Willie Gin - Minorities and Reconstructive Coalitions: The Catholic Question

Willie Gin

First published 2017
by Routledge
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2017 Willie Gin

The right of Willie Gin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Gin, Willie, author.
Title: Ethnic minority incorporation and reconstructive coalitions : the Catholic question / Willie Gin.
Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Routledge studies in nationalism and ethnicity | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016058395| ISBN 9781138283237 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315270364 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Church and minorities. | Catholic ChurchDoctrines. | Christianity and politicsCatholic ChurchHistory20th century. | Protestant churchesRelationsCatholic Church. | Catholic ChurchRelationsProtestant churches.
Classification: LCC BV639.M56 G56 2017 | DDC 305.6/82dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058395

ISBN: 978-1-138-28323-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-27036-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

This book explores the connection between religion and ethnicity. It shows that religion, no matter how universal in its aspirations, is usually cloaked in an ethnonationally specific garb, and members of religious communities, like those of ethnic ones, are objects of stereotypes. There is a Polish and an Irish Catholicism, just as there is a Greek and a Russian Eastern Orthodoxy, and an Arab, Indonesian, Bengali, and Iranian Islam. Religious identity may be transformed into an ethnic one, as in Bosnia; and in some cases, such as those of Jews, Armenians, and Sikhs, the two identities have been intertwined.

The treatment of minorities is nationally differentiated, ranging from stigmatization and exclusion to toleration, valorization, representation, and incorporation into the political system and process. It is based on the size of the subcommunity, its internal texture, and its economic function as well as on the structure of the polity and the institutional setting. These factors influence the strategies adopted by minorities; if they wish to maintain their distinct identities, they engage in lobbying and coalition building, at least in democracies marked by interparty competition, where ethnic and religious subcommunities behave like political or class based ones. The emphasis in this study is on the United States, where minority incorporation is examined chronologically and in depth and comparison with Canada, Australia, and, to a lesser extent, South Africa. These countries share a number of features: they are English-speaking, democracies, and have a Protestant majority; they are settler states, and are therefore more receptive to immigrants and more open to the incorporation of minorities.

This thoroughly documented case study provides an examination of assimilationist, pluralist, and other theories concerning the behavior of citizens in complex societies, the place of interests versus ideology, and the political strategies of ethno-religious minorities in pursuit of acceptance. It is an important contribution to the study of the politics of ethnic and religious minorities.

William Safran

University of Colorado at Boulder

I am particularly grateful to my advisors at the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania who first oversaw this project: Rogers Smith, Marie Gottschalk, and Anne Norton. Thanks for the patience, the excellent advice, and the occasional free lunch (next ones on me). I would also like to thank the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania; the Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism program at the University of Pennsylvania; and the United States Studies Centre in Sydney for providing me financial and material resources to support my research. Several people deserve thanks for providing visa support, spare couches, storage space, and useful information for a clueless American, including: Kim Yi, John Porter, Annie Ng, Anne-Marie Daoust, David Grondin, Sarah van Beurden, and Michael Jackson. The staff at Van Pelt Library, the National Library of Canada, Carleton Library, the State Library of New South Wales, Fisher Library at the University of Sydney, the National Library of Australia in Canberra, the New York Public Research Library, and the anonymous, super-efficient elves of interlibrary loan all deserve much appreciation for dealing with my many requests. Many other people contributed to improving the book through reading versions of chapters or listening to presentations, including Richard Johnston, Michael Hogan, Rodney Smith, Brendan OLeary, my fellow graduate students at Penn, and two anonymous reviewers. I am especially appreciative of my current academic home, Xavier University of Louisiana, for support in completing the publishing of book manuscript. For successfully guiding the manuscript to publication, I would also like to thank William Safran, Claire Maloney, Ann King, Amy Ekins-Coward, Matthew Twigg, and the other members of the editorial and production teams at Routledge and Wearset who worked on the manuscript.