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Evangelical “Others” in Ulster, 1859–1912: Social Profile, Unionist Politics, and “Fundamentalism”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2022

Andrew R. Holmes  and
Stuart Mathieson
Andrew R. Holmes*
Affiliation:
School of History Anthropology, Philosophy, and Politics, Queen's University of Belfast, Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom
Stuart Mathieson
Affiliation:
School of History and Geography, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland
*
*Corresponding author. Email: a.holmes@qup.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article considers the existence of a distinctive form of fundamentalism in the northern-Irish province of Ulster. It does so by examining the Protestant minorities that grew significantly in the decades after the Ulster revival of 1859. These evangelical others are important because their members were more likely to have fundamentalist tendencies than those who belonged to the main Protestant churches. The existing scholarship on fundamentalism in Northern Ireland focuses on Ian Paisley (1926–2014), who was a life-long adversary of Irish republican separatism and a self-identified fundamentalist. Yet, the focus on Paisley draws attention away from the potential origin of fundamentalism in the early twentieth century that is associated with religious revival in the early 1920s and the heresy trial of a “modernist” Presbyterian professor in 1927. George Marsden's classic study defined fundamentalism as an American phenomenon, yet, with Paisley and developments in the 1920s in mind, he noted that “Ulster appears to be an exception.”1 To what extent was that true? Was there a constituency of potential fundamentalists in the north of Ireland in the early twentieth century? If there was, did the social and political circumstances of the region and period produce a distinctive Ulster variety of fundamentalism?

Keywords

EvangelicalismFundamentalismUlster1911 CensusUlster Covenant
Type
Articles
Information
Church History , Volume 90 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 847 - 872
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Society of Church History

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Footnotes

The authors gratefully acknowledge that the research for this article was funded by a Research Project Grant from the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2018-062). They also thank Professor David Livingstone, the anonymous readers, and the editors for their comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this article.

1

George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 320n1.

References

2 The standard study remains Bruce, Steve, Paisley: Religion and Politics in Northern Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Paisley's American links, see Jordan, Richard L., The Second Coming of Paisley: Militant Fundamentalism and Ulster Politics (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

3 Holmes, Andrew R., The Irish Presbyterian Mind: Conservative Theology, Evangelical Experience, and Modern Criticism, 1830–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), ch. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 320n1.

5 Census of Ireland, 1911: General Report, with Tables and Appendix (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1913), xlviii.

6 Jackson, Alvin, Ireland 1798–1998: War, Peace and Beyond, 2nd ed. (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 212–41Google Scholar; and Parkinson, Alan F., Friends in High Places: Ulster's Resistance to Irish Home Rule, 1912–14 (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 2012)Google Scholar.

7 Hempton, David and Hill, Myrtle, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society, 1740–1890 (London: Routledge, 1992), 161–187Google Scholar; Alan Megahey, “‘God Will Defend the Right’: The Protestant Churches and Opposition to Home Rule,” in Defenders of the Union: A Survey of British and Irish Unionism since 1801, ed. D. George Boyce and Alan O'Day (London: Routledge, 2001), 159–175; and Andrew Scholes, The Church of Ireland and the Third Home Rule Bill (Dublin: Irish Academic, 2010).

8 “Census of Ireland 1901/1911 and Census Fragments and Substitutes, 1821–51,” The National Archives of Ireland, http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie; and “Ulster Covenant Search,” Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, https://apps.proni.gov.uk/ulstercovenant/Search.aspx.

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10 These reasons are discussed in more detail in Fred Boal, John A. Campbell, and David N. Livingstone, “The Protestant Mosaic: A Majority of Minorities,” in The Northern Ireland Question: Myth and Reality, ed. Patrick J. Roche and Brian Barton, 2nd ed. (Tonbridge: Wordzworth, 2013), 148–155.

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12 For example, Boal, Campbell, and Livingstone, “The Protestant Mosaic”; Claire Mitchell and Gladys Ganiel, Evangelical Journeys: Choice and Change in a Northern Ireland Religious Subculture (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2011); Mitchell, Claire and Tilley, James, “Disaggregating Conservative Protestant Groups in Northern Ireland: Overlapping Categories and the Importance of a Born-Again Self-Identification,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47, no. 4 (December 2008): 738–752CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mitchel, Patrick, Evangelicalism and National Identity in Ulster, 1921–1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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15 The classic study remains Ward, William R., The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Noll, Mark A., The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys (Leicester: I.V.P., 2004)Google Scholar; and Hutchinson, Mark and Wolffe, John, A Short History of Global Evangelicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 25–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 David Hempton, “Noisy Methodists and Pious Protestants: Evangelical Revival and Religious Minorities in Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” in Amazing Grace: Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States, ed. George A. Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 1993), 63.

17 Hempton, “Noisy Methodists,” 63–64, 66.

18 Andrew R. Holmes, The Shaping of Ulster Presbyterian Belief and Practice, 1770–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

19 Census of Ireland, 1871, part 3, General Report, with Illustrative Maps and Diagrams, Summary Tables, and Appendix (Dublin: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1876), 105.

