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Claire Mitchell Sociology 2006 40: 1135 DOI: 10.1177/0038038506069854 The online version of this article can be found at: http://soc.sagepub.com/content/40/6/1135

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Sociology
Copyright 2006 BSA Publications Ltd Volume 40(6): 11351152 DOI: 10.1177/0038038506069854 SAGE Publications London,Thousand Oaks, New Delhi

The Religious Content of Ethnic Identities

I

Claire Mitchell
Queens University Belfast

ABSTRACT

The religious dimensions of ethnic identities have been under-theorized. In contemporary industrial societies there is a tendency to characterize religiously demarcated groups as really ethnic.This article suggests that the religious content of ethnic boundaries may be more important than might initially be assumed. A religious identication may have specic religious content and assumptions that may cause it to operate in different ways from other identities. Even if identities do not seem primarily religious per se, they may have latent religious dimensions that can become reactivated. Whilst identity conicts and other social struggles may stimulate the return of the religious, once reactivated, the religious dimensions of identity may take on a logic of their own. Therefore, the article argues that in many contexts there is a two-way relationship between religion and ethnicity. Each can stimulate the other, rather than religion simply playing a supporting role to the ethnic centrepiece.
KEY WORDS

community / ethnicity / identity / nationalism / religion

The Religious Content of Ethnic Identities

t is clear that religious afliation is not the same as religious identity. Whether Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland or Muslims in secular France, social groups are often distinguished religiously vis--vis one another. However, religious labels are often used as shorthand for a wide variety of cultural and ethnonational differences. Simply because an individual identies with a religious grouping, it does not necessarily follow that there is

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anything particularly religious about their sense of self, conception of group membership or understanding of the world. It is recognition of this disjuncture that has caused commentators to conclude that many religious identities are actually ethnic in nature and have little actual religious content (Gans, 1994; Demerath, 2000, 2001). This assumption, whilst it may be correct in some contexts, certainly needs to be interrogated theoretically and empirically. Sometimes it is very difcult to work out where a religious identity ends and a cultural identity begins. When a radical young British Muslim attends Londons Finsbury Park mosque to hear a political sermon, is this a religious or cultural act? When a religiously nonpractising member of a loyalist paramilitary group in Northern Ireland tattoos his body with the slogan for God and Ulster, is this religious or cultural symbolism? When religious organizations, practices and ideas infuse cultural organizations, practices and ideas, it is pertinent to ask whether this religious content actually matters. It is perhaps a western bias to assume that religiously demarcated groups are in essence ethnic. Baber (2004), for example, argues that the literature on Indian nationalism has been obsessed with religious boundaries, when in fact racial identity has been overlooked as a key aspect of divisions. This challenges the status quo in an Indian context. Conversely, the literature on ethnicity and nationalism relating to Europe, and to a lesser extent the United States, has no such obsession. If anything, there is a marked tendency amongst western rationalists to downplay religions social signicance (Marty, 1997) a trend that is perhaps understandable given the emphasis on secularization theory since the 1960s (Wilson, 1979; Bruce, 1995, 1996, 2002). However, the dominant thrust now within the sociology of religion is to explain varieties of religious persistence (Casanova, 1994; Davie, 1994, 2000a, 2000b, 2002; Berger 2000). This article calls for political sociologists and scholars of ethnicity to respond to debates in the sociology of religion and to develop new models to understand the signicance of religious persistence. Of course most commentators agree that religion can be a basis of ethnic identity. There has recently been a rise in scholarship on religio-political fundamentalism in the modern world (Jurgensmeyer, 1993; Keddie, 1998; Bruce, 2001). But these are not the types of religious identities under analysis here. Rather, this article is concerned with social groups in western societies that have hitherto been assumed to be motivated by ethnicity predicated on national, political and economic grounds. It is concerned not with establishing the primacy of religion, but with theorizing the contribution of religion to multiply constituted identities, communities and conicts. The article aims to untangle these debates and to offer some analysis of the ways in which substantive religious content infuses ethnic or communal identities. It maps out recent debates about the relationship between religion and ethnicity, arguing that religion has predominantly been cast either as an ethnic marker or as something that supports the primary category of ethnicity. However, in these accounts the relationship between religion and ethnicity is

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unidirectional religion feeds into ethnicity. In contrast, this article argues that religion often constitutes the fabric of ethnic identity. Even if identities do not appear to be primarily religious per se, they may have latent religious dimensions that can become reactivated. Religious content and assumptions may cause identities to operate in different ways. Moreover, identity debates can stimulate religious revival. Therefore, the article argues that in many contexts there is a two-way causal relationship between religion and ethnicity. Each can stimulate the other, rather than religion simply playing a supporting role to the ethnic centrepiece.

