Berkley Center

A few weeks ago, I went to a comedy debate at the Trinity College Law Society. The Law Society typically debates on serious topics, but they had promoted this comedy debate as a way to attract new members. The debate, with the proposition “This House Believes: On the first day, God created Trinity College,” provided two seemingly endless sources of jokes for the evening’s participants. First, many speakers played upon the notorious Trinity College superiority complex, complete with over-the-top insults to University College Dublin and National University of Ireland, Galway. Even more frequently, the debaters joked about creationism and the Bible, and religious belief in general. However distasteful the jokes about Trinity's elitism may have seemed, they probably didn’t morally offend most people in the audience. Yet the humor at religion’s expense could have alienated and even seriously offended some viewers. Obviously, this event was advertised as a comedy debate, so all the students who entered the room knew exactly what to expect. However, I’m sure the Law Soc’s upperclassmen had considered that this event would be many students’ very first, and possibly only, impression of their society; some prospective members would decide to either join or not join after this event alone. Therefore, the event’s organizers must have been confident that the humor on display would not alienate, but would in fact attract as many new members as possible (and I’m sure they had this in mind when they planned the free wine and beer reception following the debate).

After attending this comedy debate, I began to wonder about the religious atmosphere in Ireland. Before this fall, I had pictured Ireland as a stoutly conservative and Catholic country. After all, Ireland had legalized abortion this past July, and only in very extenuating circumstances. I remembered that one of our professors in a lecture during our Semester Startup Programme on Christianity’s development in Ireland had said, “We live in a definitively post-Christian Ireland.” Then, after searching for some data on religiosity in Ireland, I realized that my assumptions had been quite wrong. In a 2012 report by Gallup International, researchers found that 10 percent of Irish people consider themselves atheist, placing Ireland tenth out the 57 countries surveyed. For comparison, only 5 percent of Americans labeled themselves atheists in this survey. Even more importantly, Ireland experienced the second largest drop in religiosity (behind Vietnam) since 2005 among all countries surveyed: 22 percent fewer Irish people considered themselves religious in 2011 than in 2005. Although a proper investigation into the causes behind Ireland’s steep decline in religion would require more space than a blog post allows, two main factors certainly contributed. The sex abuse scandal in Ireland’s Catholic Church during the late 1990s and early 2000s and Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s subsequent denunciation of the Vatican’s response most directly turned away Irish churchgoers. Ireland’s economic prosperity (an average GDP growth rate of 5.58 percent from 2005 to 2007—before 2008’s banking crisis, of course) may have also contributed to the decline in religiosity, as the Gallup report suggested a modest correlation between one’s individual income and a tendency toward atheism.

I realized that the Law Soc’s members may have been right to assume that their humor was an effective way to attract new members, and I questioned how biased my assumptions about religious attitudes may have been because I came from Georgetown. Let me be clear here: I am not a devoutly religious person and I did not choose Trinity College because I was hoping for a religiously tinged study abroad experience. However, the culture at Georgetown will make anyone, no matter how religious, aware of the importance of respect for others’ beliefs. I think Georgetown’s two-semester theology requirement (especially for those who take "The Problem of God") forces us to consider religion differently, and more tolerantly, than students at many other universities. To be fair, many students choose Georgetown for its religious heritage, so the student body is already much more religious than that of other universities—probably even including Trinity College Dublin.

Even in my first month in Dublin, I’ve learned that Ireland’s religious atmosphere is far from what I had previously imagined, and I’m excited to learn even more about this great country as the semester unfolds.