Protestant Millennialism, Political Violence And The Ulster Conflict

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Notes

 1. Anon., ‘Paisley: I'll Never Stop Fighting Rome’, Irish Independent, 12 October 1988.

 2. Anon., ‘Pope Unruffled by Paisley Protest’, Irish Times, 12 October 1988; Anon., ‘You are Anti-Christ Paisley Yells at Pope’, Daily Mail, 12 October 1988; Mitchel, Evangelicalism and National Identity in Ulster, 1921–1998, 178.

 3. The Irish Times provided an overview of the reporting of the event in the European press: Anon., ‘Contrasting Paisley Coverage’, Irish Times, 13 October 1988.

 4. Anon., ‘MEPs’ Fury as Paisley Hits Out at the Pontiff', Irish News, 12 October 1988. For a good discussion of Paisley's eschatology, see Bruce, God Save Ulster, 226–30.

 5. Anon., ‘Ill-mannered’, Belfast Telegraph, 12 October 1988.

 6. Anon., ‘Taylor Rapped for Criticising Paisley Anti-Pope Protest’, Belfast Telegraph, 12 October 1988.

 7. Anon., ‘Hardly Surprising’, Irish News, 12 October 1988.

 8. Anon., ‘Paisley—Why Did He Do It?’, Sunday Press, 16 October 1988; Anon., ‘Bishop Makes Paisley–IRA Comparison’, Irish Times, 13 October 1988.

 9. ‘A main appeal of the notorious Reverend Ian Paisley is that he dares say openly what many people feel secretly, and more people are relieved by this than are willing to say so. His dedicated followers aside, Paisley is generally regarded in the public view with a mixture of embarrassment, repugnance, fascinated horror, and some amusement, and he is widely denounced as dangerously bigoted. But he survives, not only as an MP at Westminster but as one of Northern Ireland's three MEPs.’ Grant, Literature, Rhetoric and Violence in Northern Ireland, 1968–98, 70.

10. On reformation apocalyptic thought, see particularly Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530–1645; and Gribben, The Puritan Millennium.

11. See the essays in Gribben and Stunt, Prisoners of Hope?; and Gribben and Holmes, Protestant Millennialism, Evangelicalism and Irish Society, 1790–2005.

12. Myrtle Hill claims that ‘theological, as well as popular anti-Catholicism has been a constant feature of the Ulster Protestant mentality, thus setting Irish Protestants apart from their mainstream British counterparts’. Hill, The Time of the End, 3. For a discussion of the theme of ‘Antichrist’ in early modern thought and culture, see Emmerson, Antichrist in the Middle Ages, 204–37; and Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-century England.

13. Gosse, Father and Son, 94. Gosse's autobiography is, according to Stunt, ‘a singularly unreliable source of factual information’ for the early Brethren. Stunt, ‘Brethren or Philistine?’, 13; cf. Douglas Wertheimer, ‘The Identification of Some Characters and Incidents in Gosse's “Father and Son”’, 4–11. Myrtle Hill claims that ‘theological, as well as popular anti-Catholicism has been a constant feature of the Ulster Protestant mentality, thus setting Irish Protestants apart from their mainstream British counterparts’. Hill, The Time of the End, 3.

14. Minutes of the General Assembly and Directory of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland 1988 (1988), 54–56. The Assembly voted to approve the amendment that described Papal claims as ‘unbiblical’ rather than ‘anti-Christian’. Minority parties favoured no change, or more radical change, being made to the confessional statement.

15. Paisley later erroneously cited Westminster Confession of Faith 25:4; Paisley, Antichrist, 5.

16. The Savoy Confession of Faith (26:4) and Second London (Baptist) Confession of Faith (26:4) share the wording of the Westminster Confession but add their hope of Antichrist's eventual destruction: ‘the Pope of Rome… is that Antichrist, that Man of sin, and Son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the Church against Christ, and all that is called God; whom the Lord shall destroy with the brightness of his coming’. See Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order; and Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions of Faith.

17. Anon., ‘Pope to Visit European Parliament’, New Protestant Telegraph, September 1988, 7.

18. Bruce, The Edge of the Union, 22. As Mitchel has recently noted, ‘Paisleyism requires a volatile political atmosphere just as a fish needs water… The depth of its cultural captivity is evident in that without the spectre of imminent unionist betrayal Paisleyism would lose both its coherence and potency.’ Mitchel, Evangelicalism and National Identity in Ulster, 204, 211.