A Quick Denition of Religion

A variety of commentators argue that in order for something to be counted as religious, it must pertain, in Wilsons (1979: 4) terms, only to those activities that make some explicit reference to a supernatural source of values. However, all religions do not make reference to the supernatural, and an emphasis on questioning ultimate reality may apply only to those most religiously committed. Durkheim (1915) and other functionalists are more concerned with how rituals generate group cohesion and shared values. However, what counts as a religious ritual has been dened widely, for example Shils and Youngs (1953) analysis of royalism and coronation rituals. Certainly, there are problems with classing anything that brings people together as religious in nature. Whilst football may provoke strong common sentiments, dening it as sacred expands the denition of religion so much as to make it analytically meaningless. Therefore, there is a case for ruling things in and out when characterizing the religious eld. A useful guide is the rule of once removed. That is to decide whether the institutions, practices and ideas one is analysing are connected to recognizably religious institutions, practices and ideas in a stricter spiritual sense. In other words, one can begin with a stricter spiritual/theological denition of religion and allow only one step away from this when deciding which beliefs and behaviours connected to it may be classied as religious. This would mean that attending religious services for social reasons could be classed as religious behaviour because individuals will come into contact with spiritual messages when they participate. When an individual who was socialized into a religious tradition but now does not practice and is unsure of their beliefs refuses to marry someone of another religion because of their differing beliefs, this might also be classed as a religious act. Whilst the individuals relationship with religious beliefs may be ambiguous, beliefs are clearly still a factor in their social relationships. When a church helps set up and run a government employment scheme, it could be argued that that this activity has a religious dimension. This is because the central agency still holds to a traditional religious outlook. In all these cases there is no spiritual dimension, but the spiritual dimension is only once removed.

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It is important to include these types of organization, behaviour and belief in an analysis of religion because they are so closely connected with religion in a stricter substantive sense. Most people experience religious journeys where practices and beliefs change, loosening and strengthening over time. Whilst an individual may attend church to meet business contacts one week, another week they may nd unexpected meaning in the religious content of the service. It is not unlikely that somebody who uses a church as a community centre will be familiar with some of its religious messages and may later want to turn to this institution in a time of personal crisis. Whilst there remains some connection with recognizably religious terrain, religion is still socially important and may have the capacity to rehabilitate itself. Other commentators have characterized the question in similar terms. Davie (2000b), for example, speaks of vicarious religion. She argues that whilst most western European societies appear to be secular with only a small number of individuals keeping religion alive, beneath the surface religious ideas and memories continue to form a mass of meaning. In times of personal or social crisis, these religious meanings and behaviours rise to the surface and reveal the continued public signicance of religion. For Hervieu-Lger (2000) religion also forms an integral part of cultural memory and enables the transition of identity from one generation to another. However, religious memory is stored institutionally, and as religious institutions lose social inuence the place of religion in communal cultural identities declines. Both these approaches echo the once removed rule. They indicate that religious signicance ebbs and ows over time, but also that there needs to be a core of religious commitment or institutional presence in order to keep religious ideas in the public consciousness. Not everything that gives meaning to life or brings people together may be classed as religious. However, religion must be conceived of in terms broader than just that which relates to the supernatural, traditional orthodoxy or regular practice. This is because religion has the capacity to simmer and surface in the lives of individuals and groups over time. It can recede but also revive. In order to do so, however, individuals and societies need sacred reference points. Thus thinking of religion in the stricter supernatural sense and religion once removed is a useful way of deciding what to rule in and what to rule out in the analysis of religious identity.

