Secularization in Belfast privatized institutions but not popular religion’s territorial marking.

Evidence

Religious change is occurring. Post-conflict Belfast is characterized by two forms of secularization identified by Casanova (2006, 7): the decline in formal religious observance and the compartmentalization of (formal) secular and religious authority. But there is little evidence on its streets of the third form he identifies – the privatization of religion. Instead, popular religion and nationalism overlap and intersect in ways that sustain the binary communal division embedded in the urban environment and underpinning political conflict in Northern Ireland. Popular religion and vernacular (or banal) nationalism have much in common in terms of ritual performance and overspill – i.e., the significance attributed to representative violence and their capacity to sacralize public space. Both “mark space as sacred” (Sinha 2016) even if their object of transcendence differs (i.e., the community of believers and the national state). Religion and nationalism serve as reservoirs of communal memory that can be mutually reinforcing. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 2305

Categorization

• DEFINE: Casanova’s threefold secularization distinction (observance decline, authority compartmentalization, privatization) is usefully laid out and applied.
• XREF: connects to: Vernacular religion, not institutional belief, drives post-conflict sectarian division. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 2302; Secularism’s public presence of religion varies across modern nation-states. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 32; Secular countries differ sharply in where religion sits institutionally (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Secularism’s public presence of religion varies across modern nation-states. #expands (0.80) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 32
• Secular countries differ sharply in where religion sits institutionally #expands (0.75)
• The religious and secular are co-constitutive, not opposed spheres #corroborates (0.75) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 501