The Mormon Minority in Ireland (feat. Hazel O'Brien)

Global Mormonism is an ever-growing field of study for scholars as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints membership has exploded throughout the Global South, especially in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. But how has Mormonism fared in Europe, especially in historically Catholic nations? Sociologist Hazel O'Brien takes host Nicholas Shrum on a tour of two pseudonymous LDS wards in the Republic of Ireland, mining the deep ethnographic depths of her 2023 book, Irish Mormons: Reconciling Identity and Global Mormonism. Dr. O'Brien details the experiences of real Mormons in Ireland as they negotiate their Irish heritage with a faith other than the predominant Irish Catholicism, and as they relate to a Church still predominantly organized and ruled by Americans. Dr. O'Brien also examines the broader experiences of religious minorities in Ireland, the country's changing socio-religious landscape, and a way forward for Mormonism as it sets it sights more globally.

To find out more about Dr. O'Brien and her upcoming work, click here.

Transcript

00;00;00 - 00;00;32

Nicholas Shrum

You're listening to Scholars and Saints: The University of Virginia Mormon Studies podcast. On this podcast, we dive into the academic study of Mormonism, where we engage recent and classic scholarship, interview prominent and up-and-coming thinkers in the field, and reflect on Mormonism’s relevance to the broader study of religion. Scholars, and Saints is brought to you by support from the Richard Lyman Bushman Endowed Professorship of Mormon Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. The podcast was founded by UVA Religious Studies PhD candidate Stephen Betts. For the past several years, Stephen spoke with dozens of Mormon studies scholars and helped connect thousands of listeners to the world of Mormon Studies. Starting this year in 2024, I, Nicholas Shrum, a PhD student in Religious Studies at UVA, will carry on the podcast goal of exploring some of the most pressing issues and cutting edge methods in Mormon Studies and put them in conversation with scholarship from the discipline of Religious Studies. On today's episode, I speak with Dr. Hazel O'Brien about her recent book, Irish Mormons: Reconciling Identity and Global Mormonism, published with the University of Illinois Press in 2023. In the book, Dr. O'Brien, a sociologist, describes her years of ethnographic research among Mormon communities in the Republic of Ireland. Dr. O'Brien reveals the tensions among religious, national and ethnic identities experienced by Mormons in Ireland and offers compelling analysis of the ever-evolving state of global Mormonism. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation with Dr. Hazel O'Brien.

00;01;52 - 00;02;24

Nicholas Shrum

All right. Welcome, everybody, to the Scholars and Saints podcast, the Mormon Studies podcast at the University of Virginia. Today, we are talking with Dr. Hazel O'Brien, who is a lecturer of sociology at Southeast Technological University in Southeast Ireland. Dr. O'Brien is the author of Irish Mormons: Reconciling Identity and Global Mormonism, that was published with the University of Illinois. It’s a great ethnographic study of Irish Mormonism and I'm excited to have Dr. O'Brien on the podcast to discuss it. So thank you so much for being here today.

00;02;25 - 00;02;26

Hazel O'Brien

Thank you for having me.

00;02;26 - 00;02;37

Nicholas Shrum

So in our discussion that I wanted to start first, I think with any project, is discussing its origins or its beginnings. Can you speak a little bit about how you got on this topic?

00;02;38 - 00;05;15

Hazel O'Brien

Yeah, it's a bit of a long, tangled mess as to how I came to, what I suppose originally in my master's research, way back when I was in my 20s. I did a study of some parishes in the Dublin diocese of the Irish Catholic Church, and that was really interesting. I spoke to some parishioners and I spoke to some parish priests there, and then I went off to do other things. I moved into other research areas, and by the time I got into my 30s, I was thinking about doing a PhD project, and I thought maybe it might be interesting to move back into the sociology of religion. So I kind of thought that I had looked at the majority religious experience in Ireland, because I had already done that study of Irish Catholicism back in my 20s. And I thought it “wouldn’t be interesting to do a study, but from the minority perspective.” Now, there have been plenty of those kinds of studies done in Ireland previously, but they tend to have been done with what we might refer to as racialized religions or migrant religions, religions that have a majority non-Irish and nonwhite population. And those were there. But I was intrigued by what the minority religious experience might be like for people in Ireland who weren't a part of a large number in terms of their religious group, but nonetheless did benefit from the likes of white privilege or had dynamics of whiteness going on that would give them some commonality with the majority Irish population. So that led to me investigating the likes of Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormonism, and I kind of hadn't really made my mind up until one day I was walking just down the street in my town, and I saw a sign above my head, quite literally, that said “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” And I thought, “oh, maybe I should look into the Mormons a little bit more carefully.” So when I started investigating it, I found that, indeed, they were majority white in Ireland, with a much more religious and ethnic diversity than I expected to find. But nonetheless, they met the criteria of having a lot of white membership and still a minority religion. And so I thought, “let's just contact them and see if they're interested in getting on board with me.” And they're very much where, a few people were really helpful to me. And so the study began. So my PhD, officially is in the sociology of religion. I started off thinking that perhaps it would be a study of minority religions in Ireland. But as you can probably tell from the book, it also became a story about something else, a story about global Mormonism, the story about what does Mormonism look like when you take it outside of its U.S origins and put it somewhere totally different.

00;05;15 - 00;05;52

Nicholas Shrum

That's a fun origin story of walking underneath the sign. And the 1980s, church leadership would be just thrilled to know that those signs that say “visitors welcome” invited somebody into, not just into the pews, but really into the lived life of Irish Mormons and in contemporary Ireland. So tell us a little bit about the process, the methodology that you use in your research through ethnography, if you might.

