Hugh Turpin
My primary area of interest is the emergence of Irish ex-Catholicism, and how this process relates to such factors as increasing prosperity, lingering Church influence, clerical sexual abuse scandals, and default cultural Catholicism among the majority of the baptised Catholic population.
My general areas of research specialisation are the social anthropology of morality, moral psychology, the cognitive science of religion, the sociology of secularisation, and the anthropology of Ireland.
My general areas of research specialisation are the social anthropology of morality, moral psychology, the cognitive science of religion, the sociology of secularisation, and the anthropology of Ireland.
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Papers by Hugh Turpin
The paper discusses what the digital environment may mean for emerging and future 'religion-like objects' and how these may disrupt theoretical delineations within CSR. It goes on to consider QAnon as a potential prototype of forthcoming virtual 'paracosms' (e.g. Luhrmann, 2019), and asks whether CSR needs to get ready for this change.
In this commentary, I raise the issue of how well we can distinguish
between religious systems and those presided over by messianic “quasidivine” leaders. This problematizes the degree to which all such systems can be described as ecologically functional when they can also be
directed by the idiosyncratic whims of unstable charismatic individuals.
Aside from such issues, I also raise the issue of how we can be sure that
the “religious system” is reliably adaptive, if we may not have an accurate
tally of such systems in the first place, particularly given the fact that religious studies scholars are incapable of providing a distinction between a
“cult” that may contain but a few individuals and quickly “fail” due to its
esoteric demands, and millennia-old traditions commanding millions of
adherents and enforcing prosocial norms. I also raise two issues that have
long bedevilled functionalist approaches but that do not make much of
an appearance in Religion Evolving: Cultural, Cognitive, and Ecological
Dynamics: the boundary problem and the Pangloss problem. Despite
these reservations, I applaud the book both for its rigour and for providing
a sorely needed template for analyzing religious systems within the
cognitive and evolutionary study of religion (CESR). I close by tentatively
suggesting that religion’s ubiquity lies not with its adaptiveness per
se, but with its capacity to accelerate cultural evolution by causing societies
to lock in values that may either be adaptive or maladaptive, making
sacralization ubiquitous even when its outcomes can be destructive.
incompatible belief systems that make competing ontological claims. From
this perspective, scientists and theologians are rival knowledge specialists.
Prestige is one of the ways we evaluate who we should trust, but we do
not know whether the prestige of scientists and theologians is
conceptualized similarly, and whether they really are seen as rival
knowledge specialists by the bulk of the US population. To investigate this
question, we use a free listing methodology to explore public attitudes
toward prestigious academic theologians and physicists in a US sample.
We find that for all participants, prestige in physics is overwhelmingly
associated with forms of intelligence necessary to unravel complex
questions about the nature of reality. By contrast, the prestige even of
academic theologians is more strongly associated with piety, virtue, and
charisma than it is with raw intelligence. They appear to be seen as social
models rather than ontological experts. Furthermore, we find that while
both religious and nonreligious individuals share a unified representation
for prestigious physicists, this is not the case with prestigious theologians:
virtue is more salient in Christian evaluations of theological prestige, while
charisma is more salient for the nonreligious.
some of the non-religious are more likely to adopt an anti-religious worldview which
perceives religious influence to be a moral evil, while others tend more towards
apathy or ambiguity on matters religious. Thus far, this work on anti-religious
attitudes has entailed two serious limitations. One is a tendency to focus on
international atheist movements, leading to a homogenous picture that amplifies
cross-cultural similarity while underplaying how anti-religious stances are formed in
response to local contexts. The other is that existing work sheds little light on how
these anti-religious and more ambiguous unbelieving stances relate not just to
religion, but to one another. The Republic of Ireland provides one of the most
interesting contemporary contexts in which to examine both these issues.
While being a ‘good Catholic’ and a ‘good Irish person’ were once coterminous, this
is no longer so. Today, the ROI hosts one of the world’s fastest growing populations
of ‘convinced atheists’ (WinGallup 2012), and its non-affiliated minority are the most
anti-religious in western Europe (Riberink et al, 2013). Crucial to this are a number of
factors. First, the Church retains a significant degree of institutional influence,
particularly in the educational sphere. Second, after almost 25 years of institutional
scandal, the Church has become severely morally tainted in the public eye. My
research suggests that in combination with declining religious socialisation, these
factors have contributed to the emergence and transmission of a highly self-aware
and moralised form of unbelief, which I will call ‘ex-Catholicism’. This stance is one of
the clearest contemporary expressions of the relationship between negative moral
judgements of religious institutions and the construction of worldviews and identities
valorising religious rejection (e.g. Hout & Fischer, 2014). At the same time, this
stance exemplifies the degree to which such anti-religious worldviews are deeply
culturally constructed rather than simply being the local implementation of global
New Atheism: Irish ex-Catholicism is galvanised by a powerful moral narrative which
maps smoothly onto existing schema of Irish history as a struggle for freedom from
external oppression - this time, freedom from the oppressive hold of the Church. But
perhaps most crucially, the ex-Catholic stance cannot be understood without taking
into account a key third factor: its relationship to cultural Catholicism, which can be
construed as an accommodationist form of privatised unbelief.
