Presbyterianism

The fact that the Roman Catholic Church enjoyed the adherence of the vast majority of the Irish population (even in so-called Protestant Ulster Catholics outnumbered Protestants in five of the nine counties), that the Church of Ireland was the established church of a small minority, and that Ulster Presbyterianism was virtually a state within a state, ensured that the province's religious life would have more than its fair share of ecclesiastical and political turbulence.

It is important at the outset, therefore, to make quite clear that the evangelical Protestantism which affected Ulster religion from the mid-eighteenth century did not create the characteristic divisions of the province, it merely made them more vibrant and more complicated. Secondly, although the 'Great Awakening' brought important new features to Ulster 's religious landscape, hotter forms of Protestantism predated this international movement of the mid-eighteenth century. Not only were there small cells of gathered churches including Baptists, Quakers and Congregationalists stemming from the Cromwellian period, but there was an indigenous tradition of piety and revivalism within the Scots-Irish Presbyterianism of the seventeenth century.

Meanwhile within the church, classical divisions emerged during the eighteenth century between conservatives and radicals, Old and New Light, subscribers and non-subscribers, and those who emphasized ecclesiastical orthodoxy and confessions of faith against free thought and independent judgment. The cohesiveness of Ulster Presbyterianism was further eroded by its propensity to reflect disputes within Scottish Presbyterianism even when the point of division in Scotland had no equivalent cause in Ireland . One such was the formation of the Associate Synod, or the Seceders, who left the Church of Scotland over a patronage dispute which was largely irrelevant to Ulster Presbyterianism.

With their conversionist zeal and strong emphasis on fighting sin, expressed in days of fast and humiliation, the Seceders had all the emotional intensity of a new religious movement, but they strenuously avoided novelty. Rigid orthodoxy and strict discipline were their hallmarks. After first inviting Whitefield to minister to them and then repudiating him 'as a wild enthusiast engaged in the work of Satan', they distanced themselves-at considerable cost to their long-term prospects-from the remarkable revivals at Kilsyth and Cambuslang which, revealingly, had no Ulster counterpart. Whether this was because Whitefield did not visit Ulster in the 1740s, or, more likely, because of the weakness of an individualist and conversionist evangelical tradition within Ulster Presbyterianism, the result was the same. Ulster had no popular revival in the 1740s, but it did see the beginning of a substantial Seceder community, despite a further division into Burgher and Anti-Burgher synods.

These minority Presbyterian groups nevertheless offered an outlet for a more intense religiosity in areas traditionally hostile to the conversionist imperative of evangelical Arminianism. By creating a viable and theologically attractive alternative to New Light tendencies, they also ensured that those who objected to what they saw as excessive moderation and tolerance in the Synod of Ulster could leave the synod without abandoning a committed Presbyterianism. The fact that such options were open contributed to the maintenance of a tradition of 'serious religion' among the Presbyterian laity, while ensuring that the creeping invasion of a more conversionist evangelicalism was slower in Ireland than in Scotland .

Ulster Presbyterianism was a more fragmented community at the end of the century than it was at the beginning, and the influence of Methodism and church evangelicalism had persuaded a dynamic minority within the Church of Ireland that the unfinished work of the Reformation might yet be completed.