00;05;53 - 00;07;49

Hazel O'Brien

Sure. Well, I'm very much coming from a qualitative background. Previously that's been the work that I've used. I've always loved in-depth interviews. I think they give you a chance to just get a depth of data and nuance to people's experiences. And this was my first time incorporating an ethnographic approach, which worked really, really well because what I found was that in interviews, people were really telling me one version of themselves, and I had the ability to be able to check that against what I was seeing day to day, engaging with them in church. I was able to do stuff like listen to their talks that they were giving on Sundays, or watch them interact with other members. I was able to get a sense of what the dynamics of the congregations were, which if I'd just been relying on interviews alone, I wouldn't have gotten. So the, I guess the approach of being so immersive with ethnographic methods, having that participant observation, attending church, going to events, seeing people in their congregations day to day just gave me a much more full picture of what things actually look like. I'm delighted that I did it. I think it was crucial to try to win the trust of members. Many of them had had quite negative experiences of what we might call outsiders. And how others viewed them and viewed their religion. And I think if I had just approached people for interviews, there would be the risk that perhaps somebody might think, “I don't know anything about this woman or where she comes from. I don't know what her motivations are”, and they would refuse me. But in the end, actually, many people were offering themselves as potential interviewees for me because they had sat beside me in church for the last 3 or 4 months, and they knew me, and they had an element of trust in what I was doing, and that I wasn't going to exploit them, and that I wanted to be able to tell their experiences as best I could, so that actually ended up being really wonderful. It was an approach that worked well. I think.

00;07;501 - 00;08;16

Nicholas Shrum

Well, I certainly think so. After having gone through the book, I'm surprised at the level of engagement and trust that these Mormons gave to you and were able to share some pretty personal things. Most of the book, if I'm not mistaken, is anonymized. So it's not real names. It's not even the real names of the town in the congregations. Correct?

00;08;17 - 00;09;41

Hazel O'Brien

Yeah, that's something that was really tricky, and is still imperfect because the population in Ireland is so few. And the latest numbers in the Irish census from 2022 would indicate that there is about 1100 people in the country who are self declaring themselves as members of the Church. Now, official charts statistics would say that there's about 4000, but in a way, I think the census statistics are much more reliable, because that might give us an indication of who's actually active, that they're self-identifying themselves in that way. So it's a really small community. And when you break that down at a congregational level, of course, it's even more few. So the issue of how to protect people's identities was difficult. One of the things that might be done more commonly in studies of this kind, for instance, would be to attach an appendix to the book where you might provide some sort of demographic breakdown. You know, how many white people did you have? What sort of jobs were there, who lived where? But I was trying to avoid providing that kind of profile in the book just to try to protect the identities of people a little bit more. It's not a perfect system because they are such a small community. But I did think that, perhaps for casual readers at least, it might provide some sense of anonymity. So, yeah, pseudonyms are used even for the congregations themselves, just as a way to provide a little bit of protection for communities, even post-Publication.

00;09;43 - 00;09;49

Nicholas Shrum

Can you tell us a little bit about those communities, these congregations, Appleby and Sweetwater?

00;09;50 - 00;11;59

Hazel O'Brien

Yeah, they're quite different from each other in many ways. Physically and in terms of their dynamics, culturally and socially. Appleby is a much more established, congregation. It's much, I guess,  it's calmer in its demeanor and in its outlook. Everybody there seems pretty settled. They've got a lot of long term families who are attending church for many years, even across multiple generations, and that gives them a certain stability, I think. So in terms of interpersonal dynamics, you don't tend to see an awful lot of disputes. The big issue for Appleby, I think, is that because they are so well established, they have had a campaign of sorts, to be given ward status. They're currently, designated as a branch and there have been accusations from the members of that congregation that the church is moving the goalposts with regards to what the criteria is that they have to achieve in order to be given ward status. So there's a little bit of resentment about that issue. And they don't have a purpose-built church building, which is something that they would love and something that they feel that they deserve, given that they're such a stable congregation. And then in Sweetwater, there are about 150km away, which in an Irish context is actually a fair distance, believe it or not. Sweetwater is quite different. It's a smaller congregation. There's much more interpersonal disputes. It's a much more ethnically and racially diverse congregation. And in fact, white Irish members are the minority group there. It is predominantly recent arrivals to Ireland who are making the membership of that congregation. And that's part of the reason for the interpersonal disputes. I think there are cultural challenges there. There are difficulties in creating a cohesive identity as a congregation for that particular group. Their status has changed more recently, and they're no longer in their original location. And that may well have changed the dynamics of the group. But certainly at the time that I was working with them, they were struggling a lot to get a sense of who they were as a cohesive, communal group. I guess you might say.

00;12;00 - 00;12;45

Nicholas Shrum

So you spoke a little bit about yourself as a researcher and taking on these positions as a researcher and specifically being seen probably initially as quite the outsider to these groups. But you also mentioned throughout the book that you were able to obtain a certain amount of insider status. So I’m wondering if you could speak about, first your positionality, in regards to these Irish Mormons, both as a researcher and then also, as a believer or a nonbeliever. I'm curious about how you were able to approach that, but then also how that was received, on the part of your interviewees and the people that you interacted with?

