent wave, in 2017, or the related World Values Survey of 2022.
Across these indicators, within-cohort change perhaps looks rather less dramatic than the change in national discourse. But we should bear in mind the relative size of each cohort, and their cultural influence. The 1970s generation was relatively large and members less likely to emigrate permanently, exerting more cultural influence during the 1990s and 2000s as a result.
I was therefore struck by the question of why decline had not been more dramatic still. The ‘confidence in churches’ graph shows more stickiness than we might have expected — though things may well have changed since 2008, as new revelations continued to flow.
I also wonder whether Irish religiosity was historically ‘softer’ than we tend to think. The institutional church in Ireland is younger than we realise, becoming more established as an institution from the mid-1800s. Average mass attendance also rose markedly post-Famine: the Devotional Revolution.
Perhaps the overwhelmingly high rates we see for the oldest birth cohorts in surveys — and the near-universal rates of affiliation evident in the 1901 and 1911 censuses — represented the peak of a long, slowly-building bubble.
Where will things go from here? To identify change since 2008 will be a challenge. It’s a real shame that Ireland withdrew from the European Values Study 2017 and from the International Social Survey Programme ‘Religion IV’ survey of 2018. This was presumably due to prioritising the European Social Survey, running biennially from 2002. It is an excellent resource, but only includes a handful of religious measures.
Religion and values will continue to matter — differently — in Irish politics and society, and Ireland is changing fast. Religion has been associated with deep social cleavages in the past in Ireland, and still is a source of political difference in Northern Ireland. It’s therefore vital that Ireland returns to participation in these major cross-national studies which aim to measure change over time. The commentator Fintan O’Toole used EVS data extensively in his recent memoir, We Don’t Know Ourselves (2021). Without such bodies of evidence of what Irish people believe and hold dear, how can we find out?