Religion as an Ethnic Marker

A common way of conceptualizing religious identity is as an ethnic marker. This is religion many times removed. It is where religion provides the labels of identity, but no content or values. In contrast, ethnicity, or a sense of peoplehood based on a sense of shared descent and belonging, is more often emphasized (Horowitz, 1985; Smith, 1986; Connor, 1994; Hastings, 1997). Often, this is coupled with political national ideals or attachment to a specic territory. In a primordialist interpretation, ethnicity is seen as based on blood-ties

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and ancestry. In a more popular foundationalist interpretation, ethnicity is founded on perceptions of kinship rooted in a shared history, culture and very often language (see Fishman, 1999). Religion is often added to this list of resources for imagined kinship (Connor, 1972; Nash, 1989). However, as Coakley (2002: 206) points out, religion has been given relatively little attention in the literature (notable exceptions include Jacobson, 1998; Smith, 1999; Hunt, 2002; Coakley, 2002; Collins and Coleman, 2004). As a result whilst most commentators would agree that ethnicity can be informed by religion, the general tendency is to assume in modern industrialized societies that it is not. This has been theorized in different ways. Gans (1979: 9) denes symbolic ethnicity as characterized by a nostalgic allegiance love for and pride in a tradition that can be felt without having to be incorporated in everyday behaviour. Similarly, he theorizes symbolic religiosity as an attachment to a religious culture that does not involve regular participation in its rituals or organizations. Whilst some rituals may be participated in irregularly and religious symbols utilized, this is done in such a way that does not contradict otherwise secular lifestyles (1994: 5856). Winter (1996: 233) makes this observation in relation to American Jews for whom feeling Jewish does not necessarily entail doing Jewish, engaging in or even preferring Jewish religious or communal activities and afliations to other activities and afliations. Very similar to Ganss symbolic religion is Demeraths (2000, 2001) cultural religion. This is an identication with a religious heritage without any religious participation or a sense of personal involvement per se (2001: 59). Cultural religious identities at the individual level are mirrored by competing civil religions at the societal level (2000: 1312; 2001: 50). There is a sacralization of ethnic group. In the nal analysis, Demerath (2000: 137) concludes that cultural religion may represent the penultimate stage of the secularization process. A primordial sense of cultural continuity, symbolized by religion but devoid of religious content, is all that remains. However, Demerath himself raises a very important question when he asks whether the culturally religious might actually need deeper commitments with more compelling participation, and if so where might these be found (2000: 137)? Surely it is worth asking whether the remnants of religious ideas, symbols and practices might continue to help constitute these meanings. These ideas have frequently been applied to Northern Ireland, the case with which I am most familiar. McGarry and OLeary (1995) maintain that in Northern Ireland because religion is the key marker its importance is exaggerated. It is an analytical mistake to endow the boundary marker with more signicance than the fact that there is a boundary The religious label is an ethnic label (1995: 137). McGarry and OLeary argue that the two communities may have some form of civil religion, where each worships their own nation, but are keen to point out that this is an argument which states that religion reinforces nationalism, not the other way around (1995: 212). This assumes that political identity is the dominant identity. But communal identity is not reducible to political identity. Protestants in Northern Ireland can

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feel Protestant without also being unionists, feeling British or identifying with Ulster. Whilst the dominant national identity amongst Protestants is British, its meaning is very ambiguous. So ethnicity is often a knotty category that is not always reducible to national identity or kinship. When ethnic identity is confusing or ambiguous, religious resources sometimes offer a more solid framework for identity. This point is also made by Jacobson (1998) in relation to young British Pakistanis, amongst whom ethnic identity is a tricky category and for whom Islam has become a more meaningful source of social identity. So, if religious identities are dominant signiers of identity, often more so than ethnic labels, we are therefore compelled to ask what actually is being signied. Might it not be that difference is partially constructed from religion, rather than just represented by it? In these accounts where religion is characterized as an ethnic marker there is scarcely anything that could be described as substantive religious content. This is somewhat like civil religion where feelings of national groupness are of primary importance. The rituals and beliefs that support groupness rarely relate to the recognizable terrain of religion. However, accounts that neglect to explore whether aspects of religion help inform a sense of self only provide a certain level of analysis. Given the universally knotty nature of ethnic identity, the problematic assumptions of the dominance of ethnic and political identity and given questions about peoples possible need for deeper commitments, it is important to at least ask whether religion may actually provide some of the content, as well as the markers, for certain ethnic identities.