00;12;460 - 00;16;11

Hazel O'Brien

Yeah. Something that I discovered quite early on when I was researching the general demographic breakdown of the population of Mormons in Ireland, was that they have a pretty high educational attainment. Ireland as a whole has a pretty high educational attainment. I think Mormonism might actually be even above those Irish averages. So Mormons in Ireland are pretty well-educated, and I guess maybe I just didn't really fully think through what the ramifications of that would be for me as a researcher. What it meant, and I found when I got into the congregations was that many people have post-graduate qualifications, had done research themselves even in different fields. But it did give them, an understanding of what postgraduate research was. They understood research processes, and it meant that they were perhaps less distrustful of a researcher coming in. And I'm wondering what their motivations might be. So I think that kind of helped me develop a role as a researcher. Many people were already kind of familiar with what a researcher was or what a PhD student was. So that was really helpful. And then for me personally, I think probably the biggest thing that's shaped how I was received was the fact that I myself am not Mormon. I was baptized as Catholic, but I would identify myself as an atheist now. I haven't really had any religious background actively myself since I was a child. Going into fieldwork I did get the sense that perhaps this might be something that people wouldn't be best pleased about. I had a sense that, you know, Mormonism is a very active religion that requires a lot of its adherents. There's a huge amount of activity attached to it. And how would they deal with a researcher who had no religious affiliation, who didn't engage in any of that kind of religious work day to day. But in fact, I was really pleasantly surprised by just how well they accommodated that. And they were quite understanding about the fact that there were many aspects of Mormonism that I was quite ignorant about. And in fact, that was the beauty of it, because they saw their role as being the ones who could help me. And that was enormously helpful for me as a researcher, but also enormously helpful to generate some sort of commonality with people and rapport, because they I felt like they were on my side. And I think perhaps they felt like they were on my side. And that really helped to bond us to each other. I think I also probably benefited from the fact that I am white and I'm also Irish born. And so for white Irish members, particularly I found in Appleby, I think that probably smoothed my entry into the community somewhat. It gave me a sort of a common cultural background, that I was able to understand their stories and their circumstances and their struggles a little bit more. And then in Appleby, sometimes it worked the opposite way. Excuse me, I got the congregations mixed up the wrong way around. But in Sweetwater it worked almost the opposite way, because in Sweetwater, as the more diverse community where you had lots of nonwhite and non-Irish members, sometimes my status as a member of the majority group was a tricky thing. It almost created a distance, at least for some members, and that was just all part of the process trying to to manage this. But broadly, I have to say I was very well received and I was really delighted with just how much people tried to accommodate the fact that I was different from them. But I was open to understanding and open to listening to what they had to say.

00;16;11 - 00;16;55

Nicholas Shrum

Yeah, I was surprised, as I often am when I read ethnography, just how much the researcher’s identity really matters, and the various way that that intersects, with the identities of the people that they're researching. Just like it probably should matter for people that aren't doing ethnography, that are doing more traditional history work or various things in religious studies, that positionality really matters. And this reminds me, the reception that you're talking about, there's a part in the book where I'm trying to remember- where the Jehovah's Witnesses that were, they learned about you, and they're like, “yeah, why didn't you start researching us? Like we would have loved to have been?”

00;16;55 - 00;17;51

Hazel O'Brien

They were really offended. They were really like, wait a minute, they were just missionaries. They called to my door and they announce themselves. And I had said, “oh, I'm actually doing research in, minority relations at the moment.” And I tell them my little spiel, and they were really quite offended. They were like, “why didn't you approach us? We would have been in your study.” And I think the the guy who was doing most of the talking, was really kind of pushing for me to change my research design and to, at the very last minute, incorporate Jehovah Witnesses as possible participants. And I was trying to explain to him, I can't really do that at this stage. You know, it's a little too late in the game to do that. But it was interesting. Yeah, I think there's probably a desire amongst many members of minority religions in Ireland to just want to be heard. I think there are so many stereotypes about who they are. They're portrayed quite simplistically. And I think there's just a desire to see themselves made visible, perhaps. And that's what's driving a lot of that.

00;17;53 - 00;19;02

Nicholas Shrum

Well, that was a great anecdote, because, I mean, even though that was in the Jehovah Witness realm, I think it speaks to that place of minority religions in Ireland that there's this tension, almost this paradox of wanting to protect and to be a little bit, kind of want to hide your identity at times. You don't want to be too visible to the majority culture, but at the same time, you want to be heard and, you know, Mormonism is a proselytizing faith. And so it's, you know, there is an impulse to to share that and try to get other people to, if not to try to convert, but also just to be understood. So, very interesting tensions that you highlight. So getting into some of the specifics of your project and the conclusion you briefly reflect on how you were “exploring a country almost unrecognizable to that of your childhood.” So my question is, how has Ireland changed, over the last 3 to 4 decades or so that you describe in the first and second chapters, That really sets the stage for the research that you conducted among these Irish Mormons?

