Historians of Ireland in the past have been prone to declarative, all-encompassing, statements about their field. Irish history has been variously said to be primarily political, demographically unique, or inherently concerned with much more than just the island of Ireland. All these claims may have a ring of truth depending on one’s own preferences and period of choice, but readers of Crawford Gribben’s new book might come away thinking that the strongest case of all could well be made for Irish history, across the broad sweep of time, being mainly dominated, for good or ill, by the phenomenon of Christian religion.
Professor Gribben certainly situates religion, and Christianity in particular, at the centre of a matrix of many other stories: Christianity’s vital interactions with myriad wars, constitutional developments and social transformations are never far from his purview. In a narrative that is a mere 220 pages long, and dealing with a span of about 1500 years, maintaining this balance between the political and personal significance of religion and religious change is an admirable feat.
The book is divided into five chapters, chronologically organised and each with a pleasingly symmetrical single-word plural as its title. Following an introduction in which the author speculates — for that is all we can really do — about the religious life of the island before Christianity arrived, and usefully establishes the enduring importance of place and materiality in religious expression, ‘Conversions’ tells the story of the early Christian missionaries, Patrick among them. This sets up another important thread in the book, namely how exchanges with people and places beyond the island shaped Irish Christianity. ‘Foundations’ follows the trials of medieval monastics as they mounted several fights: to preserve important relics and religious texts (often, with violence, from one another), to defend against and incorporate Viking and Norman incomers, and, by the fifteenth century, to balance a diverse ethnic and linguistic population under the church’s exclusive sway.
‘Reformations’ documents the unravelling of this latter ambition, telling the well-known, complex story of how, while the Irish did not convert to reformed, non-Roman Christian churches en masse in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they were nonetheless left with an Anglican ruling class that would supress, to varying degrees, both Catholic and Dissenting worship in the eighteenth. ‘Revivals’ treats the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period of enormous change in all denominations, both in terms of the making and breaking of politico-religious coalitions and in terms of the spiritual and ritual changes wrought in everyday worship. Finally, a chapter entitled ‘Troubles’ offers a concise account of the rise of ‘religious nationalisms’ and the partition of the island, the fluctuating role of religion in each jurisdiction’s political and social life, and, in brief, the many moments in the post-1969 Northern Irish Troubles where religion, as Gribben notes ‘kept [the conflict] going’ (p.193).
Together, these chapters constitute a very valuable narrative history of a millennium and a half of Irish religion. The casual reader and the undergraduate student alike will find them an especially useful introduction that offers, unusually, both a long view and a cross-denominational survey and therefore an important framework for understanding Irish history. Educators — this reviewer included — will be eager to place the book on reading lists for that precise reason. That breadth of coverage of course has a downside, and specialists may lament the relative brevity of the discussions concerning their own particular eras, although a hefty bibliography shows that considerable and wide-ranging research supports the conclusions made.
More curious is the book’s substantial conclusion which brings the story up to the present day, and thereby focuses on what Gribben terms the ‘sudden-onset secularization’ of the last thirty years, both north and south of the border. A familiar litany of appalling abuse scandals (in which Gribben offers a rather surprising heroic role to the former Taoiseach Enda Kenny, who returns the favour on the book’s back cover), clerical recruitment crises and progressive social legislation are wheeled out as evidence of the ongoing ‘fall’ of Christian Ireland.
Professor Gribben writes here with obvious passion for his subject, notably when he condemns all of the churches for having contributed to their own loss of moral leadership and for having ‘undermined the Christian faith’ by their efforts ‘to dominate and control the peoples of the island’ (p. 209). Throughout this section, increased public support for same-sex marriage and abortion rights are continually presumed to signal a fall-off in personal piety if not in census-level identification with particular Christian groupings. A personal investment in the more conservative definitions of Christian faith evidently underpins these conclusions, which is somewhat jarring after a condensed account of 15 centuries of institutional, cultural, intellectual, doctrinal, liturgical, and devotional change.
For some in twenty-first century Ireland, both religious and not, issues of personal morality clearly dominate conceptions of what Christian religion represents. But other readers of this book might ask why, if, for example, the eighth-century monks of Clonmacnoise who killed 200 of their counterparts at Durrow Abbey can be considered to be part of a long Christian ‘rise’, the merely casual church-goer who in 2022 declines to agree with their church on every point, is, as is implied here, part of a Christian ‘fall’ and a secularizing wave that oppresses ‘believers’.
In short, as a neat and readable narrative survey of Ireland’s religious past, the book succeeds; as a commentary on its religious present and prediction of its future it offers a more partial and less convincing account.
