SCOTLAND began the twentieth century as a profoundly religious country, at least if measured in terms of adherence to Churches; this reached an all-time peak in 1905.1 By the end of the century, however, the country was implicated in what a leading scholar in the area has termed ‘The Death of Christian Britain’.2 Clearly, there is a lot to explain around the role of the religious factor in Scotland over the last century. Equally, it should be acknowledged that the decline of the Churches does not necessarily oblige us to discount the salience of religion as a notable issue in Scottish life as the twenty-first century takes its course. This chapter seeks to comprehend both the significance of religious institutions from 1900 to our own times and the various social and cultural effects of religion as a controversial subject or form of identity.
The century began with a highly important and symbolical reorganization of Scotland’s dominant religious tradition of Presbyterianism. The coming together in 1900 of the Free Church and the United Presbyterians into the United Free Church signalled the cooling of the intra-Presbyterian conflict that had embittered much of the nineteenth century. The formal rift between the established Church of Scotland, still deferring to the United Kingdom practice of patronage in appointing parish clergy, and the various Presbyterian ‘dissenters’, still demanding disestablishment, remained; nevertheless, the fusion of the great majority of Presbyterianism’s dissenters into one body foreshadowed moves to reunion with the ‘national’ Kirk. This eventually transpired in 1929 and was greatly facilitated by the 1921 Act of the Westminster Parliament, which was broadly interpreted as confirming the established Church’s independence from the State. Indeed, one commentator has pointed out that this made the constitutional position of the Church of Scotland ‘unique in Britain’ and was ‘an abrogation of parliamentary sovereignty’.3 The dissenters dropped their campaign to disestablish the Kirk after 1921. A further Act of Parliament in 1925 regarding Church property and finances then removed the final impediments to union between the Church of Scotland and the great majority of the United Free Church.
The 1921 Act was not unambiguous. Colin Kidd has pointed out that concessions to the Church of Scotland may have been at the cost of weakening its protections of the 1707 Act of Union, and he notes the absence in the 1921 Act of the ‘language of establishment’.4 The attention paid to such debating points rapidly diminished over the coming years, yet it is important to recognize the matter’s wider connection to the relationship between Scottish Presbyterianism and the Anglo-Scottish Union. Kidd, along with other scholars, has highlighted the centrality of religion to the national question in Scotland and the manner in which ecclesiastical controversies more than any other kind had, by the early twentieth century, brought tensions between Scotland and England to the surface. As Kidd argues, the fundamental fault line within the Union for most of its history has been religious rather than political.5 The twentieth century was to provide several notable instances of the intersection between Scottish religious identities and the question of the nature and desirability of political union, notwithstanding the sharp decline in strength and influence on the part of the established Church by the latter decades of the period. More thought, perhaps, needs to be given to how British identity and institutions served the interests of Scottish Protestantism rather than the other way round.
In the years leading up to the First World War, however, pan-Presbyterian Scotland gave every appearance of being geared to the cause of the British Empire. The imperial context was distinguished by much Scottish missionary activity and, arguably, the conspicuously vigorous promotion of moral and social visions. The exploits of David Livingstone in particular inspired heroic myths regularly reworked to fit the needs of the times.6 In the Edwardian era Scottish Protestantism evinced a self-confidence that was substantially the result of its global reach. David McCrone sees this as the high point of the social power and influence of the Presbyterian bourgeoisie.7 Notions of civic responsibility ran deep and the Presbyterian churches cherished what they saw as their character-forming contribution to the life of the nation. Although subject to gradual erosion from the growth of the State, Presbyterianism continued to exercise a role in the local provision of such services as education and welfare through to 1929, when the local-government system was re-organized and the old parish councils were abolished. In relation to education in particular, Presbyterianism, in and out of the established Church, was linked in the popular mind with the pursuit of virtue, the profusion of ‘lads o’ pairts’ equipped for the world’s challenges, and the remarkable achievements of Scottish inventors and Scottish educational institutions.8
Yet amid self-congratulation and a measure of confidence, historians have found evidence of anxieties and alarm. The unsettling effects of industrialization and urbanization had long concerned Church leaders, fearful especially of ‘the masses’ drifting away from organized religion. In the Edwardian era suburbanization gathered pace and the Churches’ contacts with the inner cities were stretched; there was also the competing attraction of organized leisure pursuits. Callum Brown has cautioned against losing sight of what he calls ‘the religiosity of the common people’ in this period, manifest in Church-related organizations and evangelical bodies like the Sunday schools and the Band of Hope.9 Nevertheless, worries about ‘the condition of the people’ and the appeal of the growing Labour movement produced significant engagement with social problems on the part of the Churches and, in some cases, the radical politicization of clerics.10
