Moving Beyond Sectarianism - Religion, Conflict, and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland by Joseph Liechty and Cecelia Clegg. Published in 2001 and the culmination of a six year project costing about half a million pounds. I hope to get a reasonable extract from this onto the REAL website today. Here is the beginning of the Introduction: Sectarianism as a System: Basic Implications In Northern Ireland, few interventions can raise the emotional temperature of a conversation so sharply as bringing up the topic of sectarianism. It is a harsh word, expressing a harsh reality and often hurled as an accusing, condemning weapon. In fact maintaining civil conversation usually means not discussing sectarianism at all, especially in mixed settings. Between these extremes of accusation and avoidance, people have painfully few tools for getting to grips with the problem of sectarianism in a constructive way. Given the difficult and explosive nature of sectarianism, we want to begin by laying out as clearly and honestly as possible the basic elements of our approach. Readers can expect the following ideas, principles, and assumptions to pervade and guide the rest of this book. Sectarianism as a system While an understanding of sectarianism as a system has been part our work from the beginning, we have found it increasingly important to stress the systemic nature of sectarianism. We might pose the problem as follows: much thinking about sectarianism is faulty because we take a solely personal approach to a problem that is both personal and systemic. When thinking about sectarianism, we typically begin with personal attitudes and personal actions. Thus we absolve a person of responsibility, we think, when we say, ’She doesn’t have a sectarian bone in her body. In one sense, this concern with the personal is not only appropriate, we need more of it, not less. At the same time, however, a too exclusively personal approach fails to take seriously enough the systemic issues around sectarianism. To pose the problem another way: a sectarian system can be maintained by people who, individually, do not have a sectarian bone in their bodies. Some reflection on the nature and origin of the sectarian System will show how this paradox comes to pass.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 05:57:41 +0000