00;19;03 - 00;24;38

Hazel O'Brien

Yeah. I've been thinking about this idea, and I think there's probably maybe three main ways that we can see this or certainly that I see it in my own life. As I think back now, it's seen economically, socially, and probably religiously as well. And in the book, I try to give a sense to the reader who might not be familiar with the Irish context of what that might look like. From an economic perspective, for instance, Ireland at the time that I was born in the early 80s would have been a much more poor country than it is now and much less globally developed in terms of their economic structures, but also a country that was undergoing severe recession. And then if you fast forward to around about the time that I would have perhaps been doing that master's study in my early 20s, with Irish Catholics in Dublin, at that stage, Ireland was in the middle of what became known as the Celtic Tiger. It had become a very prosperous, wealthy country. It had globalized really very quickly in terms of its economy. And it was reaping the benefits of all of that. But then if you flash forward just another ten years to 2008, Ireland was experiencing the same global recession as everybody else had been. But in Ireland, perhaps because of how our economy had been set up, we had been enormously vulnerable to banking shocks. We experienced a very severe recession, bringing us back to perhaps an almost 1980s level of insecurity and poverty. And now in 2024, Ireland's economy is broadly recovered. There are still some really severe problems, particularly in terms of housing. But broadly, Ireland is relatively stable when it comes to its economy. But there has been this boom to bust sense to Irish economics for the last 30 or 40 years. And that's shaped much of how the country has developed socially. And then when you think about how Ireland has changed socially from the time of my childhood, it's just a much more liberal country now than it was back then. And it is partly because of the decline of the power of the Catholic Church, who were an enormously influential conservative force over Irish politics for many years. But it's not just that. I think it's also been driven by increased immigration, which has brought a diversity of viewpoints into Ireland. It's been driven by globalization, which has exposed Ireland to alternative worldviews. And there've been plenty of practical changes. And since the time I was a child, Ireland has introduced contraception, divorce, abortion, same sex marriage, and is now generally known as one of the more liberal countries, even within the EU. So definitely a complete change from the social perspective. And then from a religious perspective, then, of course, when you undergo these massive economic and social shifts, it's going to affect religion. And that's what we've seen. Also, mass immigration starting in around about the 1990s, had brought a plethora of world religions into Ireland, which had never really been seen in any great numbers before, as well as smaller religions or new religious movements. and those have had varying degrees of success. Those that are very heavily reliant on immigration inflows have done really well. And the likes of Hinduism, for instance, Islam, and others that are, more heavily associated with other dynamics, like Mormonism, for instance, haven't done as well. And the Catholic Church has undergone enormous changes since I was a child. I looked up the statistics just before coming on to you, just to double check the numbers. And in 1961, in the census, 95% of the population was self-identifying as Catholic, and in the most recent census in 2022, that's down to 69%. Now I guess in many countries, people might hear those statistics and think, “well, almost 70% of the country still self-identifies as Catholic.” I mean, that's still a pretty high figure. but it is a pretty significant drop in a pretty short space of time. Everybody, including the Catholic Church hierarchy in Ireland, is very clear that within that 69%, only a small proportion of those are actively religious, and many more are ticking the Catholic box on the census form because it's become a cultural identity for them. It's part of the Irish national identity. It shapes who they are as an Irish person in the world. And it's not that they have any active religious participation or any spiritual beliefs that underpin it and certainly they're not adhering to Catholic doctrine. And we've also seen an explosion in those who have no religion, people like myself, I have numbers for that as well. I think we are at about 14% of the population now, which makes those who have no religion the second largest grouping under that religion category on the census. I know it sounds a bit nonsensical to describe those as no religion under the religion grouping. But that is where the question falls. And if you see them as a coherent group, they number about 14%. So they have increased in number really hugely over the last 20 years and are continuing to grow. And all of that just makes Ireland look like a very different place to the place it was in the 1980s.

00;24;39 - 00;25;16

Nicholas Shrum

You mentioned that the social, economic, and religious landscape of Ireland has changed drastically, including that decline of the influence of the Irish Catholic Church. But you also mentioned that Ireland still retains quite a bit of religious identity compared to maybe Europe as a whole. Is there anything that you would like to add, maybe about Ireland's place within the European religious landscape that maybe it stands out a little bit, or does it follow broadly those trends that are seen in Europe?

00;25;16 - 00;27;21

Hazel O'Brien

Yeah. It's so interesting trying to offer hearted summary of the Irish religious landscape within the likes of a book like this, because there just is tension everywhere, constant contradiction and tension. On one hand, Ireland is becoming more secular. The power of the church is declining, those self-declaring as religious and Catholic, specifically, are declining. And yet, on the other hand, we can see that new religions are growing. We can see that there is an explosion in those who are identifying with what we might consider to be alternative spiritualities. So Ireland is generally considered a bit of an outlier in the wider European religious landscape. Europe is often pointed to as being one of the most secular regions in the world, and the data would probably broadly support that. And Ireland was definitely late to the secularization process. It's only really begun to clearly show itself in the data, really, from the 1990s, when in other European countries it would have been evident much earlier. And we do still have a pretty high level of self-identification with religions, as you can see from the data I just mentioned to you there. And that would be much higher than in many other European countries. There tends to be an interesting phenomenon with Ireland, where it more closely resembles some of the southern European states, and the likes of actually, Italy, Greece, for instance, where we see higher levels of religiosity, and Ireland does not often look very similar to its close neighbors, likes of the UK or France or Germany with regards to religion. So there's an interesting divide there, although we might consider Ireland to be more towards the North, culturally speaking and religiously speaking, it might be more similar to those countries in the South of the European region. So I think Ireland probably is in the middle of a secularization process. But it was late to start, and it’s much slower, and it'll be interesting to see how all of that continues to change how new religions or small religions are experienced because they're going to continue to exist, even in a more secular country.

00;27;22 - 00;28;32

Nicholas Shrum

Thanks for setting the background or the stage for the research that you conducted for these Irish Mormons. You also mentioned briefly that, even though Catholicism has declined in influence and self-identified affiliation, Catholicism continues to be a really important marker of Irishness. Probably not unfamiliar to how in the United States, immigrant churches such as, Greek Orthodox or various strains of Catholicism among Italian, Latino communities, that religion is seen as a marker of national identity. You argue in your book that “Irish Mormons are adopting a collective memory of Irishness and of Mormonism to create a sense of belonging for themselves in spite of their marginalized positions on the outskirts of both Irish and Mormon.” Can you spend a little bit of time discussing each of these aspects? And maybe we could start with this idea of collective Irish memory. What do you mean by that?