Many of the poor and disadvantaged belonged to the Roman Catholic faith, particularly in Glasgow and the west of Scotland and in Dundee. Overwhelmingly the product of emigration from Ireland during the previous century, especially from the Great Famine of the late 1840s, this community—some 10 per cent of the population by the early twentieth century—in many ways looked to its church first and foremost for succour and guidance. As such some historians have tended to perceive a tendency towards insularity, occasioned or reinforced by anti-Catholic attitudes in Scottish society; this raised questions about the process of assimilation and the limits to it.11 On the other hand, recent scholarship has revealed a more complex picture of greater Catholic participation in many aspects of Scottish public life and the emergence of a ‘viable’ Catholic community in the early twentieth century out of hitherto unappreciated social and economic improvements and the rise of a Catholic professional class.12
The Roman Catholic Church, whose hierarchy was restored in 1878, prioritized control over the education of its adherents and directed efforts in the political arena to this end. The struggles and sacrifices involved in providing a Catholic education outside the mainstream abated with the 1918 Education Act, which guaranteed full State support for a separate Catholic schools sector. Some Protestants regarded this concession as unduly favourable to the Catholic Church at a time when the Presbyterian Churches’ educational influence was waning and soon to be marginalized, and the issue fuelled sectarian tensions off and on for the rest of the century. A distinguished historian of Catholicism in Scotland wrote: ‘The feeling that the 1918 Act had brought the by now largely Scoto-Irish Catholic community into the life of the nation while preserving its ethos lies behind its defensive reactions in the twentieth century to any proposals to change what is seen as something of a constitutional symbol.’13
The 1918 Act was passed by a coalition government under a Liberal Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. The Catholics in Scotland had until this point largely backed the Liberals, chiefly on account of their policy of Home Rule for Ireland. However, with the coming of near-universal (male) franchise in 1918 and the inability of the Liberal Party to heal its divisions to assume the role of the major force for socially progressive politics, Catholics swung towards the Labour Party. Such a development was by no means inevitable: during the early years of the century the hierarchy was firmly anti-Labour, fearing the spread of socialist doctrines to the socially deprived mass of Catholics. The Labour Party’s willingness to defend the new educational legislation softened the hostility of the Catholic Church after 1918, and it was clear that the Catholic–Labour electoral alliance which then developed in the west of Scotland was predicated heavily on the party not offending the Church’s teachings on other, mainly moral, matters.
The Episcopalian Church in Scotland also provided schools at its own expense until 1918, after which most disappeared through mergers. This Church enjoyed significant support in the north-east, and to an extent grew in the late nineteenth century in the Central Belt and south of the country through Protestant Irish immigration. But the Episcopal Church’s ‘English’ image, notwithstanding its colourful Jacobite history, weakened its claims to a share in national discourse and symbolism. Its role in Scottish public life was often a marginal one throughout the twentieth century.14
Completing the religious patchwork of the early twentieth century, the small Jewish community, based largely in and around Glasgow, grew to around 13,500 by 1914. Jews were prominent in certain trades like tailoring and made their presence felt in mercantile circles.15 Edinburgh Jews, such as the Daiches family, played a significant intellectual role in that city and in the early life of the novelist Muriel Spark.
All the main religious denominations in Scotland shared in the patriotic response to war in 1914. A year later it was estimated that around 90 per cent of the ‘sons of the manse’ had joined up for service, and Presbyterians rejoiced in Earl Haig, their co-religionist, ultimately taking charge of the British troops. Catholic Church leaders also supported the war effort and Catholics volunteered in large numbers. In its early stages the war tended to be viewed in terms of a religious crusade and an exercise in catharsis.16
As the war became one of attrition and the casualties mounted, doubts set in and the Churches’ upbeat message of national spiritual renewal lost some credibility. Scholars of the Churches and the Great War have argued that the conflagration revealed how little influence the Churches had with the soldiers at the front.17 The most popular religious support group in the trenches may have been the Salvation Army. Reports from army chaplains bemoaned the ignorance revealed by ordinary infantrymen of the essentials of the Christian faith, and their tendency to find spiritual comfort in ‘pagan’ ways. The sexual licentiousness of the men on the Western Front was deplored, and this was to an extent compounded by the perception that females at home—traditionally the moral backbone of the Churches and the community—were also falling into male habits of alcohol abuse and sexual misconduct. Before the end of the war the Presbyterian Churches were calling for a revival of puritan values, and were anxiously seeking to reposition themselves as central to the project of post-war social reconstruction.
