The Real Peace Process: Worship, Politics and the End of Sectarianism

To almost everybodys great relief, the Good Friday Agreement resulted in the cessation of the paramilitary violence that had ravaged Northern Ireland for so long. However, it barely impacted a key underlying factor in that conflict: prejudice and animosity between Protestants and Catholics. This book argues that what Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland need now is a peace process that changes the hearts and mindsand not merely the civic structuresof their inhabitants. Toward this goal, The Real Peace Process shows how Christian worship can be caught up in sectarianism, and yet how it also offers a location in which sectarian ways can be challenged and transformed. Based on extensive fieldwork in Protestant and Catholic churches across the whole island, The Real Peace Process shows how worship practices that Irish and British Christians usually think of as benign can be implicated in wider cultural sectarian norms. By examining the spatial, verbal, symbolic, musical and interpersonal aspects of everyday worship services, Garrigan first sketches a liturgical anthropology and then proceeds to propose critical and constructive means by which ordinary congregations in the Republic and Northern Ireland can use their Sunday morning ritualizing to help them move beyond sectarianism.