Archive Professor Steve Bruce Article

This was originally published in the Scotsman. I believe it has now been deleted.

Beware myths that tarnish 'sectarian' Scots
STEVE BRUCE

TWENTY years ago, I published the first serious social-science study of sectarianism in Scotland, called "No Pope of Rome". Last year, with three colleagues, I returned to the subject. We devoted much effort to measuring every index of religious disadvantage, discrimination, difference and conflict in Scotland. We looked at economic position, educational qualifications, access to higher education, political power, voting patterns, legal rights, residential segregation and sectarian violence and came to the conclusion that the best parallel for the experience of the Irish Catholic community in Scotland was not the enduring conflict of Northern Ireland but the successful integration found in the United States.
I offer two items from a large array of data to support this optimistic view.

First, social class: disadvantage is not itself proof of discrimination, but the link works in reverse - if Catholics are victimised in schooling and employment, they should have a lower class profile. What the 2001 Census shows is that there is now little difference between those raised as Catholics and those raised as Protestants. The group with the worst class profile is that of those raised with no religion (and, no, we have no idea why either).

Second, integration: just over half of married Catholics under 35 have non-Catholic spouses. In Northern Ireland, only 6 per cent of marriages are mixed. In the US, inter-racial marriages are also about 6 per cent. Despite segregated schooling, Scots now choose partners with no regard for religion.

Yet, the perception is different. In a recent Glasgow survey, 53 per cent said they thought employment discrimination was common, but only 1 per cent said they had suffered any (and half of those were not Catholic).

One explanation for this paradox may be mistaken baseline expectations. One person said her firm discriminated against Catholics because only three out of ten people were Catholic. Because we talk about the Catholic Church and the Kirk, Catholic schools and state schools, and Rangers and Celtic as matching pairs, it is possible to suppose that half of Glaswegians are Catholic and, hence, only three Catholics in ten people needs explaining. Actually, three in ten is a slight over-representation, because Catholics make up only 25 per cent of lowlands Scots.

We see the same paradox with violence. Two-thirds of the Glasgow survey said sectarian violence was common or very common, but less than 1 per cent had suffered any. When those who had suffered various forms of abuse were asked the reasons, it turned out that most violence was domestic. Residential area was much more commonly cited than religion, as were gender and sexuality. So, again, we have a mismatch. People think something is widespread but somehow they have not experienced it.

This is what I mean by a social myth. How do we explain it? A large part of the answer is that opinion-leaders such as politicians and the mass media believe that sectarianism is a major problem and that belief distorts their perceptions.
I will cite just two examples. Since June 2003, it has been possible for a criminal offence to be "aggravated" by religious prejudice. A mugger can now be hit with a second charge if he calls his victim "a Proddie b******". Last November, the Crown Office and the Procurator Fiscal Service released their analysis of the first six months of the new system. The Daily Telegraph was typical in leading with "Catholics are twice as likely as Protestants to be the targets of sectarian abuse". What was not stressed in the reporting was that, in more than 90 per cent of cases, the original offence was breach of the peace, not murder, robbery or assault. More than a third of the victims were police officers, not civilians, and more than half the perpetrators were drunk. More than a third of cases were associated with football matches or Orange marches. And the sectarian abuse was verbal.

This is not Nazis wrecking Jewish shops: it is young drunks ranting at coppers and others who get in the way of their inalienable right to get drunk and disorderly.

What was striking about this episode was that the Crown Office (aided by uncritical reporting) created an entirely false impression of Catholics as victims. The perpetrators do not know the religion of their victims and nor do we. What we know is the content of the verbal abuse. It tells us about the identity of the abuser, not the abused. Two-thirds of the perpetrators expressed anti-Catholic sentiments; one-third expressed anti-Protestant sentiments. If the drunken hooligans of Glasgow divide two-thirds Protestant and one-third Catholic, that is about par for the area. Incivility is evenly distributed.

Second case: last November, the Sunday Mail reported the burning down of a Catholic chapel in Stornoway under the banner headline "Real toll of Old Firm mayhem". The police later announced that the fire was caused by an electrical fault and that no crime was suspected, but that fact did not get the banner-headline treatment. Thus are myths sustained.

