Failing God? A cognitive anthropological examination of the relationship between Catholic scandals and Irish secularisation

Abstract

Irish sociologists maintain that Catholic clerical abuse scandals accelerated the process bywhich deference to the Church was replaced by the emergence of more autonomous,personalised forms of Catholicism in the Republic (Donnelly & Inglis, 2010; Ganiel, 2016).In current literature, the scandals' influence is tacitly assumed to end there. Catholicismremains deeply important, albeit in a looser 'cultural' manner, to the majority of baptisedIrish Catholics (6 Feich & O'Connell, 2015). The subsequent emergence and rapid growth ofex-Catholicism and unbelief since the 2000s, such that the Republic now has the eighthhighest percentage of 'convinced atheists' in the world (Gallup, 2012), has gone unanalysed, its potential connection to the scandals unexplored.

This dissertation addresses this gap in our knowledge. Theoretically, it draws on the cognitivescience of religion (Henrich, 2009), moral psychology (Haidt, 2006; Tooby & Cosmides,2010), moral anthropology (Keane, 2015), and neo-secularisation theory (Voas, 2009; Taylor,2007) to describe an alternative and more fractious picture. This picture highlights thepotentially transient nature of cultural Catholicism, accounts for the emergence and growth ofex-Catholicism, and clarifies its link to the scandals. This is supported by empirical datadrawn from a nationally representative survey, a year-long period of fieldwork, and abehavioural experiment.

Central to this new theory of Irish secularisation is the 'Credibility Enhancing Display' or CRED bias (Henrich, 2009): religious representations survive and spread insofar as they are behaviourally endorsed by religious models who 'practice what they preach'. Changes in Irish Catholic religiosity over time were in part undergirded by an explosion in environmental CREDs from the mid-19th to mid-20th Centuries, followed by a gradual process of 'CRED depletion' as Catholicism 'privatised' in response to a range of social transformations from the 1970s onwards (Inglis, 1998), precipitating a decline in embodied religious behaviour, the gradual fragmentation of religious-representational agreement, and the emergence of a comfortable 'cultural Catholic' compromise allowing a certain measure of doxastic autonomy to be reconciled with ethno-religious in-group bonds. The scandals erupted not into Irish Catholicism at its religious height then, but into this late, CRED-poor version. This process of CRED depletion was then further accelerated through such mechanisms as withdrawal from institutional participation related to feelings of disgust and shame, unwillingness to sink coalitional costs into Catholicism due to distrust, loss of devout confidence, legitimisation of resistance to conformist practice, and the further empowerment of cultural Catholics to set the costs of Catholic coalitional membership to an even lower bar.

These events did not just reduce CRED performance further and make Catholic commitment thinner still, however. The scandals constituted a rich seam of religious hypocrisy which was bound up in a scene of coalitional conflict over the role of the Church in Irish society. Coupled with increasing moral progressivism and frustrations around embedded ChurchState influence, the affordance of the scandals gave rise to a new, catchy moral narrative based around liberation from corrupt and unjust influence, and the obligation to break free of ties to the Church. This narrative successfully leverages the scandals to breach the once-iron link between Irish ethnicity and Catholic affiliation. Together, these developments have precipitated an ongoing growth in moralised, frequently unbelieving, ex-Catholicism which positions itself in opposition to an 'inauthentic' and complicit cultural Catholicism seen to Prop up the influence of an immoral institution. While still the default, cultural Catholicism is now an object of moral scrutiny, something people can find themselves encouraged to abandon. By contrast ex-Catholicism is not only socially acceptable, but a highly moral and missionary stance.

Date of Award	Dec 2018
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Supervisor	Jonathan Lanman (Supervisor)