The role of religion in defining identity in private as well as public life has been the most dominant and enduring reality of modern Irish history. While the roots of the phenomenon date back to the Reformation and the conquests of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was during the period of political and economic modernization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that religion become entrenched as the ultimate dividing line between native and colonial. This was an era in which national identity was formulated according to how people perceived the history and tradition of the community to which they belonged, a vision that would in large measure dictate the sense of national destiny and the trajectory of political life. The evolution in Ireland of two polarized and oppositional ‘nations’ illustrates the continuing importance of religion in the national psyche and the degree to which it answered people’s basic needs in a period of upheaval and change.
By 1835 the evangelical movement had established itself as the most invigorating and energetic force within the Irish Protestant world. This was an indication of the extent to which it answered the needs of a community increasingly threatened by the growth of popular democracy and the accompanying demand for political equality among the Catholic population. Like its British counterpart, the character of Irish evangelicalism was determined by the particular environment in which it was nurtured, particularly the unfolding of the political struggle between Catholic and Protestant. In this sense it may be said to have had a unique and indigenous character, though undoubtedly it owed a great deal to the influence of both people and events often far removed from the world of denominational rivalries in Ireland.
The spread to Ireland of the religious enthusiasm associated with the ‘Second Great Awakening’ was a forceful reminder of the country’s place in the wider British colonial world. Early evangelists like George Whitefield, John Wesley and John Cennick certainly saw their work in Ireland as an extension of their missionary efforts in Britain and the American colonies. Nevertheless, it was not until the early nineteenth century that evangelical leaders began to think in terms of an organized movement to convert the Catholic population. The overwhelming sense of urgency that characterized the mission to the Catholic Irish was a consequence of the political breakdown of the last two decades of the century. Following the Union the Irish problem essentially became one of assimilating a minority Catholic population into a dominantly Protestant union of nations. A ‘common investment in Protestantism’ in Linda Colley’s words, was the adhesive that bound this union.1 It is hardly surprising that the challenge of integrating the Catholic Irish was seen primarily in terms of the necessity of a ‘moral transformation’ in which the principles of the Protestant faith, along with respect for the constitution and the existing social and political order, would be made the basis of their belief and conduct. Initially, the idea that a common Christian culture could be made the basis of such a transformation gained currency in some quarters. Inevitably, however, the more extreme opinion prevailed that the influence of the Catholic religion was what lay at the root of the ignorance, poverty and rebellious disposition of the native Irish. The eradication of Catholicism in consequence became the driving force of the evangelical mission in Ireland.
Dynamic and committed adherents of the Independent groups, particularly the Methodists and Congregationalists, provided the leadership and inspiration for the first phase of the evangelical moral crusade. Revealingly, these men were not solely the products of the Irish evangelical world (though some, like Gideon Ouseley, certainly were) but partners in the great expansion of home and foreign missions that spawned the evangelization of the Celtic fringe areas of Scotland and Wales, as well as the overseas missions to Africa and India. The challenge mounted by these pioneers inspired a sense of denominational rivalry in the Church of Ireland, which proceeded to develop its own strategy to rescue the Catholic Irish from ignorance and superstition. By the second decade of the century Church of Ireland evangelicals had undoubtedly taken the lead in the moral crusade through the many voluntary agencies that made their appearance at this time, particularly the ADV, the Sunday School Society and the KPS.
The initial phase of the moral crusade was not especially productive of sectarian tension. Indeed, funds made available by voluntary agencies were often accepted and even welcomed by Catholic priests and schoolteachers eager to participate in the work of national regeneration through the spread of literacy and education. The problem arose when a series of events between 1816 and 1821 combined to produce a situation in which religion was made the centre of the political discourse on the admission of Catholics to full political equality. In the first instance, the rising tide of popular triumphalism following the victory over revolutionary France contributed to the belief that Providence had favoured the British social and political order grounded in tradition, social hierarchy, an economic system based on the principles of the free market, and the Protestant faith. Secondly, the economic crisis that followed the war produced a dangerously unstable situation in Ireland, a situation intensified by the almost total collapse of the Catholic-led Emancipation effort and the rise of an agrarian movement driven by a marked sectarian undercurrent. And thirdly, there was the readiness with which liberal Protestants stepped into the breach to take over the leadership of the Emancipation campaign. This development coincided with a growing trend among the leaders of political opinion in Britain—including prominent members of the evangelical movement such as William Wilberforce and Charles Grant—to consider that the Emancipation of Catholics, like the liberation of slaves in the West Indies, was an idea whose time had come.
