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Editorial
Alwyn Thomson
Comment:
Politics: serving God and doing good!
Ethel White
From
the Director: Cultivating the common ground
David W Porter
ECONI
Statement: Confidence in God
October 2002
Postbag: Letters to the Editor
Why
vote?
Alison Laird
Communities
of hope
Lord Alderdice
Transformation 2003: Killing for God?
View
from the south
Patrick Mitchel
Church
& state
Esmond
Birnie MLA
Taking
the plunge
John Kyle
Faith
in politics
Interview: Rt Hon Paul Murphy MP
Your
kingdom come
Heather Morrow
ECONI
Statement: Forum for Peace & Reconciliation
January 2003
Bible
study series: Faith in the future
David
W Porter
Through
a glass, darkly
Changing Women, Changing Worlds Conference
Review:
A night in November by Marie Jones
Noel
McCune
Book
Reviews
Alwyn Thomson
For
God and His Glory Alone:
Study 3: Reconciliation
For
God and His Glory Alone:
Study 4: Peace
VIEW FROM THE SOUTH
EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS in the Republic of Ireland face quite different political challenges to their ‘separated brethren’ north of the border. This article is a personal, highly selective and probably biased perspective on the challenges, past and present, facing evangelicals in the South of relating to Irish society. I say evangelical deliberately; to attempt to discuss the topic of ‘Christians and politics’ in the Republic raises all sorts of other issues, not least the problem of how to define ‘Christian’, but also the size of the task of examining the political roles of the main Christian denominations.1 I have neither the space nor the expertise to venture into that territory!
I’ve written in lion & lamb before of Miroslav Volf’s image of what constitutes a healthy relationship between the church and the culture in which it exists, but I’ll mention it again because I haven’t come across a better one. He proposes that a dynamic tension needs to exist between what he calls ‘distance’ and ‘belonging’.
On the one hand, distance means that for the Christian, no national identity can be given absolute loyalty. Through faith in Christ, Christians are to ‘depart’ from their own culture, in the sense of refusing to be drawn into the emotional vortex of their own particular national identity.
On the other hand, distance must be balanced by belonging if it is not to end in cultural isolation. Christians are not called to become aliens to their own culture by retreating to an alternative Christian sub-culture disconnected from the outside world. A balance of distance and belonging leads to incarnational Christianity that is ‘of’ a culture yet distinct from it, or as Jesus put it, is ‘salt and light’ to the world. To put it bluntly, I believe that if the pitfall for evangelicals in the North has been ‘belonging without distance’ (actively or passively spiritually anointing the cause of unionism), in the Republic it has been distance without any real sense of belonging. Let me try to justify the second half of this claim by looking at the experience of evangelicals in the Republic in three stages.2
1922-1960s
Distance without belonging: a minority within a minority
The story of Irish nationalism’s fusion with Roman Catholicism is well known. Dating from the nineteenth century it reached its climax in the 1916 Rising and the pseudo-Christian mystical nationalism of Patrick Pearse. Few other nationalists so clearly demonstrate how Christian imagery can be subordinated to the national dream. Pearse’s pamphlet Ghosts was written in late 1915, shortly before the Easter Rising. The ghosts were the fathers of the vision of a separatist Ireland who had left behind a holy and authoritative body of teaching to be obeyed by the faithful. The four, Theobold Wolfe Tone, Thomas Davis, John Mitchel (a relative of mine) and James Fintan Lalor, were likened to the four evangelists. In this and other pamphlets, Pearse raised Irish nationalism to a religion. The people were made in the image and likeness of Christ. It is they who would be tortured, naked and crucified and then would rise again victorious over their foes; ‘the people itself will perhaps be its own Messiah, the labouring people, scourged, crowned with thorns, agonizing and dying, to rise again immortal and impassable.’3
Pearse was followed by the other towering figure of twentieth century Irish nationalism, Eamon de Valera. I don’t need to cover old ground here, save to say that under his vision, independent Ireland went about implementing policies designed to give expression to a specifically Catholic Irish identity. This process, in de Valera’s mind, was assumed to be synonymous with the divine will for Ireland. Ireland as a ‘restored’ Gaelic state would be Irish speaking, economically independent, and religiously Catholic. From this perspective, it was inevitable that nearly half the Protestant population left the state in the ten years after partition. Those remaining became a small, ethnically defined Protestant sub-culture marked by attitudes of defence, retreat and decline. While over time they embraced an Irish identity they remained outside mainstream Irishness. Political engagement did not seem to go far beyond praying for the President instead of the Queen. If Protestantism has been a minor strand of Irish national identity since partition, evangelicalism, as a small movement within it, has been virtually invisible.
