Links & Readings
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On ‘British religion in numbers’, see http://www.brin.ac.uk/2013/scottish-religious-census-2011/;
Clive Field has also written ‘“The haemorrhage of faith?” Opinion polls as sources for religious practices, beliefs and attitudes in Scotland since the 1970s’, Journal of Contemporary Religion 16: 157‒175. Field’s article is the best short source for statistical information about changing religious beliefs and practices in modern Scotland.
Steve Bruce’s Scottish Gods: Religion in Modern Scotland 1900‒2012. Edinburgh University Press, 2014. It won the 2014 Saltire Society prize for best Scottish history book, and is the source of much of this chapter. It has the advantage of the space to put historical, biographical and sociological flesh on the skeleton sketched here.
See also Bruce, S, A. Glendinning, I. Paterson and M. Rosie, 2011. Sectarianism in Scotland. Edinburgh University Press.
This elaborates and tests all the various claims that are made for the relevance of sectarianism and it concludes that most of those claims are social myths. But its conclusions are less important than its role as a compendium of relevant information.