Hands Off My Heritage, Hippie!

There's a good piece in the UK Tablet debunking (at least partially) some of today's commonly held beliefs about Celts, Celtic culture and Celtic Christianity. Worth a read, I'd say.

Money graphs:

All one can say with certainty is that in the nineteenth century, before the non-English-speaking cultures of Britain and Ireland crumbled, the people of those lands tended with a certain uniformity to opt for the most doctrinally rigid, most austere and sexually unliberated brand of Christianity that was available.

What traditional Irish Catholicism, the Calvinism of the Highlands and the Calvinist Methodism of Wales shared, at least until recently, was a set of values that would have most modern Celtic revivalists shuddering, namely a keen interest in theological nitpicking, spiritual severity, and a fairly hard and unforgiving attitude towards the flesh.

Link via Open Book.