Religion and Public Values: A Catholic-Protestant Contrast

Abstract

The argument concerns the contrast between Protestant and Roman Catholics societies with respect to a whole range of public values. It lays stress on the comprehensive nature of Catholic social bonding and the attempt to provide an inclusive environment, together with Catholic parties and unions. Catholic iconography provides an expression of the conscience collective which is more explicit, tactile and ecclesiastical. Protestant iconography leans more on the analogy of society with Israel. Beyond that the Protestant norms pendant on that iconography are less clearly articulated than Catholic norms and tend to be worked out either by drawing on non-Christian systems (e.g. Stoicism) or by purely individual initiative. One consequence is that Protestant action in the social field is inclined to lose the explicit label marking its religious origins, to lack dogmatic coherence and to operate by the creation of moral cultures and transformations of cultural motifs. It is also argued that the massive nature of the Catholic social pressure precipitates an intense conflict with the enlightenment and liberalism, whereas in Protestant cultures liberalism and Protestantism eventually coalesce. A subsection of the argument concerns those conflict situations where rival expressions of the conscience collective clash within a single social entity, as in Northern Ireland, and where Protestant or Catholic enclaves adopt a ghettolike solidarity against a wider more secular social center.