20 Hempton and Hill, Evangelical Protestantism, 145–60; Andrew R. Holmes, “The Ulster Revival of 1859: Causes, Controversies and Consequences,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 63, no. 3 (July 2012): 488–515; and Janice Holmes, “Transformation, Aberration or Consolidation? Explaining the Ulster Revival of 1859,” in Explaining Change in Cultural History, ed. Niall Ó Ciosáin (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005): 120–139.

21 Nicola Morris, “Predicting a ‘Bright and Prosperous Future’: Irish Methodist Membership (1855–1915),” Wesley and Methodist Studies 2 (2010): 108, 109.

22 Morris, “Predicting a ‘Bright and Prosperous Future,’” 113.

23 The discussion of Reformed Presbyterians is based upon Thomas C. Donachie, Irish Covenanters: Politics and Society in the 19th Century (Belfast: self-pub., 2016); and Ian R. McBride, Scripture Politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 62–83.

24 Daniel Ritchie, “The 1859 Revival and its Enemies: Opposition to Religious Revivalism within Ulster Presbyterianism,” Irish Historical Studies 40, no. 157 (May 2016): 66–91.

25 Donachie, Irish Covenanters, 100–124.

26 Malcolm Coles, I Will Build My Church: The Story of the Congregational Union of Ireland, Written to Mark the Terjubilee, 1829–1979 (s.l.: s.p., 1979); James M. Henry, “An Assessment of the Social, Religious, and Political Aspects of Congregationalism in Ireland in the Nineteenth Century” (PhD diss., Queen's University, Belfast, 1965); David P. Kingdon, Baptist Evangelism in 19th Century Ireland (Belfast: Baptist Union of Ireland, 1965); and Joshua Thompson, “Baptists in Ireland, 1792–1922: A Dimension of Protestant Dissent” (DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 1988).

27 Henry, “Congregationalism in Ireland,” 220–230; and Joshua Thompson, “Covenants and Constitutions in Irish Baptist Churches,” Irish Baptist Historical Society Journal 22 (1989–1990): 5–13.

28 Kingdon, Baptist Evangelism, 19.

29 Coles, I Will Build My Church, 26–28.

30 Joshua Thompson, Century of Grace: The Baptist Union of Ireland; A Short History, 1895–1995 (Belfast: Baptist Union of Ireland, 1995).

31 Henry, “Congregationalism in Ireland,” 270–274.

32 Coles, I Will Build My Church, 15.

33 “Coleraine Baptist Church, 1795–2004,” Irish Baptist Historical Society Journal, n.s., 11 (2003–2004): 10–12.

34 Joshua Thompson, “Irish Baptists and the 1859 Revival,” Irish Baptist Historical Society Journal 17 (1984–1985): 8–10, quotation on 9.

35 Henry D. Gribbon, “Irish Baptists in the Nineteenth Century: Economic and Social Background,” Irish Baptist Historical Society Journal 16 (1983–1984): 10–12.

36 Neil T. R. Dickson, “‘The Church Itself is God's Clergy’: The Principles and Practices of the Brethren,” in The Rise of the Laity in Evangelical Protestantism, ed. Deryck W. Lovegrove (London: Routledge, 2002), 217–235; and Tim Grass, Gathering to His Name: The Story of Open Brethren in Britain and Ireland (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2006).

37 David W. Bebbington, “The Place of the Brethren Movement in International Evangelicalism,” in The Growth of the Brethren Movement: National and International Experiences; Essays in Honour of Harold H. Rawdon, ed. Neil T. R. Dickson and Tim Grass (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2006), 260, 257.

38 Donald H. Akenson, Discovering the End of Time: Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O'Connell (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Press, 2015); and Donald H. Akenson, Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North-American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

39 Neil T. R. Dickson, Brethren in Scotland 1838–2000: A Social Study of an Evangelical Movement (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2003), 310.

40 Victor Maxwell, Belfast's Halls of Faith and Fame (Belfast: Ambassador, 1999).

41 Grass, Gathering to His Name, 115–146.

42 Holmes, Irish Presbyterian Mind, 66–70.

43 David W. Bebbington, Victorian Religious Revivals: Culture and Piety in Local and Global Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 13–15.

44 Andrew R. Holmes and Stuart Mathieson, “Dwight L. Moody in Ulster: Evangelical Unity, Denominational Identity, and the Fundamentalist Impulse,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 72, no. 4 (October 2021), 800–821.

45 Hutchinson and Wolffe, Short History, 124–130, 143–145.

46 John T. Carson, The River of God is Full: Portstewart Convention Through Seventy Five Years 1914–1988 (Belfast: Committee of the Portstewart Convention, [1988]).

47 T. Rennie Warburton, “The Faith Mission: A Study in Interdenominationalism,” in A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain, vol. 2, ed. David Martin (London: SCM, 1969), 75–102.