The changed context of a country trying to come to terms with the losses suffered in the war, and a social and economic order in some flux, saw the Churches struggle to give direction and guidance. Firstly, much emotional energy was absorbed in grieving: the need to honour the dead in memorials and with pulpit panegyrics was urgent and compelling. The same impulse increased faith in spiritualism, evangelized by a famous Scot, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Then there was, for the Churches, the alarming spectre of revolutionary politics and a lurch to the left, as presaged during the war in the violent clashes between workers and authorities. On the part of the majority Presbyterian tradition, preoccupied also with progress towards unity between its main Churches, there was a conservative turn away from the ‘social gospel’ that marked the pre-war period. Leading figures such as the Reverend John White now personified the Kirk’s fears of the political left and the perceived progress made by the Catholic Church as its main ‘competitor’.18
The recent historiography of the religious factor in Scotland during the interwar period has indeed tended to focus on the sectarian tensions between Protestants and Catholics above all else.19 The impact of the 1918 Education Act was a significant part of this; local-authority elections after the war often heard militant Protestant candidates denounce what they called ‘Rome on the Rates’. Some of these candidates were sponsored by the Orange Order, a Protestant organization imported from Ireland during the nineteenth century and still largely directed by Protestant Irish immigrants to Scotland and their descendants well into the twentieth.20 The Order, influential also at grassroots level in the Unionist (Conservative) Party in the west of the country, appealed increasingly to Protestant working-class Scots, and grew in strength after the war around the education controversy and the fear of Bolshevism. It also strengthened its popular cultural credentials with its colourful Battle of the Boyne celebrations and parades—the carnivalesque equivalent in Protestant circles to the Catholic Irish tradition of St Patrick’s Day and Hibernian occasions. Riotous scenes had accompanied such factional dates on the calendar in areas of high Irish immigration in Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire, and Ayrshire as well as Glasgow from the mid-nineteenth century. However, community relations were put under even greater strain in the 1920s and 1930s against the austere economic background and the social scourge of unemployment.
In this context the Presbyterian Churches’ involvement in the public controversy over the extent and impact of Irish immigration was highly divisive; the campaign carried on by leading figures of both the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church, and then by the re-united Church after 1929, repeatedly denounced Irish Catholics as ‘alien’ to Scottish values and culture and damaging to the country’s social and economic welfare. Stewart J. Brown has demonstrated how dogged the Presbyterian campaigners were over a fifteen-year period in trying to bring about legislative change to curb specifically Irish Catholic immigration and even to repatriate Irish Catholics in Scotland.21 Fears of the erosion of Presbyterian influence through the changes to the education system and the local-government reforms, combined with dismay over the extent of emigration—almost four hundred thousand Scots left the country during the decade 1921–31—led the Churches down this confrontational route, although it should be remembered that opinion within Presbyterianism was divided and anti-sectarian and conciliatory voices were also heard.22
For all the inflammatory rhetoric of the era, and the local electoral impact of Protestant parties in Glasgow and Edinburgh, the Education Act was left untouched, and successive Secretaries of State for Scotland refused to be pressured into anti-Irish Catholic legislation. Moreover, Michael Rosie’s recent research reveals the extent to which Catholic propagandists waged their own campaign against Protestantism, and the way the Catholic Church pursued a policy of ‘separatism’ in various social and cultural areas.23 The Catholic Church’s insistence on a Catholic upbringing for all children of mixed marriages—following the guidelines of the ‘Ne Temere’ decree of 1907—aroused much resentment. The electoral impact of the Protestant parties proved ephemeral: as Steve Bruce has argued, the Scottish political world, subsumed as it was within the broader British party system, did not provide the opportunities for sectarian politics to thrive in the contemporary manner of the introverted and closed-off political unit of nearby Northern Ireland.24 Catholics in Scotland could regard the Labour Party as a plausible vehicle for the pursuit of their interests in stark contrast to the political marginalization of their co-religionists in Ulster.25
