Grounding Identity Persistence and Change: Comparing Catholics and Protestants in France and Ireland

Identity is about ontology (individual or social) and ontological analysis can easily lose itself in abstraction. At the level of the individual, however, identity is practical and concrete, a way of being and/or doing, including being and doing with. This paper focuses on the practice of old religious identities and oppositions, foregrounding what it means to hold, to do or to be, the identity in question. It interrelates ethnographic and micro-level evidence with meso- and macro-level analysis to explain the contradictory mix of persistence and change that is one of the defining features of personal and social identities. I take two particular cases: being (and doing) Catholic or Protestant in France and in the Republic of Ireland. While no longer politicized, these identities remain strong and salient. Viewed at the micro-level, they are also highly varied. For the individual, being or doing Protestant or Catholic today quickly appears as a matter of choice in a context of multiple possibilities: theological, institutional, economic, social, cultural, political, historical (including notions of peoplehood). Nor does this exhaust the possibilities. In Ireland religious identities have historically been part of ethno-politico-religious identity constellations, and any one of these can act in some degree as a proxy for the others. With so much choice left to the individual and so many possibilities, why then have these identities persisted in recognizably similar ways over centuries? How is identity persistence and change socially patterned? This is where the meso- and macro-levels come, since wider processes of structural, geo-political and institutional change (some of very long-term, others of shorter duration) encourage some choices and rule out others, whether on practical and/or moral grounds. The comparison of very similar identity constructs in quite different socio-historical contexts, allows us to isolate the patterns of persistence and change.