One
Christian demagogue who spent his life preaching a gospel of hatred in the name
of Jesus was the Reverend Ian Paisley, founder of the Free Presbyterian Church
movement of Ulster and of North America.
Paisley had been raised in religious bigotry—his father had been an
independent Baptist preacher who had served in the Ulster Volunteers—a Protestant
militia formed to protect the Protestant ascendency in the years immediately
before World War I. Paisley himself
began preaching at the age of sixteen and his message from the first was one of
fundamentalism and religious bigotry.
The
conflicts that tore Northern Ireland apart during the second half of the
twentieth century were not essentially religious conflicts but rather a
socio-economic struggle between the native Irish who were held in menial jobs
and high unemployment by the Scots-Irish who were the descendants of Scottish
settlers whom the British had transplanted to Ireland in the late seventeenth
and in the eighteenth centuries. The
native Irish tended to be Catholic; the Scots Irish were usually Presbyterian,
though sometimes Anglican, Baptist, or Methodist. Due to the eighteenth-century British laws
that prohibited Catholics from owning land, studying at the universities,
entering the professions, or having sufficient capital to build or own
industries, eighteenth-century Ireland had economically fragmented with the
Protestant minority being the landowners and capitalists and the Irish majority
being tenant farmers and menial workers.
Nineteenth-century reforms and twentieth-century independence of the
Irish Republic corrected this imbalance in southern Ireland, but in Ulster, the
six-counties that remained under British occupation, the Scots-Irish Protestant
population was the majority and was able to hold the Irish (and Catholic)
sector of society in economic bondage.
The problem was that despite the relative prosperity of Ulster, there
were only so many jobs to go around and what employment there was was tied to
the Orange Lodges—Masonic-style associations of
Protestant Unionists. Unionists
were those who were dedicated to maintaining Union with Great Britain in the
“United Kingdom.” You got your job
through your connections with the Lodges.
As Catholics did not, and could not, belong to these associations it was
much more difficult for them to find employment and when they did it was in the
more menial work that the Protestant upper and middle class would not
undertake. The result was high
unemployment among the Irish (and Catholic) underclass and the resultant social
evils that go with economic hopelessness.
In 1964 Ulster Irish looked to the experience of the African American
struggle for Civil Rights and began their own peaceful organization for civil
rights. They wanted”
1. and end to job discrimination and
a fair share of the employment; and in particular equal access to civil service
jobs
2. public housing to be allocated on
the basis of need and not of religious affiliation
3. reform of the police force where
almost all police were drawn from the Protestant sector of society
4. an end to property requirements
for voting so that all citizens could vote regardless of whether or not they
owned property
5. guarantees of habeas corpus,
freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, all of which were frequently denied
the Irish Catholic community
6. electoral reform to end the
gerrymandering that gave the Unionists disproportionate representation in
government.
Terrence
O’Neill, the Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, showed an openness to
the movement and the reforms they were seeking.
Ian Paisley immediately organized a resistance to the civil rights
movement, founding the Ulster Protestant Volunteers, a paramilitary group whose
aim was to intimidate the civil rights movement out of existence. This in turn spawned the Ulster Volunteer
Force, another Protestant association to prevent civil rights for the native
Irish. The Ulster Protestant Volunteers
and the Ulster Volunteer Force began organizing marches through native Irish
neighborhoods to intimidate the populace from civil rights activities. At this point, the Irish Republican Army was
still dormant and had not become active, but in June 1966 the Ulster Volunteer
Force was responsible for the burning of several homes and businesses belonging
to the native Irish and several Catholic schools. They also shot dead two Irish civilians on
their way home from Mass. This is
generally considered to be the beginnings of the period of terror known as “The
Troubles” in which over 3500 would lose their lives and almost 50,000 would be
injured. This also triggered the revival
of the Irish Republican Army, an Irish and Catholic terrorist group whose goal
was to protect the native Irish population from the Unionist violence and to
respond in kind to the aggressive attacks of the various Unionists
militias. In response to the escalation
of violence which he had begun, Ian Paisley would later organize two more
paramilitary groups, The Force and The Ulster Resistance.
Paisley’s
political views and reliance on violence was rooted in his religious
convictions that saw Catholicism as the religion of the anti-Christ. For Ian Paisley true religion was not simply
Protestantism—he was as opposed to most Protestantism as he was Catholicism—but
in a Biblical fundamentalism, a rigorous Calvinism with its doctrine of double
predestination, and an appeal to the sixteenth-century reformers who had
declared the pope to be the Anti-Christ and Catholicism to be a diabolic
corruption of authentic Christianity.
Paisley had left the Presbyterian Church in Ireland to form his own
denomination, the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster. He was rigidly anti-ecumenical and one of the
reasons he broke with mainline Presbyterianism was Presbyterian involvement in
the World Council of Churches which he saw as compromising pure Protestant
doctrine by its association with other denominations. (The Catholic Church does not belong to the
World Council of Churches, though it does have “observer status” with it;
several Orthodox Churches do belong however and they do certain things such as
prayers to the Mother of God of which Paisley disapproved vehemently.)
It really
was Ian Paisley who turned the conflict in Northern Ireland from a political
and socio-economic conflict into a religious one by making it a Protestant
cause.
How did
Ian Paisley feel about the native Irish?: his rhetoric was worthy of a George
Wallace or a Ross Barnett: "They breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin" he
declared. "Catholic homes caught
fire because they were loaded with petrol bombs; Catholic churches were
attacked and burned because they were arsenals and priests handed out
sub-machine guns to parishioners" he said.
It wasn’t because they were Irish that he said these things—he himself
claimed to be “Irish” though his ancestry was Scots. It was because they were
Catholics. When the beloved Pope John
XXIII died in 1963, Paisley declared from his pulpit: “This Romish man of sin
is now in hell.”
In the New York Times obituary this
morning it was reported that while his politics had softened in his final
years, the legacy of hatred remains:
But his politics were predominantly a crusade against Irish
Catholics. And when it was over, when he had softened the diatribes and accepted
leadership in a power-sharing government, the legacies of fighting and
religious hatreds remained. Housing was still overwhelmingly segregated,
discrimination in jobs was still common, and 3-year-olds, researchers said,
continued to display sectarian instincts.
Sixty years of preaching leaves a
legacy of hatred. This man was the
devil’s evangelist with his gospel of hatred.
If Calvin were right and we are predestined from all eternity to heaven
or to hell, there is no doubt where a man whose life produced such evil fruit would
find himself. But, ironically, if the
Gospel as proclaimed by the Catholic tradition is right, there is a hope of mercy for us
all, even Ian Paisley.
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