The commitment of liberal Protestants to an Emancipation bill, together with the fear of popular revolution and the emergence of men like Daniel O’Connell, Rev. John MacHale and Bishop James Warren Doyle as outspoken and fearless leaders of Catholic public opinion, amounted to a grave threat to the continuation of Protestant supremacy in Ireland. This threat infused a renewed, indeed revolutionary, vigour into the traditional intransigence of conservative Protestants. Inspired by the belief that Britain had been saved because of its fidelity to the Christian faith, Protestant conservatives emphasized their traditional loyalty to Church and constitution, and rallied to the standards of the religion they now saw as enjoying undisputed ascendancy. With the strength of the United Kingdom and its immense commercial empire at their back, and the global imperative of awakened Christianity to provide wind for their sails, they were now emboldened to launch an ideological crusade to undermine the threat to their liberty from the forces of Catholic subversion.
This disposition found expression in a hardening of the attitudes on the use of the Protestant Bible in schools run by evangelical agencies, in the renewed activity of the Orange Order in provoking Catholics, and above all in the renewal of the debate on the safety of the Church of Ireland begun by Bishop Woodward in the 1780s. The combined effect of these developments was to inject religion, or rather religious division, solidly into the centre of the debate on Catholic Emancipation. This, of course, was nothing new. In the past, however, there had not been in existence either a developed ideology, which professed the necessity of converting Catholics, or a body of institutions with which to effect the transformation. Both elements were now in place, backed by a rising tide of conservative opinion in Britain as well as Ireland that public funds be used to advance the process.
It was the realization that public money was being utilized to undermine the doctrinal authority of Catholic teaching by insisting on ‘the Bible without note or comment’—the ultimate symbol of Protestant superiority and righteousness—that caused Daniel O’Connell and Rev. John MacHale to come out in open opposition to the aims and methods of the evangelical educational agencies in 1819. The particular object of their attack was the KPS, an organization originally devoted to neutrality in religious affairs, but which had been overtaken by the ascendancy of evangelical opinion on its board of directors during the second decade of the century. This heralded an open confrontation between Catholic spokesmen and increasingly strident defenders of the Established Church, fearful of the implications of Emancipation and tithe reform. New heights were reached in the dispute when the newly appointed archbishop of Dublin, William Magee, in his inaugural sermon in St Patrick’s cathedral in October 1822, claimed apostolic succession for the Church of Ireland and challenged its members to work towards making it a national church that would eventually absorb both the Catholic and Dissenting communities.
Archbishop Magee’s famous sermon has rightly been interpreted as a turning point in denominational relations in Ireland. What made it so was the response it evoked from Catholic leaders, particularly Bishop Doyle, a rising star in the religious and political world. Doyle’s response to Magee’s charge began what would be a brief but extraordinary career as a theorist and propagandist of Catholic freedom. His defence and vindication of the Catholic Irish infused new vigour and confidence into the community as a whole, and his advocacy of peaceful, constitutional action provided a modus operandi for the newly formed Catholic Association. The coherence of Doyle’s arguments, the force of his vision and the power of his rhetoric united people across class, geographical and even denominational lines, and made it appear that the cause of Catholic freedom was irresistible, if not providentially ordained. It drew to the Catholic Association leaders of extraordinary talent who exploited every opportunity and effected a political revolution based on peaceful mass mobilization that would be the first of its kind in Europe.
The perception that the evangelical mission underpinned the ideological assumptions of ultra-Protestantism, and was geared towards changing the attitudes and assumptions of the Catholic Irish, made the conflict into a war of cultural defence. It was this feature above all else that provided unity and cohesion among the disparate supporters of Emancipation. It also provided a clear opportunity for the clergy to become involved in political organization and policy making, particularly in the area of education, where they established an influence that would fundamentally control the direction in which the mindset of Catholic Ireland would develop.
The fact that the theorist of native resurgence was the work of a Catholic bishop, and that the popular democratic movement was driven forward by the unity of priests and people at the local level, was more than enough to cause conservative Protestants to see the hand of Rome behind the process. Where previously it had been perceived as the agency behind the violence of the agrarian rebels and the treason of the republicans, now the papacy would be seen as the arch manipulator of the forces of popular democracy unleashed by the revolutions of the late eighteenth century. This ennabled Protestant critics to insist that Catholic democracy was a sham because its followers were slaves to Rome. It was a worldview that became embedded in the very foundation of Protestant national identity and would for generations stand as a barrier against the acceptance of Catholics as equal citizens within a constitutional system.
Archbishop Magee’s famous charge of 1822 baffled contemporary observers as well as later historians, including Desmond Bowen, who referred to it as a declaration of religious war, unprovoked and uncalled for in the circumstances of the early 1820s. But this opinion carries weight only if one chooses to ignore what had been taking place in the previous two decades with regard to evangelical ambitions for the native Irish, and the marriage between the overweening ambitions of the evangelicals and the hard-line political conservatism that began to take solid form in the years after 1816. Having established this claim, it is not altogether fair to lay the blame for the explosive events of the 1820s totally on the doorstep of the moral reformers and missionaries. It is entirely possible that agencies like the KPS and the LHS could have gone about their work of educating Catholics until a national system made its appearance, which it undoubtedly would as it did everywhere in Europe. Their work might even have come to be regarded as having contributed to a great deal of good. Bishop John Jebb of Limerick, for example, despite his lifelong adherence to the principle of the Church of Ireland taking the lead in the movement for moral reform and his rigid opposition to Emancipation, was enormously well regarded by Catholics. It was the politicization of the movement in the second decade of the century that opened the door for the Catholic Church to assert itself in the public sphere as the protector of the native Irish and the guardian of their traditions and way of life.