Religion as Support for Ethnicity

Another literature emphasizes the roles that religion plays in supporting ethnicity. Religion is not just a marker of identity, but rather its symbols, rituals and organizations are used to boost ethnic identity. In this version of the relationship, the substantive content of religion plays a more signicant role in the construction of group identity. But this is still a supporting role. Ethnicity is still the primary category of analysis, and religion is thought to legitimize, sacralize and otherwise buttress the primary ethnic category. Hamf (1994), for example, argues, in terms similar to Barth (1969), that whilst cultural distinctions can be based on common origins, language or religion, the objective distance measured by markers is rather irrelevant. However, he also argues that religious boundary marking can be socially powerful. Religion and rites, he maintains, are far more resistant to social change than many other markers of identity, religion has been successfully used by ethnic entrepreneurs and religious images are useful in validating any history of the people (1994: 1112). So for Hamf, religion does make a difference to how the community mobilizes and politicizes. This is because religion is deeply rooted in the socialization processes of early childhood. Its rituals shape and mark the day, the year, and stages in life that create an emotional bond between all

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members. As a rule, its ofcers and organizational forms at different levels are more numerous and better established than those of ethnic and linguistic communities (1994: 15). However, Hamf indicates that religious rituals are an instrument of mobilization (1994: 16). Theology can be used to legitimize a groups economic and political interests. In this sense, Hamf argues that religion functions as a potent support for ethnicity. Hamf is quite right to underline how religion can be instrumentalized to support ethnicity. However, he assumes that most groups ultimately have economic and political ends, rather than actually religious identities and motivations. As such, Hamf ultimately sees religion as something that needs to be depoliticised (through syncretism, universalism, assimilation, regulation etc.), rather than sometimes being the very fabric of ethnicity itself (1994: 1617). A similar approach is found amongst those, such as Mol (1976), who argue that religion sacralizes identity by providing an orderly interpretation of an otherwise complex reality. This is where groups and individuals call on religion to give divine explanation and justication for deeper, perhaps ethnic, concerns. Mol maintains that religion protects identity by providing psychological reassurance and emotional security. However, for Mol, religion protects other identities that are already there. It is not an active agent in their construction or transformation. This, however, is a problematic assumption. Winter (1996), for example, cites Prell (1989: 188) who found that members of the Minyan (Jewish prayer group) she studied, even when they had no personal relationship with God, related through prayer to a self-transcending element called the people of Israel. Winter argues (1996: 243) that where ethnic groups are sacralized, some form of religion can become important for the survival of the group. Religion is needed to protect ethnic identity. But surely it is pertinent to analyse the consequences of this for the religious conscience of the ethnic group at hand. Smith (1999: 3368) argues that religious election myths are important because they confer on the chosen a sense of moral superiority over outsiders and provide an idea that the community has a special destiny that promises spiritual liberation. Whilst these can be seen as purely ethnic processes, when myths like these are used to help draw the boundary, Smith argues that the elect may turn in upon themselves and are forced to rely more fully on their spiritual resources. In short, where ethnic identities are sacralized, religion may come to change the meaning of that ethnicity. Chong (1998) makes these types of observations about the role of conservative/evangelical Protestantism amongst second-generation Korean Americans in the United States. She argues that the ethnic and religious aspects of the church are irrevocably related in supporting and reinforcing ethnic identity and consciousness (1998: 275). Legitimation is sought from the bottom-up as people try to make sense of their place in American society. In addition, connections between evangelical and Korean values are promulgated by religious leaders from the pulpit. In the nal analysis, Chong allows for much substantive religious content to Korean American identity. However, rather than

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religion and ethnicity being mutually conditioning, Chongs focus is on religion reinforcing, supporting, maintaining, legitimizing, and sacralizing ethnic identities. Religion is closely related to ethnicity, and ethnicity is formed from it, but ethnicity is the primary category. These ideas have often been applied to analyses of religious identity in Northern Ireland. Bruce (1994: 22; 1986: 264), for example, highlights the symbolic role evangelical culture plays in the ethnic identity of Ulster Protestants, and argues that this is why it pervades politics beyond the numbers of the faithful. Religion denes group belonging, gures large in history, legitimizes the groups advantages and radically distinguishes the group from its traditional enemy (1994: 25). In fact, Bruce feels that religion is such a dominant theme in Northern Ireland politics that, for Protestants, the conict is a religious one. However, this is somewhat misleading as Bruce (1995, 1996) frequently argues that secularization is the normal course of events, except in situations of conict or change where religion becomes a badge of ethnic group identity. For Bruce, what matters is not any individuals religiosity, but the individuals incorporation in an ethnic group dened by a particular religion (1996:. 122). Therefore whilst Bruces work is useful in eshing out how the substance of evangelicalism supports ethnic identity, ultimately, the real root of the problem, and the nal category of analysis, is ethnic rather than religious. Brewer (1998) and Brewer and Higgins (1999) work on religious antiCatholicism amongst Protestants might also be characterized as ethnic support. Brewer asserts that anti-Catholicism must be understood as sociological process. It provides the resources to mark out boundaries, rationalize and justify Protestants political position and to provide unity in times of threat. Brewers work by no means ignores theology as he outlines how each variant of antiCatholicism intertwines specic theological positions with political ideas and (lack of) relationships with Catholics. He teases out the how the substance of religious anti-Catholicism relates to social and political power. However, for Brewer, anti-Catholicism is a resource that is used to expediate goals, forms a source of support, and supplies material benets (1998: 11). Brewer seems to argue that Protestants are anti-Catholic because they want to retain power and a superior identity. This may well be true in many cases, but this does not capture the ways in which religion is also used from the bottom-up by people trying to make sense of their place in the world. As Flanagan replies to Brewer:
[t]heology is treated in terms of social characteristics, the identities and boundaries it effects. This differs from other approaches, where sociology is forced to seek a theology to resolve the limits of understanding faced in dealing with issues of identity, and the self in a culture of postmodernity. (2000: 234)

