Well, good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for this opportunity to share some thoughts are on my paper's topic Christianity,
peace and conflict in Northern Ireland. And I've subtitled it some lessons from the Irish peace process as the title of today's conference indicates.
And as we heard this morning, peace is a subject worthy of serious academic study.
And this afternoon's panel indicates but it is also appropriate for the serious study of peace
to include a serious study of how religious traditions can shape both peace and conflict.
And this serious study will need to include detailed engagement with religious scriptures,
faith traditions and ethical values that bear directly on conflict, violence and peace.
And, of course, a great deal of important work has been done in this area already and should continue.
However, one of the things that I will be suggesting is that if a study of religion's role
in conflict and peace building is to rise to the full challenge that is being set,
it will need to go beyond these directly relevant question areas and research
and to explore ways that religions can help to generate conflict or support
peacebuilding and reconciliation by means that at first may not be obvious and may require a different set of less direct research questions as well.
What I hope to do in the short presentation is to look at a sequence of three questions that might arise in the state serious study of Christianity,
peace and conflicts in Northern Ireland and which typically do arise in the programme in reconciliation
studies that I teach in Belfast as part of the work of the Irish School of that Chromatics,
Trinity College, Dublin. And I'll be raising these questions primarily in the context of the so-called troubles,
which can be dated differently but would typically be dated something like 1969 to 1998 and their ongoing political and social legacies.
Since the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement of 98. And as any serious studies of this question show, there is, of course,
a much longer historical context to all the issues that I would be talking about.
And these longer historical issues should not be forgotten, though, in a short paper like this.
There's little time to go in, too many of them here.
What I hope to conclude with is just pointing to a couple of lessons that might be taken from the serious study of Christianity,
conflict and peace in Northern Ireland, which might also be relevant to the study of religion,
conflict and peace elsewhere whilst taking on board the warnings to to readily reach out from one conflict.
We have lessons that apply elsewhere.
I should just by way of further introduction, mentioned that in terms of discipline, I come at this with a background in theology.
And as you may well be able to tell from my accent, I come originally from England.
I moved to live and work in Northern Ireland. Eight years ago, my first question, a direct question on this topic might be something like this.
What stance did the churches take on conflict and violence during the troubles?
A reasonable starting point for considering the role of Christianity with regard to the conflict in and about Northern Ireland,
as it sometimes said to be,
might be to look at what Christianity says about violence and conflict more generally, or perhaps more concretely, more empirically.
What stance did the Christian churches take towards and within the conflict?
Questions related to this might include what did the churches say in their teaching and preaching?
What scriptural passages and other faith resources did they draw on and promote?
How did they convey their message that the means and the mechanisms as well as the message itself?
Who did they address it to? What difference does it make to the people they thought they were speaking to?
And what else might be added to this from a wider consideration of Christian views and values?
These are all, it seems to me, very directly relevant questions on the topic and would invariably,
very quickly, when you start exploring them with reference to Northern Ireland,
highlight the complexity of the issues involved and apparent contradictions that arise when looking at Christianity in conflict.
For example, in Northern Ireland, on the one hand,
the churches preached a united and consistent message of non-violence and peace throughout the troubles,
whilst also insisting that the conflict, the armed conflict, was not a religious conflict.
However, despite the church's emphasis on peace and despite a wealth of data pointing to the
relatively high levels of religiosity and church attendance in Northern Ireland,
at least compared to other Western European societies, the violent conflict continued, seemingly unresponsive to the church's voice.
For some observers, this demonstrates the insignificance of religion, or at least the insignificance of the churches in the troubles.
Others might suggest that despite the apparent concern for peace in Christianity and the church's pleas for peace during the troubles.
Christianity also has an unavoidable undercurrent of latent violence.
And in this view,
the eruption of political violence is to be understood as basically consistent with Christian values rather than in opposition to them.