Despite the collapse in the Church’s moral stature and authority, the majority of the
Irish population constitute what might be called ‘cultural Catholics’: while they may
have abandoned most of the beliefs, practices, and signature moral stances
associated with Catholicism, and while many disapprove of the Church, for a variety
of reasons they cleave to a Catholic identity. The newly emergent and rapidly
growing stance of ex-Catholicism this chapter describes is defined by an ‘ethic of
authenticity’ which positions itself in opposition to this cultural Catholic default,
reconstructed as a form of ‘unwoken’ or ‘lazy’ complicity on the part of a majority who
are, in truth, agnostics, but who nevertheless allow an immoral and power-hungry
institution to claim them as believers. From this perspective, disaffiliation is
imperative, metaphysical beliefs are a private side issue, and the maintenance of
local traditions and affiliations should not be allowed to interfere with the central
moral project of national institutional secularisation. Through the lens of the ROI
then, this chapter will shed light on negative moral judgements of religious
institutions and their key role as a component of strong religious rejection, the
cultural construction of anti-religious worldviews built upon such judgements, and the
complex relationship between anti-religious and ambiguous unbelieving stances that
can result from such processes.
can address the question of how religious systems come to fail. First, the chapter discusses whether or not it makes scientific sense to talk about “religious systems” before outlining how the success or failure of such systems can be evaluated. A distinction is then drawn between the ‘mental-representational’ and ‘social’ failure of religious systems. After this, we examine the contributions of CSR to explaining the differential success of religious systems over time, such that some come to fail while others succeed. We then outline the relevance of CSR for explaining how and where religious systems lose influence altogether and various forms of non-religion emerge, a process that has traditionally been called “secularization.” The chapter closes with a case study outlining the applicability of the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion to the decline of Catholic belief, practice, and identification, as well as the rise in anti-Catholic Church social action, in early 21st Century Ireland.
group than did those in the control condition. Moral afterlife beliefs increased generosity to strangers for all groups. Taken together, these results provide evidence that different religious beliefs can foster and maintain different prosocial and cooperative norms.
The paper discusses what the digital environment may mean for emerging and future 'religion-like objects' and how these may disrupt theoretical delineations within CSR. It goes on to consider QAnon as a potential prototype of forthcoming virtual 'paracosms' (e.g. Luhrmann, 2019), and asks whether CSR needs to get ready for this change.
In this commentary, I raise the issue of how well we can distinguish
between religious systems and those presided over by messianic “quasidivine” leaders. This problematizes the degree to which all such systems can be described as ecologically functional when they can also be
directed by the idiosyncratic whims of unstable charismatic individuals.
Aside from such issues, I also raise the issue of how we can be sure that
the “religious system” is reliably adaptive, if we may not have an accurate
tally of such systems in the first place, particularly given the fact that religious studies scholars are incapable of providing a distinction between a
“cult” that may contain but a few individuals and quickly “fail” due to its
esoteric demands, and millennia-old traditions commanding millions of
adherents and enforcing prosocial norms. I also raise two issues that have
long bedevilled functionalist approaches but that do not make much of
an appearance in Religion Evolving: Cultural, Cognitive, and Ecological
Dynamics: the boundary problem and the Pangloss problem. Despite
these reservations, I applaud the book both for its rigour and for providing
a sorely needed template for analyzing religious systems within the
cognitive and evolutionary study of religion (CESR). I close by tentatively
suggesting that religion’s ubiquity lies not with its adaptiveness per
se, but with its capacity to accelerate cultural evolution by causing societies
to lock in values that may either be adaptive or maladaptive, making
sacralization ubiquitous even when its outcomes can be destructive.
incompatible belief systems that make competing ontological claims. From
this perspective, scientists and theologians are rival knowledge specialists.
Prestige is one of the ways we evaluate who we should trust, but we do
not know whether the prestige of scientists and theologians is
conceptualized similarly, and whether they really are seen as rival
knowledge specialists by the bulk of the US population. To investigate this
question, we use a free listing methodology to explore public attitudes
toward prestigious academic theologians and physicists in a US sample.
We find that for all participants, prestige in physics is overwhelmingly
associated with forms of intelligence necessary to unravel complex
questions about the nature of reality. By contrast, the prestige even of
academic theologians is more strongly associated with piety, virtue, and
charisma than it is with raw intelligence. They appear to be seen as social
models rather than ontological experts. Furthermore, we find that while
both religious and nonreligious individuals share a unified representation
for prestigious physicists, this is not the case with prestigious theologians:
virtue is more salient in Christian evaluations of theological prestige, while
charisma is more salient for the nonreligious.
some of the non-religious are more likely to adopt an anti-religious worldview which
perceives religious influence to be a moral evil, while others tend more towards
apathy or ambiguity on matters religious. Thus far, this work on anti-religious
attitudes has entailed two serious limitations. One is a tendency to focus on
international atheist movements, leading to a homogenous picture that amplifies
cross-cultural similarity while underplaying how anti-religious stances are formed in
response to local contexts. The other is that existing work sheds little light on how
these anti-religious and more ambiguous unbelieving stances relate not just to
religion, but to one another. The Republic of Ireland provides one of the most
interesting contemporary contexts in which to examine both these issues.
