1869-1976: 107 Years of Religion, Racialization, and Empire in Northern Ireland

Religion has been an instrumental part of colonial projects for centuries. Its interplay with white supremacism in colonial logics entangles it in phenomena that, in recent years, scholars like Sylvester Johnson have analyzed as the racialization of religion under empire. This thesis seeks to apply Johnson’s framework of religion-as-race to examine how racialization was created, applied, and evolved by empire in an Irish context where phenotype and anti-blackness were not extant divisions. This thesis seeks to accomplish such by tracking through the works of three different far-right, pro-imperial men across a timepsan of one-hundred years in order to analyze the ways in which they racialized religion, their respective historical contexts, and said religion-as-race’s evolution. In doing so, this thesis aims to provide a better understanding of the ways in which empire weaponizes both racializaiton and religion to justify and perpetuate itself so that we might resist and undo it.