As the historian Marianne Elliott has pointed out (in an article earlier this year in the Financial Times called “The dividing line”): “Partition, was, in effect, a recognition of sectarian division”.

On both sides race and religion were inextricably linked - unionism meant Protestantism, nationalism meant Catholicism. Religiously-fuelled tribalism came in two varieties - orange and green, and flourished. Unbridgeable divisions remain to this day.

As fear of Home Rule grew among unionists, the threat of violence intensified with the formation by Carson and Craig of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in January 1913. As Joe Lee, Emeritus Professor of Modern History in UCC, pointed out, the “infuriated reaction” of unionists to Home Rule “unleashed violence into twentieth-century Irish politics”.

This was especially so after April 1914 when, in the Larne gun-running, the UVF landed 24,000 rifles and 3,000,000 rounds of ammunition from Germany.

After the establishment of the UVF, the response from the South came with the founding of Irish Volunteers in Dublin in November 1913. This was followed by the Howth gun-running in July 1914 - a far less spectacular version of what had happened in Larne.

But whereas the British Army attempted to intervene in Dublin, no such intervention occurred in Belfast. And this despite the fact that unionists had issued the Proclamation of the Ulster Provisional Government in 1913 - a proclamation that foreshadowed the establishment of a “Protestant parliament for a Protestant people”.

What this demonstrated, of course, was that unionists had the support of the British establishment in London. Nothing better illustrated this than the “Curragh Mutiny” in March 1914. 

A group of over 50 British officers based in the Curragh Military Camp offered their resignations rather than move against unionist opponents of Home Rule. Their decision was communicated to the War Office in London where it was sympathetically received.

Political religion

Meanwhile the church establishments - in the manner of Cardinal Francis Spellman, Archbishop of New York, blessing US tanks during the Vietnam War - bestowed blessings on the endeavours of the two recently-formed paramilitary groups and the politics of sectarianism they represented and propagated.

In these circumstances, the title of historian Marianne Elliott’s 2009 book 'When God Took Sides' could hardly be more germane. The book’s subtitle is “Religion and Identity in Ireland - Unfinished History”.

In it she writes: “Every people develops origin-myths, and the idea of a nation can be a benign solvent, bringing a common good out of diversity. 

The problem in Ireland is that there were two ‘peoples’ whose origin-myths have been based on extremely negative views of each other and, because these were religiously based, the clerics had far more power than they should have had.

The bitter divisions, the bloody conflict, the sectarianism, bigotry and pervasive mistrust that have been so much a part of the fabric of Northern Ireland since Partition, were fuelled to a significant degree by a phenomenon we have come to a new appreciation of in the post-9/11 age – political religion.

This might be best defined as the harnessing and exploitation of religion for political ends – the hijacking of religion to serve secular objectives and goals. 

There may also of course be a reverse dimension – circumstances where you have religion or a church embracing or endorsing or aligning itself with a particular political system or political establishment where doing so advances its own aims.

The Catholic Church’s alliance with the Irish Free State is an obvious example. And despite the fact that the Free State’s 1922 Constitution is a secular document - there is no preamble invoking the blessing of the Most Holy Trinity, and no mention of God in any of its 83 articles - the newly-independent State quickly morphed into a “Catholic State for a Catholic people”.

In its crudest – and one of its deadliest forms – political religion in Ireland was best exemplified by the Rev. Ian Paisley and Paisleyism, especially during the period between the publication of the first edition of the scurrilous Protestant Telegraph in April 1966 and the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998. 

But it also had its “green” variety, as Martin Dillon, a BBC reporter who covered Northern Ireland for 18 years, reminded us in his book 'God and the Gun: The Church and Irish Terrorism'.

“Catholicism, nationalism and republicanism are inter-connected,” he wrote in 1990. 

The folk tradition of the gun in both communities, carries with it a moral crusade in defence of the respective traditions.

And throughout the 19th century, in the long struggle for independence from British rule, it was Catholic nationalism that sustained and legitimated the campaigns for Catholic Emancipation, land reform, and Home Rule.

Global examples

Outside of Ireland, there were other, later examples of religion being co-opted on the side of nationalist causes.

“The success of religious nationalism since the latter part of the twentieth century has surprised many commentators who believed that religion no longer had political significance in an era of nation states,” according to Linda Woodhead, Professor of Sociology of Religion at Lancaster University. 