19. Mitchel, Evangelicalism and National Identity in Ulster, 129.

20. See the ‘Spectrum of Evangelicalism’ chart in Mitchel, Evangelicalism and National Identity in Ulster 131.

21. Foster, Shadow of the Antichrist, 237–39. This appears to contradict Paisley's statements about Revelation 13, in Paisley, Antichrist, 42.

22. There is no Irish equivalent, for example, to the surveys of popular evangelical millennialism provided by Dwight Wilson's Armageddon Now or Paul Boyer's When Time Shall be no More. The published results of a recent survey of Belfast churchgoers did not refer to eschatological belief. Boal et al .,Them and Us?

23. Bruce, Edge of the Union, 35.

24. See Smyth, ‘The DUP as a Politico-religious Organisation’, 34; Mitchel, Evangelicalism and National Identity in Ulster, 5.

25. Tara, Ireland Forever, 5. See, more generally, Roy Garland's series of Irish Times articles, ‘Drawn to Fundamentalism’, Irish Times, 13 April 1982, 10; ‘Tara Sets Out to Reconquer Ireland’, Irish Times, 14 April 1982, 12; ‘Your Blood is on Your Own Head Now’, Irish Times, 15 April 1982, 10. See, more generally, Bruce, The Red Hand, 23; McKnight, ‘Tara Goes to War’, 17; Irwin, ‘The Kincora Scandal and Related Subjects’, 14–15; Mitchell, Native vs. Settler, 154–55; and Moore, The Kincora Scandal, passim.

26. Tara, Ireland Forever, 13. Tara's British-Israelitism seems not to share in the Anglo-Saxon racism that Mairéad Carew has attributed to earlier exponents of the British-Israel theory. Carew, Tara and the Ark of the Covenant, 13–15. For the British-Israel myth in Ulster loyalism, see Buckley, ‘“We're Trying to Find Our Identity”’, 191–92.

27. Moloney and Pollak, Paisley, 282–83.

28. Tara, Ireland Forever, 28.

29. Tara, Ireland Forever, 11.

30. Tara, Ireland Forever, 10.

31. Garland, ‘The Ulster Volunteer Force Negotiating History’, 24. McGrath feared that the Republic's army was planning to stage an ‘international incident’ by violating the territorial integrity of Northern Ireland and by calling on the intervention of the United Nations in a bid to encourage the withdrawal of British troops. The existence of a similar plan was confirmed by Neil Blaney, Donegal TD and former Fianna Fáil minister. Belfast Telegraph, 31 May 1990; and Garland, ‘The Ulster Volunteer Force Negotiating History’, 30.

32. Landes, ‘Millennialism’, 334.

33. See Moore, Kincora Scandal; Clifford Smyth, ‘Tell the Truth’, Belfast Telegraph, 20 June 2005.

34. ‘Foreword’, Tim Pat Coogan, in Anderson, The Billy Boys, 11.

35. Garland, ‘The Ulster Volunteer Force Negotiating History’, 50.

36. Bruce, ‘Paramilitaries, Peace and Politics’, 192.

37. Parkinson, Ulster Loyalism and the British Media, 29.

38. Anon., ‘The Church of England Follows Church of Ireland's Lead—at Last!’, The Loyalist, March 1994, 4.

39. Anon., ‘Roman Paul Murphy’, The Loyalist, February/March 2003, 12.

40. Combat, July 1989, 8; Combat, September 1991, 3; Combat, March 1992, 13.

41. Combat, July 1988, 14.

42. Combat, September 1988, 2.

43. Bruce, ‘Paramilitaries, Peace and Politics’, 191.

44. Bruce, ‘Terrorists and Politics’, 41; Wallis et al. , ‘No Surrender!’, 8.

45. Smyth, Ian Paisley , 122–27.

46. Gribben, ‘Andrew Bonar and the Scottish Presbyterian Millennium’, in Gribben and Stunt, Prisoners of Hope?, 177–202.

47. Bruce, God Save Ulster, 206–07.

48. Wells, ‘Schaeffer on America’, 237.

49. Paisley, Into the Millennium, 14 [sermon preached in 1990].