Militant Protestantism found no support at the elite level in politics; while the press, when it intervened in the Irish immigration issue, did so to explode the myth that the country was being overrun.26 The Scottish Office also disputed the claims of the Presbyterian Churches about immigrant numbers and contended that in the period 1921–31 more Irish emigrated from Scotland than entered it. On the other hand, a memorandum by a Scottish Office official did concede that even a small number of immigrants could aggravate the situation in areas of acute deprivation and unemployment, suggesting that sectarian animosities, whether genuine or cultivated and encouraged by some for their own ends, were always likely to emerge in straitened economic times.27
The Church of Scotland, especially after the reunion of 1929, was desperate to reassert itself as the national Church. In this its aspirations probably mirrored those of the Catholic Church in Ireland or Spain or Poland, and the Church of England south of the border, at the time. It was a self-conscious desire to make the nation and the Church appear intertwined, with the Church responsible for the nation’s values and character. It was perceived as a worthy mission in a modernist world where old certainties were under cultural attack.28 Such sentiments and claims were a notable feature of the ceremony attending the reunion of 1929, and certainly it is important to record that the Kirk membership following reunion stood at 1,300,000, some 27 per cent of the total population; as the novelist and politician John Buchan (son of a Free Church minister) put it in a book celebrating the event, the Church of Scotland was now truly ‘of’ Scotland and not merely ‘in’ Scotland.29 Around 90 per cent of Presbyterians now belonged to the ‘national’ Church, with outside of it only small congregations of dissenters in the Lowlands and the ‘Wee Free’ Free Presbyterian Church in the Highlands and Western Isles. Indeed, the latter congregations, drawn from the crofting community, were the most committed churchgoers and the most steadfast in defence of sabbatarian principles.30 The Kirk, largely through its annual General Assembly and its ‘Church and Nation’ Committee, considered itself the voice of the nation and as such deserving of a hearing at the highest level of State.
Although mainly a period of retrenchment and conservatism, the 1930s witnessed the emergence of more liberal and indeed socially radical tendencies within Presbyterianism which were given momentum by the Second World War. George MacLeod’s Church of Scotland ministry in the parish of Govan in Glasgow genuinely sparked a broad-based community activism and devalued sectarian divisions. MacLeod strove to reconnect Presbyterianism to earlier strands of Scottish Christianity, invoking the example of St Columba and proceeding to found the spiritual community of Iona in homage to him. MacLeod’s willingness to embrace Catholic forms of worship while critical of the papacy earned him the suspicion of many Kirk traditionalists, but foreshadowed a more ecumenical era to come. His pacifism was to lead him to take a prominent part in the campaign for nuclear disarmament in the 1960s.31
Perhaps even more influential in his time, John Baillie provided a more expansive social and theological vision during the Second World War. The Baillie Commission, which highlighted the social problems faced by the nation, sought to bolster community spirit and advocated more public control of economic resources.32 Baillie was Moderator of the General Assembly of the Kirk for 1943. By the time the London Labour government applied itself to the task of post-war reconstruction, the Churches in Scotland were more oriented towards a collectivist view of social and economic policy than in the period following the First World War. Recent scholarly work has revealed the vigour of the Kirk’s industrial mission from wartime through to the late 1950s, and the constructive critique of communism that often accompanied it.33 The advent of the Welfare State also caused fewer ripples of disaffection given the reduced role of the Churches in such areas since the 1920s.
The post-war era saw the Churches increase their membership. A full 46 cent of Scots had a formal Church connection in 1956, only 5 per cent lower than the all-time peak of 1905. The growth after the war was most striking in the Protestant churches while the Catholic peak came later in the mid-1960s. Figures regarding baptisms, marriages, and membership of church-related organizations indicate a significant surge until the end of the 1950s.34 A burst of evangelical activity, most famously the revivalist rallies conducted by the American preacher Billy Graham, fuelled a particularly Protestant form of religious commitment in these years. It was in this era too that a group of young preachers and scholars founded the Scottish Church Theology Society and took forward work in biblical theology.35 William Barclay began to establish his reputation as a popular communicator and Bible teacher and to give notice of his claim to be one of the most internationally renowned Christian leaders of the twentieth century.36 Scots, and Britons more widely, were a ‘believing people’,37 if not to Irish levels; church membership and attendance appear to have reflected strong religious convictions and, in the majority of cases, not merely a social obligation.
