The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland by Crawford Gribben

Author:Crawford Gribben [Gribben, Crawford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192638571
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2021-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

III

Throughout much of Europe, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were often regarded as an age of enlightenment and doubt—but in Ireland, during the same period, the churches experienced enlightenment and religious revival. Shut out of the apparatus of the state as a consequence of the Glorious Revolution, Catholics and dissenters found themselves affected in different ways by expanding body of inconsistently applied penal laws. These laws targeted the religion of Presbyterians by denying the legality of their ordinations and marriage ceremonies, while leaving their wealth largely intact. They targeted the wealth of Catholic landowners, while recognizing the validity of their church’s ordinations and marriage rites.214 But, despite the calls of reformers for the broadening of the political nation, these laws that protected the social, cultural, economic, and religious privileges of the Anglican elite were only slowly dismantled. Eventually the restlessness of those shut out from the state boiled over into action. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Presbyterians gained a political education during the American revolution, while Catholics were influenced by events in France. When it realized that one-tenth of the island’s population had combined in a religiously pluralist but politically radical oath-bound society, with strong links to a hostile foreign power, the state responded with repression. The ideals of the enlightenment were abandoned as the rebellion of the United Irishmen led to horrific sectarian violence. While their Church condemned ‘the French disease’, many Catholics turned to republican theory in order to plot out their political future. Dissenting protestants recognized the danger, and came to terms with the state. The British government realized it had to take radical action in order to avoid further episodes of violence. In the Act of Union, the Dublin parliament was incorporated into that of Westminster. Many middle-class Catholics supported the union in the hope that they would be given the vote. Many protestants resisted the union on the basis that their political power would now be diluted. Both expectations were fulfilled in the early nineteenth century—even as Catholics turned against the union and protestants came to support it.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Catholic and protestant communities had consolidated as a consequence of revivals and reformations. Archbishop Cullen standardized the practice of piety and suppressing local idiosyncrasies while pulling the Irish church more closely into alignment with Rome. Among protestants, clergymen as well as anti-clerical revivalists preached a generic evangelicalism that may have led to 100,000 conversions. Ulster was made distinctive by high levels of church attendance that were a ‘by-product of the deep sectarian divisions that dominated Irish public life’.215 For all their differences, evangelical ministers and ultramontanist priests had created strong religious communities by exploiting fears of the other.

As their communities consolidated, protestants and Catholics began to engage more fully with the wider world. This ‘spiritual empire’ provided denominational leaders in the United States as well as the many single women and married couples that took up opportunities for missionary work in Ireland’s urban centres as well in Africa and the far east.

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