In reply, some more sympathetic to the churches or within the churches have pointed out that dismissing the
church's contributions to peace may underestimate the full effectiveness of the church's teaching.
In this view, whilst church teaching and preaching could not bring the violence to an end,
Christian values and work by the churches played an important role in keeping the
conflict essentially in cheque and helping the communities to step back from the brink.
When political violence could have exploded completely out of control.
Now, whatever might be decided on the effectiveness of the church's response to the conflict,
if the starting point for the study of religion and peace is this type of direct question
or questions related to it about the relationship of religion to conflict and peace,
it's going to be necessary to go on to look at the assumptions that this type of question might make
about the nature of the conflict and the relevance of religion to it in our own work in Belfast.
Assumptions about the religious character of the conflict are often voiced by Christian visitors from other parts of the world.
For example, I remember a Christian student from India who was baffled that two Christian communities,
Catholic and Protestant, should be caught up in such a longstanding and bitter conflict despite a shared Christian faith.
Some European visitors have pointed out at home nobody cares whether I'm Catholic or Protestant.
Others are puzzled by the practical logistics of telling people apart, at least when they are not in church.
As one visitor said, how does anyone know who is who?
In Northern Ireland,
similar issues come up in the church's insistence similar issues about underlying assumptions that the conflict was not a religious conflict,
an insistence that highlights the need to ask other questions as well.
So pushing this on the second question, to what extent were the troubles a religious conflict?
A prominent Republican once remarked to me, this is not a conflict about how we pray.
He was, of course, absolutely right. The troubles were not a religious conflict in any straightforward or causal sense.
Attempts to understand the troubles in terms of religion without primary reference to the economic, political,
colonial, social, historical, national and ethnic dimensions to the violence of Fazli, flawed and incomplete.
However, it would be equally misguided to ignore the historical role of religion as a direct factor in the
conflict or to underestimate its much reduced but still residual role in the recent troubles.
Nonetheless, I am going to be leaving these direct religious aspects of the conflict aside here and simply
note that religion was a much more powerful force in the 16th century than it is now,
and that during the troubles, religion remained a more powerful force in Northern Ireland than in other Western European societies.
Instead, what I want to do is to point to the longstanding an ongoing role of religion, of Christianity in this case,
in maintaining the social divisions that sustained the conflict rather than generated it.
Now, this is a less direct influence of religion on conflict and probably a less obvious question to ask about Christianity and conflict.
But it is an important area to consider for a fuller understanding of the role of religion in the troubles in
Northern Ireland is a deeply divided society in which religious divisions have played a central role in sustaining,
shaping and expressing oppositional identities across society.
Any adequate understanding of its recent conflicts and the prospects of peace
will therefore need to address religious divisions that have proved deep,
powerful and durable over centuries. Whilst the troubles were not primarily about religious divisions between Catholic and Protestant,
the extraordinary social power that these divisions sustained the violence of the troubles and continues to provide a foundation for conflict.
In contrast to other Western societies where Christianity is usually seen as a largely private matter of personal faith.
In Northern Ireland, a person's identity as Catholic or Protestant is not just a personal matter of faith,
but is readily understood as a form of community identity with social and political dimensions.
Northern Ireland is a place where people can say without any conscious irony that they are quote, Protestant, but not Christian.
Or Catholic, but not religious. Which is perhaps more recognisable in other places as well.
The terms Catholic and Protestant are typically understood as shorthand for the wider
social and political divisions between Northern Ireland's main two communities.
The previously dominant Protestant union's majority, which is now in decline,
and the previously subjugated Catholic nationalist minority, which is now on the rise.
And they live uneasily alongside each other on a contested ethnic frontier with a long history of conflict.
For over four centuries, historical forces have welded religious identities to political beliefs and community identities.
And oppositional relationships between Catholics and Protestants remain important.
Even though religious disputes as such are now largely marginal,
Catholics are likely to identify themselves as Irish and support for the nationalist politics of the United Ireland.
