Peter Mulholland supplies a useful anthropological survey of the development of New Religious Movements (NRMs) in Ireland. The author primarily uses popular media sources and newspaper articles to explain why NRMs and New Age Movements (NAMs), such as the Charismatic Revival Movement, gained popularity in Ireland during a period in recent Irish history when the social power and cultural influence of the Catholic Church was waning.
The length of the volume should not be a deterrent to readers, as nearly seventy pages are devoted to appendices comprised primarily of summaries of newspaper articles, speeches or other popular and public media outputs. The chapters are easily digestible as they are subheaded, though the author tends to make sweeping and declarative statements based on unsupported and generalised claims throughout the book. Nominally in support of Mulholland's argument, competing claims are presented to the reader in each chapter's body, but without any articulation of which claim should be believed or privileged until each conclusion. The conclusions to the chapters do at least untangle these confusions to some extent by outlining their respective chapter's argument, but the bald presentation of competing claims in the body of the chapters often creates confusion as to what the reader is meant to understand about the initial argument. Many of the claims and arguments made throughout the book are also unhelpfully linked only to appendices rather than supported by research woven throughout the text. This occurs, for example, as when the author states that
Religious education in Catholic institutions and the intellectual abilities of Catholic seminarians were also being debated and I found some evidence for Wuthnow's suggestion (1976: vii & 154) that higher-level education and exposure to the relativism of humanistic studies and counter-cultural values was influencing people's attitudes towards traditional religious teachings and institutions. (p. 60)
No proof for this claim is offered other than a list of thirteen appendices. Without clear reasons, these cited appendices largely follow a Fr McClean and what appear to be ongoing debates between traditional religion and post-Vatican II theological streams in the Irish Catholic Church, rather than offering the ‘evidence’ from within the laity themselves to which the author appears to refer. The appendices themselves are often confusing, as they are generally presented without a full context or integration into the claims that they are meant to support. Both the appendices and their use throughout the volume would benefit greatly from more discursive analysis throughout the text, as a more integrated approach to presenting the influence of popular media would be a valuable addition to understanding the development of NRMs in Ireland. So too integrating the arguments of the chapter conclusions throughout the body of the text would present a strong challenge to current scholarship on the decline of Irish Catholicism and the concurrent rise of NRMs and NAMs.
A more thorough contextualisation and analytical presentation of Catholic history, theology, philosophy and language would have been welcomed in the sociological study presented in this book. First, such contexts would help bring more to the fore the story of NRMs and their syncretisation of existing religious cultures in Ireland. Second, it would have been helpful to understand what precisely is being referred to in Catholicism as core to the shift towards its own decline – one lingering question, for example, is which doctrines are being referred to as the Church's ‘doctrines of love and atonement and Church tradition’ (p. 69)? Other questions arise around theological trends, opinions or behaviours attributed to the influence of Irish Catholicism – was there specifically something Irish about these behaviours, or Catholic? If the latter, what is the broader context of these behaviours and opinions outside of Ireland (p. 84)? Did those who joined NRMs or NAMs formerly belong to the Catholic Church, or were they overwhelmingly Protestant or even non-believers? If either of the former memberships make up the critical mass of NRM/NAM members, is there really a link between the decline of Irish Catholicism and the rise of these new religions?
In all Mulholland takes on an ambitious project in this volume which raises many questions about the links between the decline of Catholicism in modern Ireland and the rise of NRMs and NAMs amongst the Irish people. Though in many ways it begs more questions than it answers, Love's betrayal presents an accessible and streamlined synthesis of various Irish NRMs and their chronologies in Ireland, which will certainly be useful for future scholarship on the topic.