Of course religion often supports ethnicity and legitimises and justies power, as suggested by Bruce and Brewer, but we need to ask what other kinds of identity work it does as well. These accounts go further than those that characterize religion as a mere ethnic marker. They put substantive religious esh on the bones of ethnic

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identity. They correctly acknowledge how religion often functions as a power resource, how religious symbols legitimize identity, and how ethnic entrepreneurs seek to harness religious meanings. These observations are vital if we are to push forward debates about the interaction between religion and ethnicity. And in many cases, religion plays exactly these kinds of legitimizing and sacralizing roles. But ultimately, these are instrumental roles. By treating religion as a support for ethnicity they downplay the role that religion itself often plays in constituting ethnicity and reproducing power.

Religion as the Fabric of Ethnicity

Banton argues that the content of ethnic consciousness varies in time and space and cannot be easily abstracted from its social setting (2000: 482). He correctly points out that if a broad denition is employed, then many conicts could be classed as ethnic, but that without an appreciation of the multidimensional nature of social relationships, based on neighbourliness, class, race, religion and political interest, for example, then a classication of ethnic does not contribute much to our analysis of events or relationships. Echoing this, Ruane and Todd (2005) provide an alternative conceptual framework for examining the content of ethnicity. They argue that ethnicity is a useful practical category, but that it is often a thin one that needs to be filled up with other substantive content. Perceptions of groupness, they maintain, are not always based on a feeling of shared descent or kinship. The ethnic category may also be filled up with religious or linguistic content. Moreover, they argue that these other categories do not become the (surface) markers of a (deeper) category of ethnicity. Rather, they partially constitute the felt significance of the ethnic category, the type of peoplehood invoked and the values that are linked to it (p. 6). Moreover, Ruane and Todd go on to suggest that the content of ethnicity is changeable in meaning and function over time. These arguments are very signicant in the analysis of religious identities. The content of a specic religion may have an important impact on how a certain ethnic group thinks of itself and what its core values are. This is important in order not only to understand how a group conceives of itself, but also its relationships with other groups and the basis of its members actions. In other words when religious ideas and values help compose identity and action, this is a different type of identity and action than one based simply on ideas of shared kinship and specic national or political ideals. Religious content infuses identities in a variety of ways. First, religion usually evokes a sense of the sacred. This can add a potent dimension to the already oppositional nature of identication. In a society with a religious history, it is likely that theological beliefs, which are intrinsically about good and bad, come into play. This may help explain why some groups in society are more antagonistic than others. Religion can provide spiritual resources to explain and justify

