interrelated trends: that away from sectarian identification and that toward greater secularization. This paper will consider both, noting that the trends are strong enough to question the two multiculturalist education policies in the light of a society in which fewer individuals identify along divisive Catholic-Protestant sectarian lines - or even religious ones.
VVIn recent decades, Scottish society has become less sectarian, posing difficult questions for an education system in which schools are, as a result of historical choices, either “denominational” Catholic institutions or nominally “non-denominational” Protestant ones. Bruce, et al, find such a decline in sectarian identification and discrimination by looking at structural discrimination against Catholics, socio-economic divisions between Catholics and Protestants, differences in opinion on moral issues between Catholics and Protestants, and the current cultural sentiment regarding anti-Catholicism. Reviewing (the lack of) modern evidence of structural discrimination against Catholics, Bruce, et al, consider legal disabilities, access to politics, educational achievement, and socioeconomic status of Scots based upon their religious affiliation. The authors find that, while Catholics had been discriminated against in each of these societal structures—often by both the state and private actors—that was no longer the case.22 Similarly, where differences in moral opinions once separated Catholic from Protestant persons, there today exists “’a widening [moral] gulf between the leadership and teachings of the Catholic Church and people of all persuasions.’”23 Finally, citing as evidence cases in which public officials have left their posts as a result of anti-Catholic sentiments or utterances, the authors note the growth of widespread public repugnance toward such feelings and their expression as indicative of the decline in them.24 While Bruce, et al, cite such disdain for and condemnation of discrimination as confirmation of declining sectarianism, that argument assumes much about the correlation between structural and individual discrimination. However, compounded with the other evidence provided of the growing generational similarities among Catholics and Protestants in socioeconomic class and in values, the decline in sectarian discrimination in Scottish society can be considered quite palpable. This societal shift would be expected to decrease the desire and weaken the justification for religious schools, as Catholics feel less compelled to seek rectification of past wrongs and, generationally, feel closer in values, norms, and even identities to their Protestant counterparts.
88822. Steve Bruce, Tony Glendinning, Iain Paterson, and Michael Rosie, Sectarianism in Scotland (Edinburgh: University Edinburgh Press, 2004), 66, 71, 73, 76.
88823. Field, “The Haemorrhage of Faith?,” 166 in Bruce, et al, 104.
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