00;28;33 - 00;32;50

Hazel O'Brien

Yeah, collective Irish memory is a tricky thing because, of course, inevitably Irish people are diverse, not necessarily homogenous, increasingly so. But nonetheless, I think we can still identify some patterns. And I think to really understand those patterns, you need to understand Irish history. If you consider what happened across Ireland in the 19th and 20th centuries, you have the process whereby Ireland moves towards independence from the British, eventually achieving independence in 1922. And in the aftermath of that, the new Irish state very deliberately set about a policy of a sort of a cultural nationalism, whereby it decided that it needed to create a common Irish identity. It needed to start from scratch and make sure the population understood who they were and had a sense of loyalty and community to each other. How that was achieved was primarily through a celebration of the arts and through Irish culture. So there was a real focus on Irish language, a real focus on Irish art, but also there was a huge focus on Irish Catholicism because the Catholic Church was enormously influential socially and politically in the early 20th century in Ireland. And so they were very heavily influential over what this cultural nationalism looked like. And they ensured that it meant that as cultural nationalism progressed in the early 20th century, that the Irish national identity component involved a strong component of Catholicism, so that by the time you get to the mid 20th century, to be Irish was absolutely to be Catholic, you very much were seen as the outsider. If you were not Catholic. And you would struggle to really, truly claim an Irish identity. And a long standing religious minorities in Ireland from the 20th century would advocate for this too. For instance, for a long time one of the main religious minorities in Ireland in the 20th century would have been the Church of Ireland, which is related to Anglicanism and more heavily associated with the British. They have argued for a long time that there was just no space for an Irish Church of Ireland identity, across this time period, that they were made to feel as though they were not Irish. And so the collective Irish memory that develops across the 20th century and then into the 21st, becomes one that's very much rooted in having Catholicism as a component of Irishness. And that remains the case even though many people do not have any active religiosity, they're performing Catholicism in different ways. Scholars like Tom Inglis, for instance, have observed that there's a huge cultural component to modern Irish Catholicism and that it can serve as a way for people to ground themselves in a time of really rapid social change. That you declare yourself an Irish Catholic becomes a way to grasp onto something that's bigger than yourself. And that's really comforting if you feel as though life, society, and your country is changing and adapting really quickly. It can feel as though you have been uprooted. To identify with that collective memory serves as a way for you to ground yourself and to offer you something that you can transmit to the next generation. I can see why it's incredibly attractive. I think really ultimately, what I argue in the book is that traditions are key for the transmission of collective memory. And for me, increasingly, I'm starting to think of Irish Catholicism itself as a form of tradition, that it is a way for Irish people to be able to engage in something which the meaning of which is disputed, for one person to declare themselves a Catholic, it might be very much a religious aspect of their identities. For another person it might be mainly cultural. But no matter what the meaning is that they attach to that tradition, the important thing is that they are doing it. They are engaging with it. They are declaring it as part of themselves. And that ensures that it continues. And it also ensures that all religious minorities in Ireland are framing their own experiences through that lens. They have to engage with Irish Catholicism to truly be able to articulate who they are. Because Irish Catholicism sits at the heart of Irish collective memory.

00;32;50 - 00;33;05

Nicholas Shrum

Thank you for that. And then as it intersects, in your argument, you also talk about these Irish Mormons being on the outskirts of a collective Mormon identity. And what do you mean and how do you understand a mormon identity or a collective Mormon identity?

00;33;07 - 00;35;09

Hazel O'Brien

Yeah, well, this bit might be a little bit more familiar for your listeners, because just as I argue that you need to understand Irish history if you're going to understand Irish collective memory, I think you need to understand Mormon history if you're going to understand Mormon collective memory. A mormon collective memory perhaps might be a little bit more familiar for some of your listeners. Really, I'm talking about the development of Mormonism itself, its origins and the era of persecution, and just how much that came to shape what the early church looked like. If you think about the development of the church identity, or the Mormon identity more broadly, as being shaped within the shadow of being viewed as non-American for many years, and then ultimately by the mid 20th century, where Mormonism is viewed by US society as being quintessentially American, that there has been a trajectory from Mormonism too in the development of its history, just like Ireland and Irish Catholicism has developed. And I think that feeling of persecution, being the outsider and yet in more modern times, somehow being quintessentially the American religion, is imbued within Mormonism. It shapes who Mormons are. It shapes how they see themselves. But very crucially, and I think sometimes US Mormons underestimate this, it really shapes how non-Mormons outside the US view Mormons. I think often times US Mormons just imagine that when outsiders are looking in on them, that they're focusing on the Mormon aspect of their identities, whereas oftentimes it's also the Americanness of their identities that's viewed as equally as unique, equally as worthy of study, equally as much a curiosity, as their religious identities are. So I think, again, to understand Mormon collective memory, we have to think about how the church has developed, how the common Mormon identity has developed, and how that's being interacted with by people on the outside.

00;35;10 - 00;35;54

Nicholas Shrum

Thank you. And maybe to get a little bit of the aspects that you're talking about being on the outskirts of both Irishness and Mormonism you write in chapter four that “for many Irish Catholics, conceptions of Irishness are carried through the generations through family, and conversion to Mormonism can be interpreted as a rejection of Irish Irishness itself.” And so that's similar to or at least that's, I think, a pretty provocative line that you write here that by converting to Mormonism and it's, you know, understood as having brought in some American identity. Is that what you mean by it rejecting Irishness itself?

00;35;55 - 00;37;44

Hazel O'Brien

Yeah, definitely. I think it's really interesting how this manifests itself. To be honest, I think if you had a Mormon convert in Ireland, who married a fellow Irish Mormon, their families would probably still see as somewhat of a rejection of Irishness, even if they've married a fellow Irish person because they were still converting to Mormonism, they were still rejecting Catholicism. They were still doing something different and unusual and seen as foreign. Even if the the family that that convert ultimately goes on to create is a typically Irish born family, and continues to be so. But one of the things that I find in my research is that that often does not happen when people convert to Mormonism in Ireland, they often actually will settle down with a non-Irish convert. And that's really a matter of necessity, because if you look at the demographics of what the Irish Mormon population looks like, it is increasingly becoming non-Irish. It is people who have arrived into Ireland more recently. They call Ireland home and they work here, they live here, they're settling and raising families, but they're not necessarily born here. And I think that diversity of Irish Mormonism is actually adding to the perception amongst the majority society that Mormonism is somehow a foreign religion, because when they encounter a Mormon, chances are that that Mormon will be foreign. They'll either be a US missionary or they will be somebody who might recently have arrived from Ireland, from Southeast Asia, or from Africa. And that's almost confirming the perception that the majority society has that the religion is not Irish. And so if someone chooses to convert to it, the question is, “why are you doing that? That's not an Irish place to put yourself.”

