Surprise: most Irish-Americans are not Catholic

Details, from Religion News Service: 

In the American imagination, to be Irish is to be Catholic. The data, however, is clear: most Irish-Americans are not Catholic, and Irish-Americans make up a minority of Catholics in America. Nearly half of Irish-Americans are Protestant; a third are Catholic. The proportions are more equal (roughly 40 percent each) between those that were raised Catholic or Protestant.

Many Irish-Americans, particularly in the South, are evangelicals. In fact, Michael P. Carroll, a dean at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, reports that Irish-Americans make up a larger share of evangelicals in the South (20 percent) than their share of Catholicism elsewhere (16 percent). That’s right—a Southern Baptist is more likely to be Irish than is a Catholic.

The link between being Irish and being Catholic remains strong in the American imagination. To be really Irish is to be Catholic. To give one trivial example, the University of Notre Dame football team was called ‘Fighting Irish’ because ‘Fighting Irish’ was used interchangeably with the school’s other early nickname, ‘Fighting Catholics’. The school, which is officially named L’Université de Notre Dame du Lac, was founded by French priests, not Irish, but the name Fighting Irish stuck.

This conflation of Irish and Catholic identities is, in part, bigotry. The Irish immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s were a threat to Protestant America. Earlier immigrants from Ireland who were Protestant were viewed as not truly Irish. They were ‘Scotch-Irish’, which meant that they were really of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ stock, not the ‘savage’ Irish race. Carroll points out, however, that these so-called Scotch-Irish were fully Irish, just ones with loose ties to the Presbyterian church. Many left the Presbyterian church and became Methodist or Baptist. There were also many Catholics in pre-Famine America who converted to Protestantism.

Carroll concludes that being Irish in America has two different meanings today. For Catholics, the link between being Catholic and being Irish is now entrenched, with Irish Catholics often viewed as being devout. ”Claiming an Irish identity can function for Catholic Americans as a way of presenting themselves to others as a good Catholic,” Carroll said.

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