“A Savage and Sacrilegious Race, Hostile to God and Humanity”: Religion, Racism, and Ireland’s Colonization

Abstract

ABSTRACT Though the Irish became Christian in the fifth century and had helped spread Christianity throughout Britain and the Continent since the sixth, when England’s Norman nobility set imperialist eyes upon Ireland in the twelfth century, the papacy pronounced the Irish fallen from the faith, otherizing them to justify their invasion. The imperialist colonialism that the English imposed on Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas, they imposed on their neighbors first, where physical characteristics couldn’t provide as convenient an excuse; instead, they made religion the pretext for their racism, even though all involved were Catholics and the Irish had been since long before their colonizers’ conversion.