Scottish sectarianism? Let's lay this myth to rest

In the runup to the Easter Sunday Old Firm game historical animosities between Celtic and Rangers supporters have been in the spotlight following the security threats against Celtic manager Neil Lennon, his lawyer Paul McBride and the former MSP Trish Godman. But those animosities should not be allowed to dominate or distort perceptions of the Scots, or of Scottish culture.

Most Scots are not football fans; most fans do not support Rangers or Celtic; most Rangers and Celtic fans are not religious bigots. That some Rangers and Celtic fans wind each other up by falsely claiming to have strong religio-ethnic identities which are offended by the equally false religio-ethnic identities of the other side is not a reason for the rest of us to take such ritual posturing as the basis for judging the polity, society and culture of an entire country.

The sectarianism of Scotland is a myth: popular in some places but a myth nonetheless. A major survey in 2001 in Glasgow showed that many people thought sectarianism discrimination in employment was common but that none had suffered it themselves – it was something they had heard had happened to others.

We are now able to test claims of labour market discrimination with a vast body of information because the 2001 census recorded people's current religion and religion of upbringing as well as data on jobs, education and income.

And the religious constituency with the poorest socio-economic profile? Not those raised as Catholics but those raised with "no religion". Why the children of the ungodly should be disadvantaged remain a mystery, but it is clear the census data offers no evidence for widespread anti-Catholic discrimination in the economy.

A second component of the sectarian myth is the violence that bigotry supposedly produces. Again, when surveyed many Glaswegians said that sectarian violence was commonplace but very few had personally experienced any.

The Glasgow survey asked respondents if they had been the victims of a variety of crimes in the previous five years. It found "no significant difference with regard to the level of crime experience by respondents who classified themselves as Catholic and those who classified themselves as belonging to a Protestant faith".

The few respondents who had been victimised were asked to guess why they had suffered: gender, country of origin and sexual orientation were cited as often as religion, and all of those came a very long way behind "the area where you live".

In total, less than 1% of those surveyed thought they had been victimised because of their religion and one of those seven individuals was non-Christian.

Myths thrive on naivety, carelessness and exaggeration. In a fine example of Chinese whispers, a report that claimed 11 Old Firm-related murders in 18 years was inflated by a spokesman for the anti-sectarian campaigning organisation Nil By Mouth into "Eight murders with a sectarian element in the last few years" and by a Church of Scotland committee into "11 Rangers and Celtic fans" in seven years.

Religious identity did not actually feature in any of the 11 homicides claimed in the original report, and the Old Firm football element was often trivial. For instance one drunk punched another (who subsequently died) for ruining his new football shirt. It could have been a Hearts or a Dunfermline shirt. It happened to be a Rangers top. Colleagues who looked closely at the cases concluded that at most, less than one third of 1% of Scots homicides over an 18-year period had any sort of sectarian element, and it was invariably football allegiance rather than religion or inherited ethic identity.

A large part of my research career has been taken up with Northern Ireland. I know what sectarianism looks like. When Irish migrants settled in large numbers at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century, some Scots objected to what they feared was union-bashing cheap labour. Others objected to what they believed was a false and dangerous religion.

But Scotland never divided in the way Ireland did. It did not divide politically: the native Scots who worked with the Irish settlers and their children in the labour movement and in the Labour party always vastly outnumbered those who supported tiny and short-lived anti-Catholic parties.

Scotland never divided residentially: nowhere in Scotland displayed Belfast's pattern of residential segregation. And despite the Catholic church insisting on maintaining a separate school system, social mixing has always been common and, as interest in religion has declined, intermarriage has become commonplace. In Northern Ireland only about 6% of marriages are mixed but in the 1990s, just over half of Scots Catholics under 35 who were married had non-Catholic partners.

Scotland's disgrace is not religious bigotry. It is the unthinking way in which sectarianism is assumed. In 2004, on the Sunday after a heated Rangers-Celtic game, a Sunday tabloid newspaper ran a two-page story under the headline "Real toll of that Old Firm mayhem". One page was given over to a fire which severely damaged a Catholic church in Stornoway. The implication was clear: "Priest's church blaze agony" was caused by "Old Firm Mayhem". The boring truth, which merited just one column inch in a sister tabloid the following week, was that the fire was caused by an electrical fault.