Any evangelical presence that was sustained tended to be primarily the result of Northern activity or a small minority of Irish evangelicals within Anglicanism like T. C. Hammond.4 As such, it did not emerge from within the boundaries of Irish Protestant identity. It faced the significant obstacle of being perceived as foreign, connected with Britishness and unionism. It was not part of the Irish ‘national story’. In short, it faced the hurdle of distance without belonging.
1960s-1990s
Distance without belonging: a diverse minority
The modest but significant growth of evangelicalism throughout the Republic since the late 1960s has witnessed people expressing evangelical faith from within an Irish Catholic cultural identity. In contrast to the predictable neat boundaries of the past, Irish evangelicalism now consists of a small, disorganized spectrum of denominational churches and newer fellowships scattered all over the country. Southern evangelicals no longer come from a minority within a (Protestant) minority, but largely originate from a Roman Catholic background and nationalist cultural identity. They feel little, if any, affinity for the unionist politics and Protestant identity of their fellow evangelicals north of the Border.
The onset of postmodernism has heralded the rapid fragmentation of homogenous ‘classic’ Irish nationalism in an increasingly diverse Irish culture. Secularisation has eroded the once all pervasive de Valerean vision of Catholic Ireland. That vision is dead. One by one the ideological ‘pillars’ of nationalism have been removed with unsentimental pragmatism. Most dramatically, the influence of the Roman Catholic church at the centre of Irish culture and identity has collapsed in the face of an unceasing stream of horrific revelations of abuse: sexual abuse of defenceless and vulnerable children; abuse of power; and abuse of the enormous trust placed in a church supposedly committed to the ultimate Christian ethic of love.
Other pillars have fallen too. Economic independence has effectively been ceded to the EU. De Valera’s non-negotiable territorial dream of a thirty-two county united Ireland, given expression in his 1937 Constitution, has been rewritten to accept the principle of unionist consent. Perhaps the only pillar of the past still proudly standing is that of the GAA which still enjoys massive support through a vibrant network of local clubs and county teams.
The passing of old Ireland has undoubtedly created more ‘space’ in Irish Identity for alternative voices to be heard. In places the evangelical community has witnessed encouraging and even spectacular growth, particularly where churches preach and embody the gospel of grace in a loving and worshipping community. I count it a wonderful privilege to be ministering and working alongside believers from whom I would ‘normally’ have been culturally, politically and religiously alienated. The evangel is not confined within the borders of unionism or political Protestantism. All over Ireland there are now evangelical Christians, inside and outside the ‘main’ denominations, who have an Irish identity and culture. I think that most church leaders, from across the spectrum of the evangelical community, would agree that there is a flexibilty, informality and freshness here, free perhaps from the weight of ‘historical baggage’ under which much Protestant evangelicalism in ‘the North’ continues to labour.
Yet having said this, Irish evangelicalism has not made the advances some hoped for twenty years ago. Generally, it remains on the fringes, historically irrelevant, culturally isolated and outside popular Irish consciousness. It still does not belong. A consequence is that if I’d confined myself strictly to writing about evangelical political involvement in the Republic, this would have been a very short article! Why is this? I believe various factors exist which have contributed to southern evangelicalism’s continued political, social and cultural distance from Irish life.
First, undoubtedly a major factor is that, as in much of Western Europe, an increasingly secular, post-Christian, plural culture is deeply resistant to the Gospel. Just because the old authoritarian Catholicism is collapsing, does not mean that Irish people are rushing into evangelical churches. Many people feel confused, hurt, betrayed and suspicious of religion.
Second, many Irish evangelicals have a strong pietistic spirituality which militates against involvement in the nitty gritty of day to day engagement in education committees, local politics, community organizations and the like. Many are simply too busy in church activities to have time for luxuries like politics. Of course, the ongoing revelations at various tribunals regarding widespread corruption within the Irish political life have done little to overcome many Christians’ instinctive wariness of politics or to counter widespread cynicism from among the public in general.
Third, is the reality that in recent decades, Irish evangelicals, particularly perhaps independents outside recognized denominations, have faced enormous difficulties in creating a positive and confident identity that can simultaneously be distinct from and yet also belong to their host culture. Some believers, when leaving their Irish Catholic identity behind, were perceived as betraying themselves, their families, their community and their Irishness. For some the cost has been high.
