‘Reality is Always a Little More Complex’

Abstract

This study has sought to demonstrate that Scotland is not a ‘sectarian’ society, at least when that term is used as analytical concept rather than pejorative description. Scotland is an increasingly secular country where religion does not provide a significant marker of political and social cleavage. Nor did it represent such a line of cleavage in the impoverished and polarised 1920s and 1930s. In that period religious conflicts were localised and ephemeral and, to all intents and purposes, epiphenomenal to broader secular cleavages in Scottish society. One crucial question, then, remains. Why is it that religious division — or, in the popular lexicon, ‘sectarianism’ — emerged as a controversial topic at the end of Scotland’s twentieth century when religion was declining in its social significance and when inter-church relations were warmly ecumenical? In a sense, the current debate over religious conflict is a lacklustre echo of the polarised grievances of the inter-war period, which invoked a mythical religious past in response to a moment of national crisis. The present debate has proved even more ephemeral. The actual religious conflicts of the inter-war decades were prompted by fears that Scotland’s day as a distinctive national community was over. In contrast, contemporary debate over perceived religious conflicts is prompted by the ‘rebirth of Scotland’.