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Turpin’s book on religiosity in contemporary Ireland explores the persistence of Irish cultural Catholicism and the poor long-term prospects for active religiosity. The book examines the cultural content of religiosity, irreligion, and unbelief in Ireland, adding to the body of evidence on Irish secularization by probing the moral justifications of former and continuing adherents. Researching incongruent religious behavior is challenging (Chaves, 2010), with multiple methods necessary to
account for variation. Turpin shows great methodological range in his account of non-religion and continuing religiosity, and perceptions of continuing adherence among the non-religious, via an online panel survey, participant-observation, semi-structured interviews, and digital ethnography. The description of “Kincaid” is immersive, providing prima facie evidence of the hedonic rewards of secularity: the pub discussions are vivid. The survey includes intriguing features such as the “free list” method, deserving of much wider use. The institutional church’s loss of credibility from the 1990s and 2000s is identified as a key turning point. The book’s attention to the cultural content of religiosity, irreligion, and unbelief in contemporary Ireland will encourage many to the social scientific study of religion in Ireland. An important project for a collective research program is the identification of the origins and causal mechanisms of Irish secularization. This text adds to the body of evidence required, fore-grounding the scandals revealed in the 1990s and 2000s. The Casey affair of 1992 was a key turn-ing-point: a bishop resigned and immediately left the country after press revelation he used church funds to maintain a teenage child. A participant in Hilliard’s longitudinal study of women in Cork described instant demoralization and loss of her own credibility with her daughter: “it damaged my whole life … he should have come out himself and made a statement” (Hilliard, 2003, pp. 42–43). The puzzle is why so many remain attached, given evident moral disgust with the various and extensive revelations. Turpin suggests a range of possible factors: habituation, the emotional draw of a secularized Catholic form of Irishness, communitarian values, and self-interest, each
highly-plausible. That the question remains open suggests further attention be paid to cohort-driven change as a key mechanism of religious change in Ireland, ideally tested against longitudinal data. Indeed, the reflections on generational change within families provide some of the most compelling material in the book. Such reflection aids understanding because “individuals are remarkably bad at giving consistent reasons for their behavior” (Vaisey, 2009, p. 1672). Choices in the
moment tend to be made in nondeclarative mode (Lizardo, 2017), structured by “deep, largely unconscious networks of neural associations that facilitate perception, interpretation, and action” (Vaisey, 2009, p. 1686). While qualitative methods give rich insight into the justification of choices, it may be difficult for subjects to articulate fundamental motivations, and why a particular choice simply “feels right” (Vaisey, 2009, p. 1689). Dual-process models of culture accordingly propose that “discursive consciousness” is less involved in everyday moral decision-making than often thought (Vaisey, 2009, p. 1690). While the institutional church lost credibility almost instantly on 7 May 1992, the decline may nevertheless more largely reflect the slow workings of individualization, liberalization, and economic security. Attention to cohort effects might also provide additional traction over the question of why cultural Catholicism persists. Cohort-driven approaches have explained religious change in a number of contexts, including Britain (Crockett & Voas, 2006; Field, 2019), Germany (Wolf, 2008), the US (Voas & Chaves, 2016), and in cross-national studies (Norris & Inglehart, 2004; Voas, 2008).
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