“In 1979, for example, the increasingly secular state in Iran was overthrown by Islamic nationalists. Religious nationalism is also a potent force in many other Islamic countries, as well as in India (Hinduism), Israel (Orthodox Judaism) and the former Yugoslavia (Roman Catholic Christianity, Orthodox Christianity, Islam),” she wrote in the introduction to Religions in the Modern World.

'Reflection' on the Partition of Ireland

Ireland had its own virulent forms of politico-religious nationalisms. And the complicity of the churches, especially since Partition and the creation of Northern Ireland in 1921, meant that there was bound to be reservations about an event in Belfast on 21 October, 2021, organised by the leaders of Ireland’s five main Christian churches.

The service, described as a “service of reflection and hope” marking the centenary of the foundation of Northern Ireland and the partition of Ireland, in St Patrick’s Church of Ireland Cathedral, was never going to be controversy-free.

That’s simply because partition can never be depoliticised. It’s not possible to discuss or “reflect” on partition in a politics-free zone. It was created by politics, sustained and entrenched by politics.

The real question for the churches is to what extent, by commission or omission, they helped to create the conditions in which partition became inevitable and its deleterious effects sustained. And it is worth reminding ourselves that 100 years on from partition, and 23 years after the Good Friday Agreement, the religion-political divisions in the North are just as real today as they were at the beginning of the Troubles.

Shows of unity by church leaders do not change the reality on the ground. These same church leaders are one of the main reasons why campaigns to have Protestant and Catholic children educated together have gained little traction in the North. This is because the church establishments have a vested interest in maintaining separate schools.

“All the major churches in Northern Ireland bear a heavy responsibility for segregationist practices and the lack of contact, understanding, and tolerance that flows from the separation of young people,” according to Liam Kennedy, emeritus professor of history at Queen’s University, and author of a 2020 book Who Was Responsible for the Troubles?

The 'awkward reality' of 'underlying sectarianism'

In his recently published book The Partition, Charles Townshend reminded readers that “awkward realities” remain - “the ‘peace walls’ in Belfast are still doing their work, and have if anything grown, in number and size. Most analysts find that polarisation has not receded during the peace process. Some indeed suggest it is sharper than ever, and more visible”.

Writing in the Financial Times in May this year, the historian Marianne Elliott, who is from Belfast, said she was “distressed at how underlying sectarianism continues to have the power to keep people apart, particularly in polarised working-class communities”.

In the light of all of the above, a service of repentance in a Cathedral on 21 October, 2021, in Belfast would have been a far more appropriate (and less hypocritical) event than what actually occurred.

There was at least an oblique recognition of the churches’ “inglorious” role in a poisonously divided Northern Ireland in remarks made by the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh on Thursday. The Most Rev. John McDowell said he was “sorry” church leaders “didn’t do more to become peace makers, or at least speak peace” in Northern Ireland.

“Too often we allowed the attitudes of the societies around us which we serve to shape us rather than the other way round.”

His sentiments were echoed by the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, Eamon Martin. He said that as a church leader he had to face “the difficult truth that perhaps we in the churches could have done more to deepen our understanding of each other and to bring healing and peace to our divided and wounded communities”.

I covered the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland in Fisherwick Place in Belfast (just around the corner from the City Hall) annually over a 12-year period during the height of the Troubles. 

Over that same period and beyond, I also covered the General Synod of the Church of Ireland in Christchurch Place in Dublin, and later in the RDS. In addition, I covered the thrice-yearly meetings of the Irish Hierarchy in Maynooth, the inter-church “summits” at Ballymacscanlon, and the New Ireland Forum in Dublin Castle.

Those experiences, especially in Belfast, far from contradicting, invariably supported the observation by Marianne Elliott that “if sectarianism had not been so deep-rooted, the Northern Ireland troubles would not have happened”.

The Troubles were the legacy of partition, but the sectarianism that fuelled the conflict predated the Border. And that is a measure of the failure of the churches to wean their congregations away from it. Tragically, it was too often reinforced by the readiness of the churches to play to their respective tribes.

Individual clergy, on both sides of the denominational divide, were honourable exceptions in seeking to promote dialogue and heal divisions - but they were lone voices and, importantly, usually didn’t have the support of church leaders.