00;37;46 - 00;38;26

Nicholas Shrum

One of the more telling anecdotes that you narrate in the book was a discussion that you had with an interviewee named David where he was talking about a sister that he knew that was going to get married, and was going to get married in an LDS temple. But in order to, and you can correct me if I'm not remembering this correctly, in order to kind of appease the family, opted to get married in the United States rather than in England. Can you talk about that just a little bit? Again, I think this is an interesting case of how national and religious identities just get kind of messy.

00;38;27 - 00;39;41

Hazel O'Brien

I really love that story because it does really illustrate the depth of the resentments that can exist across different nations. And it also really reminds us of the importance of history in terms of shaping our present circumstances and how we see the world. Yeah. You recall the anecdote correctly. She chose to get married in a temple in the US rather than to get married in the temple that was closest to her, which would be in England because her family were so anti-British that they would be more annoyed that she was getting married in England than they were that she was actually getting married to a Mormon. And so to have, a Mormon wedding, she thought, “well, the best way to appease the family will be to do it in the US. They'll be less irritated if I do it there than if I do it in England.” There was another similar sort of an anecdote from another interviewee of mine who told me that she cried in the car park on the day of her baptism because she just felt like her ancestors were turning in their grave that she was converting to Mormonism. So those sorts of complexities of national identity, religious identity, ethnic identity, they're all intermingled with each other in Ireland, as of course, they are everywhere. But to see them, laid out before me was really fascinating.

00;39;43 - 00;40;18

Nicholas Shrum

Another argument that you make in the book is about how Irish Mormons are adapting the faith, but also adapting, maybe even their national lived experience. And one of the ways that you describe this is how Irish Mormons insert or assert Irishness into Mormonism. You give a couple  examples of this, such as an individual making sure that he said prayers in Irish. And then also a really interesting experience with Halloween. Can you speak about that process as well?

00;40;20 - 00;44;35

Hazel O'Brien

Yeah. The the individual who made the point of saying prayers in Irish is an interesting one, because he was quite clear with me that he did this for political reasons, partly because he's a very committed Irish nationalist. And again, in keeping with a sort of an anti-British sentiment, he was seeing it in that vein, but he also was using  it politically within the church as well, because he's resentful about the fact that from an organizational perspective, Ireland falls under the Scotland/Ireland mission and Ireland is included with the UK as an organizational region of the church. And he argues that when the US is dealing with Ireland, it deals with Ireland through the UK and that it doesn't fully recognize Ireland as its own specific region, with its own cultural differences, and its own specificities. And so his saying his prayer in Irish was on one hand, a symbol of his nationalist leanings. But on the other hand, it very much was a point of criticism towards his own church and how they structure their organization, as he very much saw it as a political act. And then the reference to Halloween is an intriguing one. There actually is a story from Halloween, which I don't think I put in the book. I don’t think I did. So I think that the anecdote that you might be relating to might perhaps be in relation to the Saint Patrick's Day party, because I didn't mention Halloween as part of that. There was a party held in the Sweetwater branch, whilst I was there, and they regularly held parties. And in the book I do mention that they have Halloween parties, they have Saint Patrick's Day parties, that sort of stuff. But the event that I thought was intriguing was how they went about their Saint Patrick's Day celebrations. So Saint Patrick's Day is Ireland's national holiday, but it's also a religious feast day within Irish Catholicism and celebrates the Catholic saint, Saint Patrick. And within the Sweetwater Branch, they had this lovely party where everybody brought along lots of green, white and orange food, clothing, music, and it was organized as a wonderful celebration of Irishness, despite the fact that there were very few white Irish members in that congregation, most of the members at the party were in fact not Irish. And that led to some really interesting dynamics of the party itself, where they were doing things like, playing a bingo game, where nobody knew the answers because nobody really knew a lot of Irish cultural or social history. Or they were singing the Irish national anthem, which is sung through Irish, a language that nobody speaks. So for me, as an ethnographer, it was a really interesting event to observe. But what I thought was intriguing was that the main organizer for the event was a woman who I've called Suzanne, who was very much resentful about the fact that her branch had changed from being majority Irish to minority Irish in a relatively short space of time. And she felt that a lot of the disputes that were happening within her branch were being caused by the fact that there wasn't a lot of cultural cohesiveness, and that she thought that perhaps organizing the branch around an Irish identity might be a way to bring cohesiveness. And so she did a wonderful effort of hosting the party. But I thought it was really interesting that she incorporated in the bingo game reference to people like Saint Bridget, who, again, is another Catholic saint, outside of the Mormon tradition. And yet this was perfectly accepted at the party, and nobody questioned why they were at a Saint Patrick's Day party where Saint Bridget was being discussed within Mormon church grounds. Everybody just took it for what it was. It was part of Irish national identity. It was a celebratory day and they all really enjoyed it. And Halloween, I think, is another good example of that because Halloween has Irish origins, is very much associated with Celtic Celtic traditions, and rituals. And although within American Mormonism it's often seen as being a very American event, within Ireland it's seen as being a very Irish event. And so how Mormonism happens to bridge those two things and how it navigates it to offer some sort of a way for members to engage with each other socially, I think is really interesting.

