Although issues of faith and doctrine have played a central role in Scotland’s turbulent history, Scottish society today is increasingly secular in character - bar the customary round of christenings, weddings and funerals - and relatively little troubled by religious conflict. Of the main churches, the established Church of Scotland is the largest. Presbyterian in structure, it is governed by a hierarchical system of church courts, from local kirk sessions, which operate at a congregational level, up to the annual General Assembly in Edinburgh, where clergy and lay representatives gather to debate key issues concerning church and society. Historically more progressive than the Church of England (women, for instance, were being ordained without fuss as ministers in Scotland decades before the C of E’s wranglings over the matter during the 1990s), the Church of Scotland has a long tradition of active involvement in social welfare and social justice work.

The Roman Catholic Church is another major presence, partly thanks to large-scale waves of Irish immigration in previous centuries, and is organised into two archdioceses – Glasgow and St Andrews – and six dioceses. The biggest influx from Ireland, during the 19th century, together with the largely Unionist sympathies of Protestant Scots in regard to the Irish independence struggle, once more exposed the vein of anti-Catholicism in Scotland dating back to the Reformation, which persists today in pockets of sectarian hostility, mainly in Glasgow and its environs.

There’s certainly no love lost between Catholicism and the Free Church of Scotland, a more austerely hard-line form of Presbyterianism which split from the Church of Scotland following the Disruption of 1843. Its shrinking strongholds today are in the Western Isles, notably Lewis, where it has sustained a famously successful defence of Sabbatarianism. The Scottish Episcopal Church is also significant, with other Christian denominations including Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, and Unitarians.

Other world faiths, as practised by different ethnic communities, are increasingly represented in Scotland, notably Islam, Judaism and Buddhism.