Religion, Northern Ireland and the Politics of Establishment

Northern Ireland's Troubles, a violent conflict from the late 1960s until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that killed over 3,500 people, was fundamentally a political conflict over the region's constitutional status within or outside the United Kingdom rather than a theological dispute, but its two sides divided almost entirely along the province's Catholic and Protestant communal lines, with Catholic nationalist and republican paramilitaries such as the Provisional IRA seeking union with the Republic of Ireland and Protestant unionist and loyalist paramilitaries seeking to remain within the United Kingdom, making religious identity the primary marker of political allegiance throughout the conflict.

The Church of England's establishment gives it privileges unavailable to other faiths, including reserved seats for its bishops in the House of Lords and a constitutional role in coronating the monarch, an arrangement that has drawn periodic calls for disestablishment given Britain's now-minority Christian practice and its religiously diverse population; the 2023 coronation of King Charles III, while retaining the traditional Anglican rite, notably incorporated for the first time acknowledgments and blessings from leaders of other faiths present, reflecting pressure to represent a more religiously plural Britain within a still-established church.