00;44;35 - 00;45;32

Nicholas Shrum

Yeah. Thank you. That is the event. It was Saint Patrick's Day, not Halloween. So thank you for getting that straight for us. In the interest of time, and I want to be considerate of your time, one of the major throughlines in your book, and one of the major aspects that you investigate is the role that race plays, especially structures and manifestations of whiteness. You argue, about three fourths the way through the book, that “so much of this– meaning a church culture– is built upon the ideals of whiteness and intermingled with US exceptionalism, that we should not be surprised if ordinary Mormons outside of the United States experience this culture as a form of colonialism. So how does your work relate to the broader global non American Mormon experience? So maybe that one first, how does your work relate to the broader Mormon experience as it relates to race and whiteness?

00;45;33 - 00;48;07

Hazel O'Brien

Yeah. Well, it's a it's a really tricky one because on one hand, I have a lot of sympathy for white Irish members who say that they feel marginalized within their own church. They say that the church over-privileges the American experience, that its organization does not allow enough flexibility for cultural nuance to be delivered at a grassroots level, and that negatively impacts them as Irish people. And on the other hand, I think, “well, sure, you know, that might be true, but, you know, you're still a white guy at the end of the day, you're still benefiting from white privilege that's built into the heart of your church itself and the society that you're a part of in Ireland. So you're not, perhaps, as marginalized as you might imagine that you are.” And that perspective is sometimes accepted by members, and sometimes there's a little bit of pushback against that. But it does make my job of evaluating whiteness within the church and how Irish whiteness fits within global Mormonism really quite tricky, because I want to be able to argue that Irish Mormons are feeling as though they're cast aside or second class citizens within their own church, which is an articulation that participants in many other studies in many other countries, particularly in the global South, have already articulated. And yet, on the other hand, I feel as though when I make that argument that, you know, I'm trying to offer some sort of equivalence, which I'm not, because white Irish members still benefit from being white, being in Europe, benefiting from the preference that the church gives to Europe. And so it's really difficult to evaluate. But there's no doubt, I think, that there is this presumption of a sort of a white American hegemonic worldview that sits within the church. And it's intriguing to me that even white Irish members are often made uncomfortable by it. And many white, participants in my research specified to me that they find that the church's guidebooks or manuals were often too white, or that the examples that the church might offer on certain events are often insensitive to their fellow church members who perhaps are not white. So that, I think, helps to give us a sense that there is an awareness within Ireland that Irish Mormonism is becoming more diverse and that Irish Mormonism specifically, but also that global Mormonism more broadly, and the church within that, as a global organization, needs to do more to understand us and to allow for a greater expression of diverse identities, which they don't really feel as they are at the moment.

00;48;07 - 00;48;25

Nicholas Shrum

And Ireland is such an interesting case study for this as well. As you point out, the differences between Appleby and Sweetwater. Sweetwater, the racial-ethnic, diversity is much more diverse than Appleby is, correct?

00;48;26 - 00;49;28

Hazel O'Brien

Yeah. In Sweetwater, I think only about maybe a third, perhaps even less than that, would be Irish born. So most people are recent arrivals to Ireland here in the last, maybe 10 to 15 years or so. And they're dealing with all of that. They're dealing with life as a migrant. They're dealing with life as a non-Irish person. Oftentimes they aren't white and they're dealing with the struggles that are attached to that. And they're also dealing with being a member of a minority religion. So they have a lot of experiences that are placing them on the outside of Irish society, and they're grappling with all of that. And I think that might be part of the problem that was present and certainly at the time of my fieldwork, it may well have changed since in Sweetwater, which was that there were a lot of interpersonal disputes, and perhaps those who were white Irish weren't really appreciative of just how complicated the experiences of those who weren't Irish or weren’t white were experiencing within their branch.

00;49;29 - 00;49;59

Nicholas Shrum

Relatedly, in your conclusion, it moves a little bit away from the descriptive to maybe a little bit towards the prescriptive, as seeing that there are roadblocks within Mormonism. And I'm curious what you would identify as those roadblocks, as you describe through the book. And maybe what do you think the church maybe should do to create a more universal church culture?

00;49;59 - 00;53;05

Hazel O'Brien

Yeah. I think there are some really practical measures that can be taken. You know, people when they're asked these kinds of questions will often say, quite rightly, that the church’s system of correlation was too rigid, that it was overly formulaic, that it doesn't necessarily work when you try to apply it to other worldviews and other cultural systems. But I think even within that there are practical measures that could be taken. One of the things that was mentioned to me by multiple interviewees, both missionaries themselves and those who had been proselytized to by missionaries, was that missionaries to Ireland had almost no knowledge of Ireland and they would have a very rudimentary knowledge of the geographical and cultural nuances of Ireland. They might have an understanding of the difference between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. My research only took place in the Republic of Ireland. But beyond that they would have very little cultural knowledge. And as such, of course, inevitably there was sometimes a lack of cultural sensitivity about the political and social history on the island of Ireland that made potential members and members themselves really uneasy. And so I think a really quick, simple thing that the church could do would be to offer a much more robust training and education for missionaries before they go on a mission to ensure that it isn't just a rudimentary education about the region that they're heading into, but a really stringent education that moves beyond just, you know, what is the currency, what is the language, what are the basics of the history there, but moves into some in-depth cultural competency that might allow them to actually generate a better rapport with members and to avoid actually inadvertently offending members. And that would be something that the church could implement, I think, pretty easily. But it's, I think, broader than just the missionary efforts. I think there's also perhaps a need for US membership more broadly to have a better recognition of what existing within a global church really means. You know, we often hear about the often-cited statistic that there are more Mormons outside of the US and there are within it, but I'm not sure that US Mormons really often reflect on what that means, that that means that you are the minority. You are the one who should be adapting itself to everybody else who's in the majority. And I'm not sure that that's really happening for some US Mormons. And I think from that more global perspective that would rebalance it, that would offer a rebalancing or a distribution of power towards countries outside of the US that might allow them to have a greater influence over what the curriculum looks like, over what manuals look like, over the decision making with regards to who speaks and what they speak about at General Conference. I think there are a whole host of things where countries outside the US could have a much larger role in decision making in the church from an organizational perspective, if US Mormons were willing to really campaign for that and to push that forward.

