News Update

There are certain conversations that are difficult to have in America because they sound too strange until they happen somewhere else first. Then there is Northern Ireland.

When I sat down with Jim Dowson, a Northern Irish political activist, media strategist, and ordained Calvinist minister, I expected a conversation about immigration, censorship, and the increasingly strange political weather blowing across the U.K. and Ireland. I got all of that. What I did not expect was to come away thinking that the most important thing happening in Northern Ireland may have very little to do with the old fight between Catholics and Protestants.

Something else is happening. The old enemies from “the troubles” are beginning to recognize that they may have a larger enemy in common. That matters in America.

It matters even more now that President Donald Trump has publicly said he would like to see a united Ireland. The remark, made during his recent visit to Dublin, immediately became an international headline. The BBC noted that former Trump envoy Mick Mulvaney and Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle both said the comment did not represent a change in American foreign policy or Washington’s commitment to the Good Friday Agreement. Trump may have been answering a question in his characteristically unscripted fashion, but the remark landed on an island where questions of identity, sovereignty and demographics are already being argued with increasing intensity.

And that is precisely why the conversation with Dowson was so interesting.

I am Irish Catholic enough to know that suggesting Catholics and Protestants should simply put centuries of grievances behind them is a dangerous way to begin an evening. My own family history is tangled up in that old world, as is Dowson’s. Yet somewhere between the Orange and the Green, something has changed. Dowson, a Protestant originally from Scotland, but living in Northern Ireland, told me he now spends much of his time working alongside Irish Catholics who share his concerns about immigration, cultural preservation, and the future of the West. The old rivalry, he argued, is becoming less important than the question of whether there will be a recognizable Western civilization left to argue about.

You heard that right, A Scottish born Calvinist minister is working with the Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland.

That is a remarkable development. For generations, people on that island were taught to see one another as the problem. Now, at least among some people, the argument is that the problem has changed. Dowson sees mass immigration, collapsing birth rates, secularization and what he regards as political censorship as parts of the same larger transformation. Whether one agrees with every conclusion he reaches is almost beside the point. The underlying question is unavoidable: What happens to a civilization when it loses confidence in its own right to exist? (RELATED: The New IRA, Irish Migrants, and the Breakdown of Social Compacts)

That question is not uniquely Irish. It is British. It is European. And increasingly, it is American.

Dowson’s argument is blunt. Western societies have simultaneously become less willing to have children, less willing to defend their inherited religious traditions, and more willing to import enormous populations from societies with very different demographic and cultural trajectories. At some point, mathematics becomes politics.

That is the part Americans should understand. Immigration is usually debated as a question of borders, labor markets, asylum policy, or citizenship. Those are important questions. But there is another question underneath all of them: What kind of country do you expect to have in 50 years? (RELATED: One Way or Another: The Insanely Easy Choice Facing America on Immigration)

That question becomes particularly uncomfortable when fertility rates collapse. A country cannot indefinitely compensate for demographic decline simply by importing people. Nor can governments manufacture a shared culture through legislation. A nation is more than a labor market. It is a collection of memories, customs, loyalties, institutions, religious traditions, families and stories that are passed from one generation to the next.

If the transmission stops, something eventually takes its place. This is where Dowson’s religious argument becomes more interesting than his political one. He believes the demographic crisis is ultimately a crisis of faith. During our conversation, he repeatedly returned to the family, children, church, and the idea that young men are beginning to search for something deeper than the consumer culture and digital isolation that have defined so much of modern life. (RELATED: The West Is a Superior Civilization (And I Don’t Care If That Offends You))

That phenomenon deserves considerably more attention than it receives. There are young men going back to church. Some are rediscovering traditional Catholicism. Others are finding Orthodox Christianity, Calvinism, or older Protestant traditions. They are looking for discipline, community, marriage, children and meaning. They are beginning to ask questions that the smartphone or AI cannot answer.

The problem, as Dowson sees it, is that Western institutions have spent decades teaching people to regard those things as burdens rather than blessings. You can disagree with his diagnosis. But you cannot easily dismiss the symptoms.

And this is where Northern Ireland offers America an unexpected lesson. The old sectarian divisions were never erased by pretending they did not exist. They were managed, negotiated, and eventually subordinated to a larger political settlement. Now a different generation is asking whether those old divisions still make sense when the cultural landscape itself is changing.

That does not mean Catholics and Protestants suddenly agree about everything. Of course they do not. They are Irish after all. But perhaps that is the point. You do not have to agree with someone about everything to realize you have something worth defending together.

That principle extends beyond Ireland. Conservatives in America routinely fight among themselves over religion, immigration, nationalism, economics and foreign policy. Europeans fight the same fights in slightly different accents. Meanwhile, the institutions that once transmitted Western culture have weakened: churches empty, families fracture, birth rates fall, and the definition of citizenship becomes increasingly detached from any meaningful concept of national belonging.

Then comes the other half of the equation: speech.

Dowson told me that police had questioned him over flags displayed at his property. He described a British system increasingly obsessed with what authorities classify as offensive or hateful speech, and he contrasted that experience with America, where even our increasingly aggressive censorship battles still leave considerably more room for people to say outrageous things without the police showing up at their door. His own social-media operation had previously been shut down after British political pressure, something he attributes to his willingness to say things the establishment considered unacceptable.

This is where Dangerous Laughter comes in. Humor is not merely entertainment. Humor is one of the oldest ways human beings test authority. You can tell a joke about the king because the joke asks the question the court does not want asked: What happens if we stop being afraid of him?

That is why free speech matters even when the speech is ugly, obnoxious, or wrong. Once people become afraid to speak, they stop arguing in public and start whispering in private. And once people start whispering in private, politics gets dangerous.

The Irish have historically been very good at refusing to whisper. That may be why I enjoyed this conversation so much. Dowson has a particular Northern Irish combination of religious conviction, historical memory, belligerence and humor. He is perfectly comfortable discussing theology one minute and telling me that the Irish are going to wake up and terrify Europe the next.

I laughed. But I also listened. Because beneath all the bluster is a serious question that Americans would be foolish to ignore.

What happens when people who spent centuries fighting each other finally look around and realize that the argument has changed?

Trump’s comments about Irish unity may or may not amount to anything politically. The BBC is right to note that there has been no change in American policy toward Northern Ireland. But the broader cultural question is not going away.

Northern Ireland may be showing us something.

A civilization does not survive merely because its borders remain on a map. It survives because its people still believe the civilization is worth inheriting.

That means having children. It means remembering history. It means maintaining faith. It means building families. It means defending the right to speak, joke, worship, and argue. And sometimes, perhaps, it means putting aside an old grievance long enough to recognize the person standing beside you.

The Irish and the Protestants have spent a very long time learning that lesson. America may want to start listening.

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A.J. Rice is host of the Dangerous Laughter podcast, and author of the new #1 political satire bestseller, The Curse of the Bearded Lady: How the Trans Mafia Whacked American Sanity. He serves as President & CEO of Publius PR, Editor-in-Chief of The Publius National Post.