Leaving Religion in Ireland

Ireland has lived through one of the fastest religious transformations of any country on record. In two generations, it has gone from a country where the Catholic Church effectively ran the schools, the hospitals, the morality of the public square, and the structure of family life, to a country where same-sex marriage and abortion access were approved by referendum. The exit was not gradual for many people. It came with the Magdalene laundries revelations, the industrial schools reports, the Tuam babies, the Ferns and Murphy and Ryan reports, and a long, suffocating realization that the institution that had been entrusted with the moral life of the country had protected predators systematically for decades.

The Irish Catholic exit therefore has a particular shape. It is rarely a doctrinal crisis in the abstract; it is usually a moral revulsion at a specific institution, layered with a culture-deep guilt machinery that does not switch off just because you have stopped going to Mass. Many Irish people carry both — the conviction that the institution is unworthy of their participation, and the muscle memory of guilt around behaviors that used to be sins. The pillar page on Catholicism and the page on the guilt that lingers will fit many of you closely.

Northern Ireland has its own complex texture, with the Catholic/Protestant divide overlaid on a political and identity fault line that goes beyond doctrine. Many Northern Irish ex-Catholics and ex-Protestants describe a leaving that involves untangling religion from political identity in a way that does not show up the same way in the Republic.