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Reverend Ian Paisley, for 30 years a key figure in the Northern
Ireland Protestant community, is to attend this
year's
St. Patrick's Day festivities at the White House. This news item
brought to my mind a story from the late 1970s. I believe it is
a true story: I read it in a respectable newspaper at the time and
it stuck in my mind at once. I shall have to give it to you from
memory, though, as I have not been able to locate the original.
The British prime minister at that time was one James Callaghan.
"Gentleman Jim," as he was known, was a back-slapper — a bluff,
hearty, can't-we-all-get-along sort of chap. He was not an especially
good prime minister, but everyone seemed to like him.
Gentleman Jim sooner or later had to go to Northern Ireland and
meet with "community leaders." All modern British prime ministers
have to. The official name of the country of which they are chief
executive is "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland"
and they can hardly ignore the last two words, though they would
dearly like to. For 80 years, British politicians have regarded
Northern Ireland as a snake pit, a problem to which there is no
hope of ever finding a solution. A few years before Callaghan, another
British politician, Reginald Maudling, had returned to London from
his first visit to Ulster to be asked, by a reporter, what he thought
could be done about the situation there. "Nothing," he replied,
"Nothing whatsoever. They are all mad." Few of Her Majesty's ministers
have spoken so bluntly, but it's what they — along with most
other mainland British — all think.
Anyway, off went Jim Callaghan to meet with those "community leaders."
One of them was Ian Paisley. Now, Paisley is a Protestant of the
most fundamentalist sort, founder of the Free Presbyterian Church
of Ulster. He detests Catholicism, routinely refers to the Catholic
Church as a limb of Satan, to the Pope as the Scarlet Whore of Rome,
and so on. At their meeting, he delivered a long harangue to Callaghan
along those lines, warning him of the mortal peril their nation
was in from the advancing armies of Popery.
Callaghan put up with it for a while, then, when Paisley paused
for breath, interrupted in his very best oil-on-troubled-waters
voice: "Come, come, Mr. Paisley. Are we not all the children of
God?"
Paisley: "No, Sir. We are the children of wrath."
Theologically speaking, Paisley's remark is well-founded. Paisley's
congregation — the "Frees" broke away from the Irish Presbyterian
Church 50 years ago this month — is part of the Calvinist tradition,
whose doctrines take the omnipotence and omniscience of God to their
logical
| “It
is not surprising that the situation in Northern Ireland
keeps producing uncanny parallels with that in the Middle
East.” |
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conclusions.
If God really is all-powerful, then nothing men can do is likely
to be very impressive to him. His natural inclination must be to
send us all off to eternal damnation, because of Adam's disobedience
in the Garden of Eden. If any of us are to be saved, it can only
be by God's gift, since we are incapable of winning His favor though
our own efforts. And if any of us are to be saved, God already knows
who, since he knows everything.
People who follow these doctrines are naturally inclined to think
that they themselves have a better than average chance of salvation,
since they at least have grasped the Truth, while outsiders are
lost in ignorance. It is a short step from there to the notion of
an elect, a chosen people, battered and besieged in this world,
but destined for glory in the next. You could hardly invent a theology
better suited to the position of the Ulster Protestants, one of
the most unloved of all the world's minority peoples. Nor is it
surprising that the situation in Northern Ireland keeps producing
uncanny parallels with that in the Middle East. In the words of
a Presbyterian historian:
Congregations
could easily identify with Israel, taking possession of the promised
land, threatened by the hostility of its fierce inhabitants.*
I confess to a fondness for the Ulster Protestants, with whom I
have some slight connections. It is true that they live on land
taken from others 400 years ago, but I cannot see why any American
should think less of them for that… Paisley's ferocious doctrines
are a minority taste — some 14,000 congregants among Ulster's
950,000 Protestants, far more of whom are Episcopalians — and
have never influenced public policy. Most of what you have heard
about discrimination against Catholics in Ulster is lies put out
by Sinn Féin, a terrorist movement organized along Leninist lines,
which has, since its creation 95 years ago, allied itself enthusiastically
with every enemy of western civilization, from Kaiser Wilhelm and
Hitler to Colonel Gaddafi.
Ulster Protestants are a slow, stolid, quiet, decent, law-abiding
people, unstylish and unfashionable. They have produced few intellectuals
— scanning my bookshelves, I see only one Ulster Protestant
novel, Sam Keery's Lilliburlero, which is not very good.
They are desperately deficient in media and propaganda skills, at
which their enemies excel. They hardly belong in the modern world
at all.
All this is changing, of course. Just as pinched, poor, righteous
old Catholic Ireland is a fast-fading memory (see Mary Kenny's very
good book on this, titled Goodbye
to Catholic Ireland), so the Ulstermen are gradually being
modernized and urbanized. Like many Israelis — the parallels
really are unavoidable — they want to live a normal life in
a modern country. Whether their enemies will allow this is still,
as with the Israelis, an open question.
Now approaching his 75th birthday, Paisley remains the most popular
politician in Ulster: in the European elections of June 1999, when
the province voted as a single unit, Paisley got 28.4 percent of
the vote, more than any other candidate. Very few of those who voted
for him share his theological convictions. They support him because
he has stood up for them, fearlessly and consistently, through all
these years of torment and betrayal, when they have been badly in
want of people to stand up for them. I doubt that will be enough
to get him a seat next to George Bush at any White House function;
but where Ian Paisley comes from, plain speaking, fierce integrity,
and the courage to face down the world's cruelest, most amoral terrorist
gangs, still count for something.
*R.F.G. Holmes, Our Irish Presbyterian Heritage (Belfast,
1985).
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