Social Divisions

http://www.scottishaffairs.org/backiss/pdfs/sa29/SA29_Bruce.pdf

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Sectarianism in Scotland

Scottish sectarianism? Let's lay this myth to rest

Professor Steve Bruce, writing recently in the Guardian

Scotland's disgrace is not religious bigotry. It is the unthinking way in which sectarianism is assumed, without evidence

In the runup to the Easter Sunday Old Firm game historical animosities between Celtic and Rangers supporters have been in the spotlight following the security threats against Celtic manager Neil Lennon, his lawyer Paul McBride and the former MSP Trish Godman. But those animosities should not be allowed to dominate or distort perceptions of the Scots, or of Scottish culture.
Most Scots are not football fans; most fans do not support Rangers or Celtic; most Rangers and Celtic fans are not religious bigots. That some Rangers and Celtic fans wind each other up by falsely claiming to have strong religio-ethnic identities which are offended by the equally false religio-ethnic identities of the other side is not a reason for the rest of us to take such ritual posturing as the basis for judging the polity, society and culture of an entire country.
The sectarianism of Scotland is a myth: popular in some places but a myth nonetheless. A major survey in 2001 in Glasgow showed that many people thought sectarianism discrimination in employment was common but that none had suffered it themselves – it was something they had heard had happened to others.
We are now able to test claims of labour market discrimination with a vast body of information because the 2001 census recorded people's current religion and religion of upbringing as well as data on jobs, education and income.
And the religious constituency with the poorest socio-economic profile? Not those raised as Catholics but those raised with "no religion". Why the children of the ungodly should be disadvantaged remain a mystery, but it is clear the census data offers no evidence for widespread anti-Catholic discrimination in the economy.
A second component of the sectarian myth is the violence that bigotry supposedly produces. Again, when surveyed many Glaswegians said that sectarian violence was commonplace but very few had personally experienced any.
The Glasgow survey asked respondents if they had been the victims of a variety of crimes in the previous five years. It found "no significant difference with regard to the level of crime experience by respondents who classified themselves as Catholic and those who classified themselves as belonging to a Protestant faith".
The few respondents who had been victimised were asked to guess why they had suffered: gender, country of origin and sexual orientation were cited as often as religion, and all of those came a very long way behind "the area where you live".
In total, less than 1% of those surveyed thought they had been victimised because of their religion and one of those seven individuals was non-Christian.
Myths thrive on naivety, carelessness and exaggeration. In a fine example of Chinese whispers, a report that claimed 11 Old Firm-related murders in 18 years was inflated by a spokesman for the anti-sectarian campaigning organisation Nil By Mouth into "Eight murders with a sectarian element in the last few years" and by a Church of Scotland committee into "11 Rangers and Celtic fans" in seven years.
Religious identity did not actually feature in any of the 11 homicides claimed in the original report, and the Old Firm football element was often trivial. For instance one drunk punched another (who subsequently died) for ruining his new football shirt. It could have been a Hearts or a Dunfermline shirt. It happened to be a Rangers top. Colleagues who looked closely at the cases concluded that at most, less than one third of 1% of Scots homicides over an 18-year period had any sort of sectarian element, and it was invariably football allegiance rather than religion or inherited ethic identity.
A large part of my research career has been taken up with Northern Ireland. I know what sectarianism looks like. When Irish migrants settled in large numbers at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century, some Scots objected to what they feared was union-bashing cheap labour. Others objected to what they believed was a false and dangerous religion.
But Scotland never divided in the way Ireland did. It did not divide politically: the native Scots who worked with the Irish settlers and their children in the labour movement and in the Labour party always vastly outnumbered those who supported tiny and short-lived anti-Catholic parties.
Scotland never divided residentially: nowhere in Scotland displayed Belfast's pattern of residential segregation. And despite the Catholic church insisting on maintaining a separate school system, social mixing has always been common and, as interest in religion has declined, intermarriage has become commonplace. In Northern Ireland only about 6% of marriages are mixed but in the 1990s, just over half of Scots Catholics under 35 who were married had non-Catholic partners.
Scotland's disgrace is not religious bigotry. It is the unthinking way in which sectarianism is assumed. In 2004, on the Sunday after a heated Rangers-Celtic game, a Sunday tabloid newspaper ran a two-page story under the headline "Real toll of that Old Firm mayhem". One page was given over to a fire which severely damaged a Catholic church in Stornoway. The implication was clear: "Priest's church blaze agony" was caused by "Old Firm Mayhem". The boring truth, which merited just one column inch in a sister tabloid the following week, was that the fire was caused by an electrical fault.