SOUPERISM was a phenomenon of the Irish Potato Famine. Protestant Bible societies set up schools in which starving children were fed, on the condition of receiving Protestant based religious instruction at the same time. Its practitioners were reviled by the Catholic families who had to choose between their faith and starvation. People who converted for food were known as soupers, a derogatory epithet that continued to be applied and featured in the press well into the 1870s. In the words of their peers: they "took the soup".
One example of souperism was the Reverend Edward Nagle, who instituted 34 schools where religious instruction and meals were provided. However, souperism was rarely that simple, and not all non-Catholics made being subject to proselytisation a condition of food aid. Several Anglicans, including the Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, Richard Whately, decried the practice; many Anglicans set up soup kitchens that did no proselytising; and the Quakers, whose soup kitchens were concerned solely with charitable work, were never associated with the practice (which causes them to be held in high regard in Ireland even today, with many Irish remembering the Quakers with the remark "They fed us in the famine.").
Soupers were frequently ostracised by their own community, and were strongly denounced from the pulpit by the Catholic priesthood. On occasion, soupers had to be protected by British soldiers from other Catholics.