The Church of Scotland did not shirk from entering the political arena during the post-war agitation for a Scottish Home Rule Parliament. It was prominent in the broad-based ‘Covenant’ movement which feared that the new Labour government’s centralizing creed placed Scotland’s national distinctiveness within the UK at risk. Would Labour’s pursuit of central economic planning lock Scotland into the British economy with little or no room for special Scottish needs and Scottish control of her own industry? The Kirk’s defence of a national interest, perceived to be under threat from a London government heedless of the reciprocal obligations involved in making the political Union work, indeed foreshadowed its later opposition to much of the governing philosophy of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in the 1980s. It was well observed by the Scottish Secretary of State after the ‘Stone of Destiny’ episode in 1951 that the Labour government might expect ‘continuing agitation’ not only from the Nationalist movement but also the Church of Scotland.38
Nationalistic sensitivities were also evident around the issue of ‘bishops in the Kirk’. Before the war there had been some suggestion that a reunited Church of Scotland might then pursue unity with Episcopal tradition. Strong opposition had been voiced, and when the matter resurfaced in the 1950s and 1960s a populist campaign denouncing the idea was conducted by the Scottish Daily Express.39 The notion of a national Church distinctive in structures and form of worship, and drawing on a history of struggle and sacrifice, mobilized opinion emphatically in favour of the status quo.
Callum Brown views the post-war period until the early 1960s as distinguished by a national or public culture shaped by and oriented to organized religion. From 1963, the sharp statistical fall in Church membership, attendance, and association revealed that Scotland, and Britain overall, turned more secular, ‘a remarkably sudden and culturally violent event’.40 The decline in Kirk membership was rapid and inexorable from this point to the end of the century when the proportion of Church of Scotland communicants relative to the Scottish population stood at less than 15 per cent.41 The Roman Catholic Church in Scotland appeared less severely weakened by the new trends, although decline here was merely delayed until the 1980s, and the changes of Vatican II caused some uncertainty and confusion. Writing in the 1990s, Brown commented that Scots were ‘forsaking their churches for worship, adherence, marriage, baptism and the religious education of their children’.42
The debate over the timing, pace, and nature of the secularization process has engaged many of the finest scholars of the social history and sociology of religion.43 Callum Brown’s criticisms of other scholars in the field of religion in Scotland have centred largely on what he sees as their failure to appreciate the suddenness and the singularity of the process from the 1960s. For Brown, the emergence of a counter-culture and especially the refashioning of gender roles challenged the moral authority of the Churches, and brought about fundamental change to the identity of the nation. Notwithstanding the persistence of a strong fundamentalist Calvinism in the Western Isles, and the sectarian tensions between Protestants and Catholics, Brown has placed the late twentieth-century experience of Scotland in the context of Britain’s development as a pluralist and secular state and a ‘post-Christian’ country.
Churchgoing, in a new age of rival attractions such as television, simply became less fashionable, especially to those from a Protestant upbringing. This was in spite of the Church of Scotland appearing to move with the times in its landmark decision to permit the ordination of women ministers in 1969, and, in the views of one historian, becoming ‘the last redoubt’ of Scottish liberalism.44 Indeed, the Kirk had taken some radical positions on African matters since the 1950s in the context of decolonization and civil rights, and the subject of foreign missions in the twentieth century is deserving of more scholarly inquiry.45 Nevertheless, the Kirk’s popular image tended to remain one of stern and censorious Calvinist joylessness. In a new televisual world of coruscating satire, it found itself mercilessly lampooned, much in the way the Catholic Church was to be made fun of in late twentieth-century Ireland, while the critical attacks by many intellectuals on Calvinism’s impact on Scottish life and culture also intensified. Scotland’s Presbyterian heritage in this view was a dam against the creative and imaginative flow of the nation. It is only in recent times that effective challenges have been served to what many associated with the Kirk have long regarded as an unfair caricature.46 Certainly, there seems little doubt that Calvinism, in common with theological matters more generally, has been little studied or understood by many who have been culturally shaped by the 1960s and later decades.
