Ulster Says Maybe: The Restructuring of Evangelical Politics in Northern Ireland

Abstract

The recent electoral triumphs of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) have stimulated debate about the role of fundamentalist or ‘traditional evangelical’ Protestantism within the party and in Northern Irish politics. This paper argues that a significant restructuring of evangelical politics is taking place, one that is interest group‐centred rather than DUP‐centred. This process has been facilitated by changes in the structure of civil society. Traditional evangelical interest groups are ‘reframing’ their political projects in surprising new ways: abandoning Calvinist conceptions of church and state, using discourses of marginalisation and discrimination, and focusing on ‘moral’ issues. These subtle shifts in rhetoric constitute an acceptance of the post‐Belfast Agreement order. Rather than the tired, ‘Ulster Says No’ politics of the past, evangelicals are speaking out with a pragmatic ‘maybe’. This move parallels and reinforces the DUP’s ideological shifts, and provides an extra‐party platform for evangelicals to impact politics.

Acknowledgement

This research was funded by the Royal Irish Academy’s Third Sector Research Programme. The author wishes to acknowledge Paul Dixon, Christopher Farrington, Claire Mitchell and Jennifer Todd for insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. John Brewer helped to clarify a number of points. Participants at the conference, ‘Northern Ireland: A Civil or Uncivil Society?’ in Bristol, UK, 2004, also helped the author to develop the arguments presented here.

Notes

1. On Northern Ireland, see Mitchel (2003), Jordan (2001) and Thomson (1998); on the USA, see Noll (2001), Smith (1998), Hunter (1987) and Carpenter (1984); on Canada, see Bebbington (1997), Bibby (1993) and Rawlyk (1997); for comparative studies of the USA and Canada, see Noll (2001–1992) and Reimer (2003); for comparative studies on global evangelical‐charismatic Christianity (especially in Latin America and Africa), see Anderson and Hollenweger (1999), Cox (1996), Haynes (1993) and Martin (2002).

2. Fundamentalism and evangelicalism are both contested concepts. Fundamentalism has its origins in an early‐20th‐century movement within American evangelical Protestantism. The term is derived from The Fundamentals, a series of booklets published between 1910 and 1915 that aimed to summarise the ‘fundamentals’ of the faith in the face of perceived threats from modernism and ecumenism (Marsden, 1980). Evangelicalism’s origins are associated with revivals in the British Isles and North America in the 1740s, led by evangelists such as John Wesley and George Whitefield. ‘Fundamentalist’ is a term that some ‘evangelicals’ would use to describe themselves and Paisley often prefers ‘fundamentalist’ to ‘evangelical’ when describing his beliefs and those of the Free Presbyterian Church. In this research, I have chosen to distinguish between different types of evangelicalism, rather than between evangelicalism and fundamentalism, for two reasons. First, evangelicalism was an important movement in Northern Ireland before the emergence of fundamentalism from the American context. Second, evangelicals in Northern Ireland who could be classified as fundamentalists often call themselves evangelicals.

3. The analyses drawn on here adopt inclusive definitions of evangelicalism that include at least four characteristics: the need to convert or be ‘born again’; a high regard for the Bible; understanding Christ’s resurrection as a historical event necessary for salvation; and a commitment to activism (Bebbington, 1989).

4. In May 2005, ECONI became the Centre for Contemporary Christianity in Ireland (CCCI). I refer to the group throughout as ECONI, because the research was conducted before the change to CCCI.

5. While the existing research has mapped diverse evangelical groups, it has not definitively quantified revisionist and traditional evangelicals. The most systematic attempt to do so has been by Mitchell and Tilly (2004), who presented evidence that evangelicals are less likely than other Protestants to vote for the DUP. This surprising conclusion may indicate that there are more revisionist than traditional evangelicals, or that the number of revisionists is growing.

6. This research is part of a larger project on evangelicalism in Northern Ireland, conducted from 2002 to 2004 and including 61 semi‐structured interviews. The data presented here are based on eight interviews with activists in the IOO, EPS and Caleb, as well as the organisations’ literature. Many of the interviewees were active in all three organisations.

7. Data provided by George Dawson, Grand Master of the IOO.

8. Caleb’s representative was David McConaghie, an Elim Pentecostal minister.

9. In her study of the Civic Forum, Palshaugen (2005: 159) found that it had been affected by opposition to its existence, led by the DUP. In her interviews, members of the Forum said that they were under attack by people with connections to the DUP within the Forum.

10. For general overviews of the Stormont era and evaluations of the extent of Protestant privilege and power, see Ruane and Todd (1996), McGarry and O’Leary (1995) and Whyte (1990). For more recent analyses of socio‐political change in Northern Ireland, see Ruane and Todd (2006), Tonge (2005), McGarry and O’Leary (2004) and Dixon (2001b).

11. Traditional evangelicals call themselves ‘mainstream’ to distinguish between themselves and ECONI, who they consider to be the evangelical fringe or not evangelical at all.

12. The IOO’s political press releases are an exception to this.

13. Revisionist evangelicals have been willing to work with Catholic and secular groups. Their joint activism usually focuses on peace‐building or ‘social justice’ projects.