An identity borne in adversity and facing overwhelming odds will tend to express itself strongly in order to survive. Just like Irish nationalism struggling against the weight of the British Empire, it will tend to be defined by what it is not. Most Irish evangelicals do not describe themselves as Catholic or Protestant. By rejecting Catholicism, often in stark terms, believers also tended to cut their links from their local communities. Some fellowships became spiritually, emotionally and even physically isolated from their surrounding environments. Bridges were burnt as evangelicals withdrew into a new sub-culture. Distance all too easily slipped into an isolationism. Thus for different reasons, evangelicals in both Protestant denominations and independent fellowships face the difficulty of overcoming distance and creating some sense of belonging. As we shall see, there are signs that this is beginning to happen.
2000 onwards
Creating belonging: Getting engaged?
For some time, some evangelical leaders have seen the need for developing a Christian voice, reflecting biblically on issues from an evangelical viewpoint, both to resource and equip the wider evangelical community and to speak prophetically into Irish society. An abortive attempt was made in the mid-1980s to launch an Irish Evangelical Alliance to meet these aims. It failed because a vocal constituency was unable to come to terms with the ‘impurity’ involved in working within a broad coalition of evangelicals.
As I write a second attempt is well underway to form an Evangelical Alliance Ireland (EAI). Originating out of an informal network of church leader conferences, the group has held regional and national consultation days and is presently ‘constructing’ the shape of the new organization. Plans exist formally to launch EAI in 2003-4. The new body is to have three inter-connected strands all serving the overall goal of advancing mission in Ireland. They are ‘networking’, ‘resourcing’ and ‘voice’ respectively. It is the last strand that is of most direct relevance here. There is a strong sense among many evangelicals in the Republic that for too long they have stayed silent and now is the time to begin to engage meaningfully with Irish society. Or to put it in Volf’s terms, to create some beloning to balance their distance.
Sean Mullan, a church leader and a prominent figure in the fledgling EAI, argues that both traditional Catholicism and secular liberalism have been tried in Ireland but failed. Whereas in the past, he argues that evangelicals disengaged intellectually, culturally and socially, now they need to develop a counter culture that engages with society at every level and presents the gospel perspective on life. I mean engaging with the arts, engaging with the media, engaging with social issues, engaging with politics, engaging with justice issues, engaging with academic life, engaging with sporting life. ‘This is not about politics. This is not about power… Our purpose is not the increase of evangelicalism but the spread of the evangel, the gospel. There is no area of our society, no area of social, political, academic, judicial life where the gospel is not good news.’5
In many ways, Sean’s comments remind me of the motivations behind the origins of ECONI. I recall David Porter’s comments about northern evangelicals being paralysed by fear and keeping silent, fearful of the ‘fundamentalist shadow’ on one side and fearing of rejection and hostility of ‘our own people’ on the other side. He wrote, ‘our goal is to encourage commitment to action and change. Such a commitment is demanding: it demands that we take risks; that we act in our community with faith and integrity; that we do something.’6
Many Irish evangelicals, I believe, are at that stage – of being committed ‘to doing something’. Where it leads and how it develops of course remains to be seen. Perhaps these developments are symptomatic of not only the greater numerical strength of the Irish evangelical community, but of its growing maturity. God willing, in a few years if I ever write about ‘Christians and politics’ here again, there will be plenty of material for a longer article.
NOTES:
1
For further details see John H. Whyte, Church and State in Modern Ireland
1923-1979(Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1984) and also Dermot Keogh, ‘The
Role of the
Catholic Church in the Republic of Ireland 1922-1995’, Building Trust
in Ireland: Studies Commissioned by the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation(Blackstaff,
1996) 85-213. (Back to text)
2 See my forthcoming book, Evangelicalism and National Identity in Ulster 1921-1998, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2003, for justification for the first part of this statement. (Back to text)
3 Patrick Pearse, Political Writings and speeches, (Talbot Press: Dublin, 1952) 91. (Back to text)
4
See Warren Nelson, T.C. Hammond: Irish Christian
(Banner of Truth: Edinburgh, 1994). (Back to text)
5
Sean Mullan, ‘A Voice to the Nation: The Third Way’,
Church Planter Net, Vol. 5, Issue 2, November 2002. (Back
to text)
6 David Porter, ‘The Pertinent Question’ in W hat Does the Lord Require of Us?(Belfast: ECONI, 1993) 26-7. (Back to text)
DR PATRICK MITCHEL is a Member of ECONI and is Director of Studies at the Irish Bible Institute, Dublin.
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