In Religion, Identity, and Politics, Claire Mitchell argues, quite forcefully, that religion plays an essential and constitutive role in the formation of ethno-national identities, not just in Northern Ireland but, by implication, elsewhere as well. While this assertion will strike many readers as rather obvious given the book's context, Northern Ireland, Mitchell is writing against a stable of scholars who have either minimalized or ignored religion's import in their work on nationalism, including studies of Northern Ireland. This devaluation has various sources, yet it often springs from the belief that secularization and modernization—that is, the building of nation-states and the correlated emergence of national identities—are equivalent processes and therefore interchangeable and synonymous. Mitchell is not the first to challenge this assertion, of course. Nevertheless, she does make a provocative incursion in what is still a lively debate in studies of ethno-national identities.

To combat this secularization model, Mitchell does not attempt to over-inflate the institutional power of the church or overplay the particular influence of individual clerics, although she does maintain their significance. Instead she capaciously reconceptualizes the category of religion. It covers not just theology, beliefs, and rituals, but what Mitchell calls “religious ideology,” defined as a “system of concepts about self and others, informed by religious doctrine,” albeit ultimately “unconcerned with answering spiritual questions” (91). It incorporates not simply true believers, those church members who show up at every gathering; it also encompasses those who were reared within, baptized, and educated by the church but who may or may not attend on a weekly or occasional basis, or, for that matter, at all (so long as their sense of identity is, as with religious ideology, “informed” by the religion of their youth). Therefore, the notion of “boundaries” works on various levels in Mitchell's argument, denoting not only the markers that distinguish the two dominant communal identities within Northern Ireland, but also the sometimes subtler differences within these communities.

Mitchell argues that religion contributes to the construction of individual and communal identities in five demonstrable ways: it establishes practices and rituals to reinforce community membership, marks out identity boundaries, provides religious ideas and theological beliefs that sustain and reproduce divisions, and, finally, offers institutional support for boundary maintenance. To sustain this argument, Mitchell takes a two-pronged approach. Of them, the first will prove less interesting to readers who are already familiar with the history of modern Northern Ireland. Taking up nearly two-thirds of the book, it is a conventional argument for religion's continued relevance, based on survey data, some interviews, and a lot of secondary literature (indeed, one chapter reads like a concatenating summation of the preexisting literature; and another is essentially a commentary on several surveys, with the bulk of the discussion devoted to the 2003 North Ireland Life and Times Surveys).

Mitchell's second approach is theoretically more ambitious. This is where she reinforces the argument for relevance by expanding the boundaries of religion to include non-church attendees and faith-informed ideologies. Instead of focusing on the straightforward self-identification of insiders, Mitchell looks to the margins and analyzes how people illumine their own communal identities in the process of talking about their perceptions of “the other.” She observes that Protestant interviewees tended, for example, to emphasize what they felt to be a strong sense of community among Catholics while, conversely, Catholics tended to focus on the perceived religious fervor of Protestant peers. Flipping this valuation on its head, Mitchell argues that a Catholic's comment about Protestant fervor inherently reveals the perceived lack of Catholic religious fervor, and so on and so forth. Identities, thus, form around, and express themselves through, a variety of dialectics, she asserts. Mitchell is not the first scholar of ethno-national identities to focus on the “‘othering’ of the other”—indeed, scholars in subaltern studies long ago made it the cornerstone of their intellectual reputation—yet this argument is the book's most effective and suggestive contribution, providing a thicker description at the margins for what often falls under flatter designation of (mere) “religious affiliation.”

Although Mitchell's book admirably reinserts religion back into the center of debates about ethno-national identities, it falls short on several fronts—the first of which relates to the book's intended audience. The book is targeted at undergraduates: a short list of “key points” is included at the beginning of each chapter to guide the student's reading, important ideas and conclusions are frequently reiterated, and inserted at the end of the book is a small glossary of such basic terms as “born-again,” “evangelicalism,” and “saved.” Nevertheless, portions of the book do read like a literature review with seemingly little thought for how an undergraduate might be engaged by the scholarship. And on another front, despite the author's expressed interest in accepting the claims of believers at “face value,” she too often relies on an interpretive framework of incredulous instrumentalism when explaining people's intentions. This reviewer could not help but wonder if this arises from Mitchell's own belief that, “To a large extent, group or communal identification is about competition for power” (14). One of the lesser shortcomings of the book is Mitchell's other predilection, which is to give Catholicism a pass. She argues, “Protestantism has provided the language and ideas for moral evaluations of the boundary [between Catholics and Protestants],” and highlights Protestant “inflexibility and arrogance” (114), yet she pays little attention to Catholic anti-Protestant attitudes and offers little justification for why she thinks Protestants control this moral boundary. Nor does she sufficiently justify other similar conclusions about Protestantism that seem to arise out of the author's own “religious ideology” (1). Notwithstanding, the book has serious merit and is worthy of attention.