On the other hand, there have been scholarly re-evaluations of Calvinism’s intellectual legacy in Scotland, and Will Storrar, an outstanding Presbyterian scholar, has pointed to the role played by Calvinist theology in ‘Scotland’s intellectual internationalism’.47 The philosopher George Elder Davie stressed the significance of Presbyterianism to what he defined as Scotland’s ‘democratic intellect’.48 Notwithstanding the formal separation of Protestantism from the education system, there remains a popular inclination to link educational achievements to the time-honoured Presbyterian stress on rigorous schooling.
As the Church of Scotland shrunk so did it become even more emphatically middle class in membership. The loss of working-class adherents was vividly demonstrated by the decline of the Church-related bodies that once embraced them: by 1987 only 90,000 children attended Sunday school in comparison with a figure of 325,000 in 1956; while the Boys Brigade, which boasted 32,000 members in Scotland in 1950, was down to 9,000 by the end of the century.49 In some contrast the Catholic Church in the later decades of the century could still claim a significant working-class membership.
Much of the Kirk’s energy was invested in trying, in vain, to steady its membership. Shrinking numbers in the pews did not prevent it continuing to speak for the nation, increasingly presumptuously in a religiously pluralist and secular age, most notably at the annual General Assembly. The Church of Scotland also took an active part in the public debate over a Scottish Parliament during the 1970s, its interventions in favour of devolution irritating Conservatives. The decade, indeed, saw the spectacular rise of the Scottish National Party (SNP), a phenomenon fuelled in part by disillusioned Protestant Conservative voters. It has been shown that the SNP derived the great bulk of its support from Protestants in this period, despite two of its eleven MPs returned in the October 1974 election being Roman Catholic.50 Only a last-minute intervention by senior Churchman Andrew Herron prevented a letter being read out from every Kirk pulpit ahead of the referendum on devolution in 1979, urging people to vote ‘Yes’.51
The insufficiently affirmative referendum verdict followed by the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1979 radically altered the political context of the 1980s. In this era the Kirk was to be found voicing strident criticisms of the Thatcher government’s ‘laissez-faire’ and individualistic policies and their effects on the less well-off in society. This culminated in the public rebuke delivered by the General Assembly to Thatcher after she had addressed it in 1989. It was no surprise, therefore, that the Kirk should join with the other Scottish Churches in campaigning again for a Scottish Parliament in the 1990s, and welcoming its implementation, finally, in 1999.52 Indeed, the temporary home of the Parliament until the completion of the building at the foot of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh was the General Assembly Hall, a not inappropriate development, symbolically, in view of the Church’s involvement in campaigns for Home Rule through the years and the General Assembly’s claims to have acted as a surrogate Parliament in the past.
Prior to the opening of the new Scottish Parliament in September 1999, the Scottish classical composer James MacMillan delivered a keynote address to the Edinburgh Festival alleging ‘endemic’ religious bigotry in Scotland against Catholics.53 One historian has judged the speech as ‘a determination to break the link between Scotland and Presbyterianism’.54 At the very least the speech had the effect of triggering an intense public debate over the nature and extent of sectarianism in Scotland at the dawn of a new century.
In a sense the ground had been prepared for MacMillan’s intervention by the work of scholars, mainly historians, in bringing to light those episodes from the interwar period that had been largely forgotten or deliberately obscured in accordance with the new ecumenical spirit which dated at least from the 1960s. In 1963 the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland had paid an historic visit to the Vatican, while in 1975 Cardinal Thomas Winning became the first Catholic prelate to address the General Assembly. Most strikingly, the visit of Pope John Paul II to Scotland in 1982 produced conciliatory set-piece events and passed off without any major protest or disruption.
However, such civilities, while a marked change to the tense and acerbic atmosphere of the pre-war era, could not conceal the persistence of much prejudice. The open sectarian hostility of the Rangers versus Celtic football rivalry in Glasgow was only the most obvious sign of a continuing problem. Nor had the education question been emptied of its potential to cause resentments and foster misunderstandings and suspicion.