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circumstances and events. Reference to the sacred may produce an ideological certainty that is difcult to create from other resources. But it is not simply a oneway relationship where people use religion to legitimize boundaries that are already there; religious beliefs themselves may partially constitute the boundaries. Second, religions provide specic ideological concepts that may inuence the character of an identity. Religions have particular doctrinal teachings and moral orientations. Religiously informed concepts, blended with cultural and historical context, can seep into common-sense understandings of daily life (Mitchell, 2004). Evangelicalism, for example, has concerns with sexual morality and an emphasis on individualism (Martin, 1999: 402). These concepts of morality and individualism deeply inuence the operationalization of, for example, Korean American, Nigerian, Venezuelan and Northern Irish evangelical identities. They inform assumptions about other groups, about work, about public law and so on. Similarly, within Islam there is a body of legal norms that provide the template for Islamic values and society. In short, religions offer specic ideological concepts to interpret the social world and dene the meaning of the good life. These ideological concepts may permeate down even to those who are not religiously devout, but who retain some contact with their religious community. Even when identities might seem secular, it is worth probing the underlying sources of their constitution because often latent religious content partially conditions the way an identity functions. Concepts of Protestant individualism, for example, may inform even nominal Protestants self-understandings. As one non-practising Protestant interviewee told Mitchell (2005), her Protestantism is a way of life and a personal choice that has given her independence, a right to choose and to think for herself. She presents this in contrast to her Catholic counterparts whom she says have more pressure and guilt about their religion due to the strictness and indoctrination of Catholic schools. So specic religious concepts can be used to ll up the ethnic category even for those who present themselves as non-religious. The institutional dimensions of religiously informed boundaries are also important. Religions are generally accompanied by powerful institutions that attempt to spread their inuence. This inuence often extends into education systems and therefore can become a key agency for the transmission of communal identity. Churches seek to give meaning to peoples political experiences as well as provide leadership. They offer sanctuary and guidance in times of crisis; and often speak up for morality and justice against secular states (Casanova, 1994). This can give religiously identied groups a powerful institutional anchor, agent of socialization, organization and leadership. In addition, religion can be a very effective facilitator of community. Ritual practices are a key way in which communities enact their imagined groupness. It is difcult to think of other organizations that could provide a forum to facilitate regular contact for such a wide spectrum of populations. Other social activities that are rooted in churches may enhance community organization and political mobilization. Faith-based voluntary organizations provide much of the

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social care work in European societies. Even when people use churches instrumentally, simply to provide a meeting place or foster cultural identity, this can have unintended religious consequences as people are continually brought into contact with religious norms, symbols and messages. Religion has many specic features that can provide substantive content to social boundaries. Of course not all societies or identities have a religious basis, but in societies where there has been a signicant religious presence or history, religion can form a cultural reservoir from which categorizations of self and other may be derived. Religious traditions provide a wealth of cultural data from different sorts of values, lifestyles, expected behaviour and decorum to memorials and rituals (Ruane and Todd, forthcoming). For the most devout, religion may be important in all of these ways. However even if one does not practise religion or believe in God, it is possible that religion still reaches into many areas of everyday life. Very often, where it appears on the surface that religion simply marks out a deeper ethnic difference, it is actually playing some of these extra roles. It is also important to conceptualize religion as providing substantive ethnic content in order to capture the dynamics of ethnic identity change over time. The ethnic category may be recongured by religious changes and this may change its meaning and function. Descent and kinship may become less important in a given ethnic identity and its religious dimensions may be elevated, or vice versa. In other words religion may inuence ethnicity, just as ethnicity inuences religion. The relation between them may be multidirectional rather than linear, where religion simply props up ethnicity. This is important in helping explain religious as well as ethnic changes. There are compelling examples that help throw light on how the religious dimensions of identity can rise and fall over time. In his discussion of Serbian nationalism Sells (2003: 31213) describes the 1989 re-enactment of the Serbian Golgotha as injecting a newly zealous religious mythical content to this story of the nation, and the emergence of a new religious language concerning the Serb Jerusalem. Similar dynamics of religious revival during the conict were seen amongst Croat Catholics. The institutions and symbols of Catholicism not only justied bloodshed, but also provided a framework of understanding redemption and sacrice in the conict. Sells underlines that religious mythology was instrumentalized by nationalist actors it did not actualize itself. He speaks of the complicity of religious gures, the deployment of symbols, the project to create religiously pure regions. He argues that these are attempts to construct internal religious community and spirituality through rejection of the other. However, he also argues (2003: 315) that [o]nce militants had spilled blood in the name of that mythology they became dependent on it [o]nce the power of symbols, rituals and myths was instrumentalised, that power took on a life of its own; those who began by manipulating it found themselves its slaves. So Sells analysis also stresses how religion itself constitutes ethnicity, how, once reawakened, religion itself becomes substantively salient. Religion became what was signied. This