48 Gráinne M. Blair, “New Battlegrounds: The Development of the Salvation Army in Ireland in the Nineteenth Century,” in Irish Women's History, ed. Alan Hayes and Diane Urquhart (Dublin: Irish Academic, 2004), 88–102; and Janice Holmes, “Gender, Public Disorder, and the Salvation Army in Ireland, 1880-82,” in Religious Women and Their History: Breaking the Silence, ed. Rosemary Raughter (Dublin: Irish Academic, 2005), 63–81.

49 Ernest C. Brown, By Honour and Dishonour: The Story of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (Belfast: Evangelical Presbyterian Church, 2016), 95–104, 108–109; and Holmes, Irish Presbyterian Mind, 224.

50 Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 38–39. See also Michael S. Hamilton, “The Interdenominational Evangelicalism of D. L. Moody and the Problem of Fundamentalism,” in American Evangelicalism: George Marsden and the State of American Religious History, ed. Darren Dochuk, Thomas S. Kidd, and Kurt W. Peterson (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017): 230–280.

51 Margaret Bendroth, “Fundamentalism,” in The Cambridge History of Religions in America, vol. 2, ed. Stephen J. Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 569–594; and David H. Watt, “Fundamentalists of the 1920s and 1930s,” in Fundamentalism: Perspectives on a Contested History, ed. Simon A. Wood and David H. Watt (Columbia: University South Carolina Press, 2014), 18–35.

52 Kathryn Lofton, “Commonly Modern: Rethinking the Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversies,” Church History 83, no. 1 (March 2014): 140.

53 Bendroth, “Fundamentalism,” 577–578, 582–583.

54 Steve Bruce, “Fundamentalism, Ethnicity, and Enclave,” in Fundamentalism and the State: Remaking Politics, Economies, and Militancy, The Fundamentalism Project, 5, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 50–67.

55 Boal, Campbell, and Livingstone, “The Protestant Mosaic,” 159, 166.

56 Bruce, Paisley, 252n6.

57 Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender: 1875 to the Present (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 7.

58 Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 20–4.

59 Based on the figures given in Census of Ireland, 1911: Area, Houses, and Population; Also the Ages, Civil or Conjugal Condition, Occupations, Birthplaces, Religion, and Education of the People; Province of Ulster; Summary Tables (Dublin: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1912), 37.

60 Morris, “Predicting a “Bright and Prosperous Future,” 107–108, 113.

61 Census of Ireland, 1911: Province of Ulster, 11.

62 Census of Ireland, 1911: Province of Ulster, 11–28.

63 Mark Radford, The Policing of Belfast 1870–1914 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 22.

64 Timothy Alborn, “Senses of Belonging: The Politics of Working-Class Insurance in Britain, 1880–1914,” Journal of Modern History 73, no. 3 (September 2001): 581.

65 Morris, “Predicting a ‘Bright and Prosperous Future,’” 113.

66 Census of Ireland, 1911: Province of Ulster, 47.

67 Liam Kennedy, Lucia Pozzi, and Matteo Manfredini, “Edwardian Belfast: Marriage, Fertility, and Religion in 1911,” in Belfast: The Emerging City, 1850–1914, ed. Olwen Purdue (Dublin: Irish Academic, 2013), 190.

68 Hempton and Hill, Evangelical Protestantism, 55–61, 95–98; and Holmes, Shaping, 266–269.

69 Patrick Buckland, ed., Irish Unionism 1885–1923: A Documentary History (Belfast: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1973), 224.

70 David Fitzpatrick, Descendancy: Irish Protestant Histories since 1795 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 108, 243.

71 Fitzpatrick, Descendancy, 109.

72 For instance, Isaac Clarke, David Clarke, and James Linden, all of County Armagh.

73 Donachie, Irish Covenanters, 167–198.

74 Donachie, Irish Covenanters, 194–195.

75 “The Protest of Ulster: Uncompromising Opposition of the Protestant Clergy and Ministers,” Daily Mail, 28 September 1912. The source is extensively utilized by Fitzpatrick in his analysis of attitudes to the Ulster Covenant. Fitzpatrick, Descendancy, 107–135.

76 Nicola Morris, “Traitors to Their Faith? Protestant Clergy and the Ulster Covenant of 1912,” New Hibernia Review 15, no. 3 (Autumn 2011): 16–35. See also, Fitzpatrick, Descendancy, 136–155.

77 The other Baptist signatories were John Taylor, James Rainey, and John Freeman. Those who responded to the Daily Mail but did not sign were Alexander Jardine, James Shields, E. W. Minne, J. W. Brown, Thomas Metrusty, and H. A. Gribbon.

78 The Reformed Presbyterians who responded to the Daily Mail were William Dick, James Dick, John Lynd, George Benaugh, James Buchanan, Torrens Boyd, John Ramsey, and J. K. Dickey. There was also a response by the Rev. William James Moffett, moderator of the Eastern Reformed Presbyterian Synod.

79 Donachie, Irish Covenanters, 193–197.

80 Andrew R. Holmes, “Fundamentalism in Interwar Northern Ireland,” in The Oxford Handbook of Christian Fundamentalism, ed. Andrew Atherton and David Ceri Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).