While being a ‘good Catholic’ and a ‘good Irish person’ were once coterminous, this
is no longer so. Today, the ROI hosts one of the world’s fastest growing populations
of ‘convinced atheists’ (WinGallup 2012), and its non-affiliated minority are the most
anti-religious in western Europe (Riberink et al, 2013). Crucial to this are a number of
factors. First, the Church retains a significant degree of institutional influence,
particularly in the educational sphere. Second, after almost 25 years of institutional
scandal, the Church has become severely morally tainted in the public eye. My
research suggests that in combination with declining religious socialisation, these
factors have contributed to the emergence and transmission of a highly self-aware
and moralised form of unbelief, which I will call ‘ex-Catholicism’. This stance is one of
the clearest contemporary expressions of the relationship between negative moral
judgements of religious institutions and the construction of worldviews and identities
valorising religious rejection (e.g. Hout & Fischer, 2014). At the same time, this
stance exemplifies the degree to which such anti-religious worldviews are deeply
culturally constructed rather than simply being the local implementation of global
New Atheism: Irish ex-Catholicism is galvanised by a powerful moral narrative which
maps smoothly onto existing schema of Irish history as a struggle for freedom from
external oppression - this time, freedom from the oppressive hold of the Church. But
perhaps most crucially, the ex-Catholic stance cannot be understood without taking
into account a key third factor: its relationship to cultural Catholicism, which can be
construed as an accommodationist form of privatised unbelief.
Despite the collapse in the Church’s moral stature and authority, the majority of the
Irish population constitute what might be called ‘cultural Catholics’: while they may
have abandoned most of the beliefs, practices, and signature moral stances
associated with Catholicism, and while many disapprove of the Church, for a variety
of reasons they cleave to a Catholic identity. The newly emergent and rapidly
growing stance of ex-Catholicism this chapter describes is defined by an ‘ethic of
authenticity’ which positions itself in opposition to this cultural Catholic default,
reconstructed as a form of ‘unwoken’ or ‘lazy’ complicity on the part of a majority who
are, in truth, agnostics, but who nevertheless allow an immoral and power-hungry
institution to claim them as believers. From this perspective, disaffiliation is
imperative, metaphysical beliefs are a private side issue, and the maintenance of
local traditions and affiliations should not be allowed to interfere with the central
moral project of national institutional secularisation. Through the lens of the ROI
then, this chapter will shed light on negative moral judgements of religious
institutions and their key role as a component of strong religious rejection, the
cultural construction of anti-religious worldviews built upon such judgements, and the
complex relationship between anti-religious and ambiguous unbelieving stances that
can result from such processes.
can address the question of how religious systems come to fail. First, the chapter discusses whether or not it makes scientific sense to talk about “religious systems” before outlining how the success or failure of such systems can be evaluated. A distinction is then drawn between the ‘mental-representational’ and ‘social’ failure of religious systems. After this, we examine the contributions of CSR to explaining the differential success of religious systems over time, such that some come to fail while others succeed. We then outline the relevance of CSR for explaining how and where religious systems lose influence altogether and various forms of non-religion emerge, a process that has traditionally been called “secularization.” The chapter closes with a case study outlining the applicability of the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion to the decline of Catholic belief, practice, and identification, as well as the rise in anti-Catholic Church social action, in early 21st Century Ireland.
group than did those in the control condition. Moral afterlife beliefs increased generosity to strangers for all groups. Taken together, these results provide evidence that different religious beliefs can foster and maintain different prosocial and cooperative norms.
Synthesises previous work on Irish secularisation and ponders where things might lead as the 'secularising euphoria' of 2015-2019 diminishes.
The paper considers the limitations of CRED theory in contexts where theocratic or ethnoreligious pressure makes religious demonstrations more mandatory, and encourages subcultural discourses of religious cynicism that undercut public expressions of piety. Following Ceslaw Milosz (1957), the paper examines how these conditions can produce a number of 'ketman' like social strategies, and how this might alter the pattern of secularisation within such societies.
Reports on a test of Sperber's 'guru effect' across scientific and religious laity committed to strong religious or scientific worldviews, using AI-modified opaque statements as stimuli.
Using rich quantitative and qualitative research methods, Turpin explains the emergence and character of religious rejection in the Republic. He examines how numerous factors—including economic growth, social liberalization, attenuated domestic religious socialization, the institutional scandals and moral collapse of the Church, and the Church's lingering influence in social institutions and laws—have interacted to produce a rapid growth in ex-Catholicism. By tracing the frictions within and between practicing Catholics, cultural Catholics, and ex-Catholics in a period of profound cultural change and moral reckoning, Turpin shows how deeply the meanings of being religious or non-religious have changed in the country once described as "Holy Catholic Ireland."