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provides an excellent insight into how social and political conicts can rehabilitate religion and cause a revival of spirituality. In a similar vein, Raj (2000: 548) highlights the growth of Hindu societies in UK universities from the early 1990s. Initially, ethnic entrepreneurs sought to promote the category of Hindu instead of other problematic Asian, Muslim and black identities that were ascribed to them. The primacy of religious identity was invoked, and linked to identity politics, but was not in the rst instance linked to religious ideas of Hinduism. Rather, a more cultural version of Hinduism was stressed. However, as people began to dene what is Hindu? the religious elements of the ethnic boundary began to emerge more clearly. Activists began to explain and justify themselves with reference to Hindutva rather than simply Hinduism. The societies programmes began to redene their goals with more emphasis on religion, promoting Hindu unity, propagating the eternal relevance of the Hindu way of life and underlining the importance of the philosophy of Hindutva. Raj points out that these emphases coincide with the rhetoric of South Asian Hindu nationalist movements; they may also be related to some key events that happened in Britain at the time. So the newfound promotion of the religious elements of Hindu identity has social catalysts and political parallels. However, the fact that Hinduism was being used beforehand as a meaningful category of self-understanding meant that religious conceptions of identity, or dharma, a way of life, were already familiar to people. Religion continued to be socially signicant in latent ways and was later able to respond to changing social conditions. As such, Raj argues that religious revivalism is implicated in the politics of identity (2000: 550). The revival of religious identity components happens at an individual as well as a group level, without ethnic entrepreneurs necessarily catalysing the transition. Chong (1998: 2668), for example, found that although her respondents initially began to attend Korean American evangelical churches for social and cultural reasons (such as to maintain social networks and keep up the culture and language), their newfound participation led to genuine religious conversions and religious renewals. The religious content of ethnicity was reactivated in a time of personal struggle with issues of ethnic identity. After this, religious identity took on a logic of its own and Chongs respondents actions became simultaneously informed by their evangelicalism and their Korean cultural identity. The meaning of the ethnic category changed. These examples demonstrate instances where groups or individuals deliberately instrumentalize religion to bolster ethnic identity. After this, the religious elements of identity can become rehabilitated and take on a life of their own. There are also cases where religion once removed becomes unconsciously reactivated in the self-understanding of individuals. They are not deliberately harnessed, but religious beliefs and practices may spontaneously resurface as individuals grope to make sense of their unfolding biographies. Jims story (Mitchell, 2005) helps illuminate the dynamics of the unconscious reactivation of religious identity. This demonstrates the salience of latent

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religious content in what might otherwise might be seen as secular ethnic group identities. Jim (a pseudonym) is a young, non-churchgoing Protestant loyalist from Belfast. His father was a Pentecostalist but Jim says he was a troublemaker and never made a serious commitment. He describes himself as becoming more moderate in recent years, both religiously and politically. Jim is motivated by class issues as well as a wider attachment to his community; his religious identity is secondary. However, in times of political crisis, such as the perceived Protestant loss after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, religious aspects of identication are reactivated. Although Jim now works with Catholics and considers them to be friends, he describes how his sense of political loss, in his words, provokes the triggers of anti-Catholicism in him once again. Even though he is not a practising Protestant and despite his new-found relationships with Catholics, political fears cause him to rebound back into religious ideas about self and other. He nds himself reverting to traditional religious categories, suspecting that the Catholic Church and his Catholic colleagues have sinister motives. He wonders why he feels that there are right and wrong religious principles and no compromise between them. Whilst Jims Protestant loyalist identity is ostensibly a secular one, and whilst he will show up in no quantitative measure of religiosity, his identity is at least partially constituted from religious resources. Indeed, religious aspects of identity may be latent and can be triggered in response to circumstances. Social and political experiences can impact on an individuals religious journey. Where there is familiarity with religious ideas, contact with religious institutions or participation in religious activities, for whatever reason, religion remains in peoples consciousness and may be rehabilitated in response to external (or indeed internal) factors. These religious elements of identity make most sense in times of struggle, but this does not mean that religion merely backs up a deeper ethnic category. Instead it helps constitute the meaning of that struggle and interpretations of social relationships. Once these ideas are put back out there into society, they continue to have their own logic and to reproduce patterns of social relationships, rather than simply signify them. This is important because an identity constituted from these kinds of religious resources in the case of Protestant identity, ideas of freedom, individualism and so on is a specic kind of identity. These religiously informed concepts play a major role in social relationships and political negotiations. To understand their substance is to inch toward understanding what makes Protestants in Northern Ireland tick. Reducing this to ethnic symbolism or support is to misconstrue how many Protestants see themselves, and to misunderstand how to communicate with them on their own terms. So, religious substance matters. These cases have illustrated how dormant religious ideas become rehabilitated in response to social and political conditions. A nal example will explicate the two-way relationship between religion and ethnicity by outlining a situation where a primarily religious understanding of identity has enabled reconguration of the ethnic category. Recent interviews by this author with 20