The manner in which the political modernization of the Catholic population took place must be regarded as one of the fundamental turning points in modern Irish history. The revolution in mass politics that occurred during the propaganda war of the mid-1820s meant that the bulk of the Catholic Irish were educated into citizenship in an atmosphere charged with the rhetoric of religious warfare. Victory in the Emancipation campaign was an unstinting reflection of the power of mass mobilization and the leadership role of the clergy. The defence of Catholic doctrine and the strident assertion of its righteousness, if not superiority, had an extraordinary influence on the role assumed by the Catholic Church in later decades in matters relating to education and morality. The net result was the growth of a political Catholicism in which religion and national identity would become synonymous.
Success in the Emancipation campaign and the securing of an educational system to suit the needs of the Catholic majority was not a prelude either to denominational peace or the decline of evangelical influence among the Protestant community. Indeed, the opposite was the case. For conservative Protestants, every passing year saw the links between Catholic democracy and the resurgence of papal power became more transparent. Anti-Catholicism as a result became more entrenched and also more widespread, and it is not an overstatement to say that by the 1830s it had become a political doctrine in its own right. Its impact on attitudes towards Ireland and the Irish, among the British population generally and in political circles in particular, can hardly be overestimated. It is impossible to understand the attitude of a government official like Charles Trevelyan during the Famine, for example, without taking it into account.
Religious prejudice born out of the great cultural collision of the 1820s was also exported in tandem with the dispersal of the Irish, both Catholic and Protestant, to Britain and the United States, Canada and Australia. It deeply influenced the way in which the Catholic Irish were treated by the host countries, and the way in which their culture evolved at an institutional as well as a social level. The creation of a ‘fortress’ structure to protect its flocks from assimilation into the dominant Protestant cultures of the English-speaking diaspora was the first prerogative of the emigrant Church. By creating wholly alternative structures to provide services in such critical areas as health, welfare and education, the Catholic Church secured the loyalty of Irish emigrants to a degree that no other institution could match. Since Irish Catholicism internationally took its culture as well as its personnel in large measure from home, it was deeply conscious of its role both as a defender of the faith and a protector of the poor and dispossessed.
The legacy of Bishop Doyle’s vision of the Catholic Irish as an ‘elect’—a people special in the eyes of God because of all they had suffered and endured for the faith—fed the creation of a self-image that would provide both identity and coherence as the Irish diaspora spread in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was central to the creation of the concept of a ‘spiritual empire’: the special role of the Irish as the vanguard of international Catholicism in the English-speaking world. The ‘spiritual empire’ thesis was the ideological fuel behind the explosion of the Irish Catholic missionary movement worldwide, which was fed by the ‘devotional revolution’ at home, and particularly by the expansion of religious orders like the Sisters of Mercy and the Christian Brothers into secondary education. It gave the Catholic Church an entirely exclusive role in Irish society, nationally and internationally, and to those employed in its ranks a unique status underpinned by the belief that they were engaged in both serving their own people and in helping to spread the faith worldwide. The extraordinary power and status accrued by the Catholic Church was the ultimate measure of the success with which it had utilized the Protestant challenge as a lever to assert itself as the supreme arbiter of morality, both public and private, among the native population. It goes a long way towards understanding what promoted the growth of the moral totalitarianism that became the particular hallmark of Irish Catholic culture, both at home and abroad.
The fusion of religion and politics that has characterized so much of modern Irish history has long been recognized as a particularly poisonous brew. For all the recognition of this reality, however, and despite the mountain of scholarly literature that has attempted to make sense of the bitter religious and political differences that have plagued Irish society, there have been few attempts to chart the course of Protestant–Catholic relations within the framework of denominational rivalry, to examine how the character of the respective churches and their communities were formed in reaction or opposition to each other and how this influenced, or was influenced by, developments in the political world. But this failure is not unique to Ireland. As Gertrude Himmelfarb has noted, the political influence of religion is one of the great lacunae in the field of modern history.2 Part of my purpose in undertaking this work was to seek an understanding of the relationship between religion and politics in a country where religious division became so entrenched as to have become virtually a national characteristic in its own right. At a time when fundamentalism is again a major influence in many of the world’s leading religions, and millions across the globe are flocking to the standards of religious nationalism, the Irish experience affords a useful case history in which scholars of other divided societies may find valuable insights and comparisons.
Notes
1. Colley, Britons, pp. 11–54.
2. Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (New York 1994), pp. 112–3.