Social class and Christianity: Imagining sovereignty and Scottish independence

Abstract

On 18 September 2014, the Scots faced the choice of voting in favour of creating a sovereign Scottish state of their own or choosing to remain in a political union with England, and in light of the 2011 census where 54 per cent of the Scottish population defined themselves as Christians, how Christians voted in the Referendum was decisive, so that an empirical inquiry into whether Scottish Christians have a preferential constitutional form for their nation (Schmitt 1996, 2005) is of some significance. As a sociologist wishing to engage with the ‘signs of the times’ I wanted to explore this question, and in March and April 2013 I conducted sixteen in-depth semi-structured interviews with members of the Catholic Church and the Church of Scotland in the Fife village of Cardenden, taking the Independence Referendum as an opportunity to inquire into a series of questions:What, if any, are the alignments between...