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conservative evangelical Protestants in Northern Ireland show a shift in emphasis away from the constitutional question, away from afnity with Britain and towards an identity more rooted in Protestant faith and moral values (see also Ganiel, 2004; Mitchell and Tilley, 2004). Continued unity with Britain was construed as just as bad an option as a united Ireland. It was described as a hedonistic society whose laws are harmful for evangelicals. A united Ireland was seen as a less threatening option with the decline in strength of the Catholic Church and the rise of consumerism. In fact, a majority of interviewees focused on new opportunities opening up for evangelicalism in the Republic of Ireland. In many cases, evangelicals were turning to their religious identities instead. Many interviewees indicated that we are currently in the end times, and that the Agreement may be a sign of the times. Some said that they had lost interest in politics and had begun to focus on saving souls, evangelism and conversion. One says that the passing of the Agreement brought it home to him that time is now precious as the end times approach, and he now focuses on spreading the good news rather than his previous political activism. In these cases, the religious elements of Protestant identity are becoming stronger and the political/territorial/nationalist dimensions are weakening. Religion is not simply being instrumentalized to support Protestant political superiority in Northern Ireland. Rather ethnic identity is reconguring and religion is playing an active role in this. In sum, religion often constitutes the fabric of ethnicity. Sometimes groups or individuals may use religious resources to boost ethnicity, and in many cases, this reactivates religious dimensions of identity. In these situations, identity becomes simultaneously informed by religious as well as ethnic content. In other cases, latent religion, or religion once removed, can be rekindled unconsciously by individuals in response to social and political changes. Sometimes religious ideas learned in childhood seem to make sense of situations in later life and can be called upon by individuals groping to understand themselves and their social relationships. Once rekindled, the religious aspects of identication may become dominant, they may remain secondary, or they may recede once again. They may come into play in some situations and not others. The important point is not that there is a set pattern of religious reactivation, but rather that there is a dynamic two-way relationship between religious and ethnic identity. Each can activate changes in the other.

Conclusions
This article has argued that there may be more religious causality and content in certain ethnic identications than one might think. There is certainly a need to look beneath surface assumptions that identities are primarily ethnic, and probe their religious foundations, expressions and implications. Often, there appears to be a complex two-way relationship between the religious and ethnic bases of identity, where each can inform and provoke changes in the other. As

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a social construct, religion only has meaning in so far as individuals and groups give it meaning. In saying that religion is an active identity category, this is not to suggest that it is somehow itself able to affect changes or inform action. Rather, it is to argue that individuals and groups often call on substantive religious content to construct identications. This is important because religious identications are different types of identications than ones based primarily on ideas of ethnic descent and kinship. A key property of religion is that it evokes a sense of the sacred. This can add a potent dimension to the already oppositional nature of identication. The institutions and ritual practices that religion provides may enhance community organization and political mobilization. Even when people use churches instrumentally, to provide a meeting place or foster cultural identity, this can have unintended religious consequences. Similarly, even when identities might seem secular, it is worth probing the underlying sources of their constitution because often latent religious content partially conditions the way an identity functions. Moreover, whilst there are latent dimensions of religious identity underlying other identities, religion has the capacity to revive and resurface. Whilst identity conicts and other social struggles may stimulate the return of the religious, once reactivated, religion may take on a logic of its own. Given the continuing salience of religion in public life, and the ever-increasing emphasis on the negotiated nature of identity, teasing out the relationships between religion and ethnicity in modern societies, theoretically and empirically, promises to be a challenging new area of research.

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Claire Mitchell
Is a lecturer in the School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work at Queens University Belfast. Her research focuses on religion, identity and politics, evangelicalism and Northern Irish society. She has recently published articles in Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Political Studies and Sociology of Religion. Address: School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work, Queens University Belfast, 6 College Park East, Belfast BT7 1LP, Northern Ireland, UK. E-mail: Claire.Mitchell@qub.ac.uk

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