The new political context of devolution was crucial to the greater scrutiny given to sectarianism by the end of the century. Whereas in the past Scottish religious questions had been marginalized in the broader context of British politics—and it should not be forgotten that the Church of Scotland wished to be left to deal with its own affairs free from State interference—they were highlighted in the new Parliament. Moreover, members of the legislature, of all parties and none, had an incentive to be seen to be tackling specifically Scottish problems in the spirit of a ‘new politics’ and a new beginning for the nation. Shortly after becoming First Minister of a Labour–Liberal Democrat coalition government, Jack McConnell declared it his intention to rid Scotland of the ‘shame’ of religious sectarianism. A measure adding an additional penalty to crimes committed for sectarian motives was proposed by Liberal Democrat Donald Gorrie and passed by Parliament, notwithstanding the difficulties of proving such a motivation, and more generally, of defining the concept of sectarianism itself.55
Of all the faiths, it was the Catholic Church that seemed to adapt most readily to devolution and the sense of a new beginning. The Church’s figurehead in Scotland, Cardinal Winning, soon proved himself an astute political operator; his combative style made life difficult for Scottish Executive ministers, particularly over the issue of the teaching of homosexuality in schools.56 After that bruising encounter there was no likelihood of any Scottish government minister or party taking on the Church over the position of Catholic schools. The Church hierarchy indeed organized a formidable ‘pressure group’ campaign to lobby for what it took to be Catholic educational interests.57
Winning died in 2001, but his successor, Archbishop Mario Conti, also proved uncompromising. In December 2002 he claimed that calls for the abolition, or even amalgamation, of Catholic schools were ‘tantamount to asking for the repatriation of the Irish, and just as offensive’.58 Conti was unlikely to have been unaware of the significance of the ‘repatriation’ charge, echoing as it did the interwar campaign conducted by the Church of Scotland. The Kirk publicly apologized for this episode in 2001.
The media debate and the political activity around the issue of sectarianism have been accompanied by scholarly interventions. These have, in effect, fallen into two categories: those, first, which take the view that sectarianism is still deep-rooted and that it essentially amounts to anti-Catholicism; and, second, those scholars who question how serious a problem it now is in Scottish society and consider that equating it simply with anti-Catholicism is overly reductionist. In relation to the former category there has been a tendency to detect prejudice lying behind criticisms of separate Catholic schools and the ethno-religious identity of Celtic football club. In addition it is claimed that anti-Catholic attitudes and stereotypes are still widely entertained and, at some level in society, influential.59
The opposing school of thought, most cogently expressed by scholars such as Steve Bruce, is concerned to show that Catholic communal distinctiveness and disadvantage have diminished within Scotland to the point where those who wish to prop up a model of a society riven with sectarian antagonisms have to resort to football to do so. Such scholars point to the widespread nature of intermarriage between Catholics and Protestants in contemporary Scotland; a recent survey revealed that more than half of the marriages of people under the age of thirty-five were ‘mixed’.60 Additionally, no significant differences between the economic opportunities of Protestants and Catholics were discerned, nor any divisive effects of political attitudes and voting behaviour.
For scholars like Steve Bruce the notion of Scotland as a society bearing a close resemblance to Northern Ireland is wrong-headed. Factors such as the rate of intermarriage and a political culture oriented historically towards social class issues question the kind of facile comparisons employed by MacMillan in his speech in 1999. Moreover, those sceptical of the extent of sectarianism in Scotland would also point to the country’s resistance to contamination by the troubles which raged in Northern Ireland for close to thirty years from the late 1960s. For Bruce and others there is a tendency on the part of those alleging rampant sectarianism to present as typical what is now better regarded as exotic. Thus, fundamentalist Calvinist denunciations of Catholicism are read as representative of the nation’s views when in fact it is the Free Church of Scotland, with its base in the Western Isles, which is currently marginalized and indeed routinely disparaged in Scotland.61
It might be added that the debate over sectarianism in Scotland of the late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century period has done little to put the issue in the context of a nation now much less religiously homogeneous, or indeed Christian. The contemporary realities of a multi-ethnic and multi-faith Scotland have tended to be obscured by an exclusive concern with Protestant–Catholic divisions and historical grievances. The sectarianism debate has only demonstrated the extent to which time-worn Protestant–Catholic tensions inhibit the kind of dialogue required to accommodate a variety of religious and other identities. By the end of the century Glasgow and Edinburgh together possessed thirty mosques and the Muslim community numbered close to fifty thousand.62 Controversial matters such as faith schools can no longer be debated with reference only to Catholics and Protestants.
Furthermore, it is not clear from the sectarianism controversy whether it is actually religion that is being debated. As Callum Brown has put it: ‘What precisely does “religion” contribute to religious identity?’63 Is religious identity really a form of tribalism with little or no religious substance? As the debate develops, such conceptual disentanglement and clarification will be necessary if light is to be shed on the subject.