00;53;07 - 00;53;55

Nicholas Shrum

Thank you so much for that. I'm going to evoke a little bit of podcast host privilege here and ask, if I may, a couple of more personal interest questions. When it comes to the centrality of America or the American continents or the United States to Mormon doctrine, I'm curious how that popped up in your field research, such as the geography of the Book of Mormon being understood as being in the Americas or the concept of the New Jerusalem being in the middle of the United States and Missouri. I'm curious how Irish members maybe navigated those or negotiated those, or if they just kind of are not really an issue. I'm curious about that.

00;53;56 - 00;56;40

Hazel O'Brien

Yeah, it's really intriguing to me how they navigate that as well. On one hand, I do recall one interviewee saying to me something along the lines of, “you know, Irish Catholics are not expected to act Italian just because the head of the Catholic Church is in Rome.” Which was a very blunt but useful way of trying to get across to me what he was trying to say. And I thought that was a useful way of thinking about the predominance of the US in Mormon doctrine. And yet, on the other hand, I think that because there is that history there, that it is so central to the story of the church, and to Mormonism and because it's celebrated culturally so strongly within the church, I think it also leads to an idealization of the US, more generally. I had a very funny anecdote– two anecdotes, actually, from Suzanne, who had told me, first of all, that she used to have a friend who suddenly, out of nowhere, developed an American accent. And he was Irish born. He had had an Irish accent up until that point. And when she asked him, “why are you speaking with an American accent?” he said, “oh, well, I'm just hanging around with the missionaries a lot.” And she said, “well, I'm hanging around with the missionaries a lot, and I don't have an American accent.” Like, what's going on here? And she said he really wanted to move to the U.S. he just had this very idealized idea of what the United States was, and she felt as though the church was almost exacerbating this to its own valorization of U.S. culture. But then she herself went to Utah, and it was her first time in the US., and she said that was a really interesting experience, because on one hand, she said it felt a little bit like going to the Holy Land, you know, it felt as though she was in a really special and sacred place. And that was really important to her. She understood the doctrine, she understood the history, and it was a really special thing for her to do. And yet, on the other hand, she said she got quite a shock because she realized when she was in the United States that it wasn't, as she put it, “all white picket fences.” She said, you know, there were poor people there, or there were people who had tattoos there, and all of a sudden she's confronted with the everyday reality of life in the US, which was, she said, very different to the idealized portrayal that she had been led to believe that the US would be like within the church. So I think her experiences are interesting. She had, even though she was criticizing her friend for having an ideal version of what the United States was like, she herself appears to have an idealized interpretation of what the US was like, and she got quite the culture shock when she arrived to realize that although it has this sacred component for her, at the same time, it's just another place.

00;56;40 - 00;57;23

Nicholas Shrum

Well, thank you so much, Dr. O'Brien, for coming on the podcast to discuss your book, Irish Mormons. I just think that this is a wonderful book that is able to bring up really important topics related to national, ethnic, religious identity, the way that historical narrative and memory functions across those various identities, and absolutely recommend that people go and get a copy, being sold through University of Illinois Press. Again, it was published last year in 2023. And before, we end, I just would love for you to tell the listeners what kind of projects or things that you working on now.

00;57;25 - 00;58;49

Hazel O'Brien

Yeah, well, I'm in an exciting time period at the moment because I've really spent some time trying to think, “where would I want to go next?” There are plenty of routes within global Mormonism that are really intriguing to me as future points of research. But there are also some really interesting developments in Irish religion at the moment that I'm intrigued by. So I'm probably going to pivot back to that for a little bit. I’m formulating a research design at the moment for a new study that I would like to be able to investigate what modern chaplaincy looks like on Irish university campuses. There is an enormous amount of change happening in Irish universities at the moment. Irish universities are hugely being influenced by drives towards internationalization, recruiting more international students. That's adding more religious, ethnic, and racial diversity to Irish campuses. And religious chaplains are increasingly dealing with really rapid social changes on campus life as a result of all of that. So I've spoken to a few chaplains who have really set a fire under me, I suppose, in terms of showing me that this work is important, that we know very little about what they do, how they do it, who they serve, and how they should or could be supported. So I'd love to be able to finalize that research design, to be able to investigate those issues a little more.

00;58;49 - 00;59;24

Nicholas Shrum

That's exciting. We'll look forward to seeing some of that work. But thank you so much for your contribution to Mormon studies. One of the goals of this podcast is to show how work in Mormon studies can relate to or speak to the broader field of religious studies, which would include the sociology of religion. And I think that this is a great case study of why Mormonism can be very productive for understanding the way that religion functions in various societies across the world. So thank you so much for doing that.

00;59;24 - 00;59;28

Hazel O'Brien

Thank you so much for having me. That was exactly what I wanted to achieve. So that's great to hear.

00;59;31 - 00;59;47

Nicholas Shrum

I hope you enjoyed this episode of Scholars and Saints. Please be sure to come back to hear more conversations soon. A special thank you to Harrison Stewart for production-editing, and to Ben Howington for providing music for this episode. To hear more, visit mormonguitar.com. Thank you for listening.