Whereas Protestants are likely to identify themselves as British and support for
unionist politics of Northern Ireland's continuing to be part of the United Kingdom.
Referring to these two groups as Protestant and Catholic is therefore both appropriate and inappropriate in terms of the religious connotation.
Whilst it may be misleading in what it suggests about religious identity,
it does indicate something important about communal identity and the role of religion in this.
Religious differences are not merely an epiphenomenal consequence of other,
more important divisions serving as the displaced expression of the real conflict,
so-called real conflict, or simply as ethnic markers for oppositional communities.
Religion just not just mark the boundaries between the two communities.
It is a powerful force in its own right in sustaining the division and enforcing the boundaries.
Now, much more could be said, and I won't be saying it here on exactly how it is that that religion continues to mark these boundaries.
Suffice to say that one's social identity as Catholic or Protestant remains crucially important in everyday life experience.
Whatever one's personal religious beliefs might be, segregation and employment is now much reduced.
But Northern Ireland is deeply divided in terms of housing, in terms of education.
Ninety five percent of schooling is effectively segregated and perhaps most decisively in meaningful social interactions with family and friends.
These remain highly segregated in society.
Even those who wish to avoid for sectarianism that flourishes within these divisions and from these divisions,
it's very hard to escape the social processes by which one is affected by these divisions.
This therefore brings me to my third question.
What positive contribution can the churches and faith based initiatives make to conflict, transformation and peacebuilding?
And here I'm going to try and push on the issues from the more direct questions about
religion and the role it can have to more indirect but still important questions.
Christianity and conflict in Northern Ireland reflects an ambivalence.
It is not just one thing. It it can be different things in different ways.
And what I think is important is to look not just at the way religion contributes to conflicts,
but how it can also contribute to conflict transformation, to reconciliation, to peace building.
But just as I was suggesting not to only focus on the direct relationship between religion and conflicts,
but to look at less direct relationships with things like division.
So when looking at the other side of the process to reconciliation and peace building,
not just to focus on those terms, but to look at the things which might contribute towards them or underpinned them,
and from our own work, I think I would pick out three, which certainly echoes some of what was being said this morning in terms of other contexts.
And the three I would pick out in terms of overcoming the social divisions that underlie conflict would be trust,
vision and a delicate balance between patience and impatience.
Now, none of these three challenges assumes directly religious values, trust, vision and the balance between patience and impatience.
Nor am I suggesting that we should privilege a Christian perspective on the Moorfield.
The Christian faith for the churches have a monopoly of wisdom on these.
But I do think Christian faith, values and theology can offer important contributions on each of them.
And if this task is approached in an imaginative and constructive way,
then there is a real contribution to be made to the serious study of peace here.
The churches should be well-placed to develop and promote new ways of thinking that might shape communal identities
and social lives and help society embrace a new shared future rather than remain locked in a painful past.
Judging by recent events in Northern Ireland, there is still a very long way to go on this, and the churches still have much that they need to do.
I'm thinking here for those of you who saw that, the news coverage of the Eames Bradley report on dealing of the past,
which I think exposed the strong underlying divisions within society,
that that would be an illustration of how far the reconciliation process in Northern Ireland still has to go.
Let me conclude. Typically, the role of religion in conflict and peace is a neglected area in both theology and the social sciences.
One of the important lessons from the conflict in Northern Ireland is the need to take religion seriously
as a factor in conflicts and in strategies to resolve and transform such conflicts within this lesson.
There is another lesson. The range of questions should not be limited to what religion directly teaches on conflict or peace,
or the stance that the churches take directly in relation to conflict or peace or other similarly direct questions like this.
This direct research certainly needs to be done. It's absolutely essential.
But it's also important to look at less obvious areas such as the role of religion in the divisions that underlie conflict
or the role it has or might have in the strengthening of foundations on which a full and lasting peace might be built.
Thank you.