The challenges facing the Churches in the new century seem daunting. Continuing membership decline, institutional decay, an often inhospitable media, a cultural climate in which secular assumptions prevail: such would be the sort of problems regularly identified by embattled clergy and Church spokespersons. ‘Modern Scotland is a secular state. The land of reformers and covenanters is as much a myth as the land of heather and highlander.’64 So wrote a commentator in 2002 before going on to call for positive Christian engagement with contemporary society. The question of effective leadership thus emerges, and as the new century takes its course it remains to be seen whether the question will be convincingly answered. In this respect the Church of Scotland is still somewhat disadvantaged by its own democratic traditions. As Moderators must change each year there is less likelihood of an individual acquiring the value of public recognition so vital in an age of mass communications. The Kirk badly needs another William Barclay, but of such a figure there is little sign. The death of Cardinal Winning and the retirement of Episcopal Bishop Richard Holloway have left both Roman Catholic and Episcopal Churches with large spaces to fill. What all the Christian Churches have in common is the need to do more than simply manage decline.
Yet in Scotland, as in Britain more generally, the apparent dominance of secularism may conceal a greater religious sensibility and concern with religious matters than is often assumed. In the sociologist Grace Davie’s words, many are still ‘believing while not belonging’.65 Modern science may have contributed hugely to the secularization process, yet the ethical questions surrounding scientific developments such as cloning and stem-cell research, in addition to the morality of much new technology and of modern weaponry, have given rise to debates in which religious interests can press their claims.66 It is difficult not to conclude that, with Kirk membership down to some 650,000 in the early years of the twenty-first century, Scotland is ‘post-Presbyterian’ in the sense that the country’s dominant tradition for so long is now just one of several faiths. However, it is less straightforward to speak of ‘post-Christian’ Scotland; the evidence here is much more ambiguous if the diversity of the country’s Christian expressions and the advent of ‘New Age’ spirituality are taken into account.67 The enthusiasm displayed by Catholics, and many non-Catholics, on the occasion of the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Scotland in 2010 provided evidence that the appeal of what some refer to as ‘militant secularism’ is more limited than is often suggested.
For the period that is the concern of this essay scholars have tended to research religion in relation to political and social developments and to matters of ethnic or cultural identity. Those—often church ministers and priests—who have focused on theology and public worship have done so for their church audiences. It might be suggested that the two streams need to converge more tellingly, and that, in particular, historians and other scholars who write for a broader public should be more cognizant of questions of actual religious belief and practice, and be wary of making assumptions about what large groups of people think. Such studies will certainly have to be placed in the context of the different groups within religious communities as defined by such variables as geography, gender, and social background.68
Finally, there would appear still to be a widespread desire for the Churches and clergy to play a significant role in society. Gilleasbuig MacMillan has put the point in the following terms: ‘The wish to have good theatre, links with the past, and language fit for the high purpose of worship is not a snobbish elitism, but a recognition of the nature of the event.’69 Rituals, ceremonies, symbols, and institutional solidity are valued as part of the nation’s heritage, and perhaps assume an even greater importance at a time when the country is entering a new phase of its history.
Brown, Callum, Religion and Society in Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1997).
—— The Death of Christian Britain (London, 2001).
Brown, Stewart J., and Newlands, George, eds., Scottish Christianity in the Modern World (Edinburgh, 2000).
Bruce, Steve et al., eds., Sectarianism in Scotland (Edinburgh, 2004).
Davie, Grace, Religion in Britain since 1945 (Oxford, 1994).
Devine, Tom M., ed., Scotland’s Shame? (Edinburgh, 2000).
—— and Finlay, R. J. eds., Scotland in the 20th Century (Edinburgh, 1996).
Kernohan, Robert, ed., The Realm of Reform (Edinburgh, 1999).
MacLean, Colin, and Veitch, Kenneth, eds., Scottish Life and Society: A Compendium of Scottish Ethnology. Volume 12 Religion (Edinburgh, 2006).
McRoberts, David, ed., Modern Scottish Catholicism 1878–1978 (Glasgow, 1978).
Mitchell, Martin, ed., New Perspectives on the Irish in Scotland (Edinburgh, 2008).
Reid, Harry, Reformation (Edinburgh, 2009).
Robbins, Keith, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales. The Christian Church 1900–2000 (Oxford, 2008).
Rosie, Michael, The Sectarian Myth in Scotland (Basingstoke, 2004).