Nineteenth-century evangelicalism and polarization.

Miller, David W.

IRENE WHELAN The Bible War in Ireland: The "Second Reformation" and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1800-1840. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, $60.00.

'SECOND REFORMATION" (or "New Reformation") is a term coined by evangelicals to describe the period around the 1820s when it was just possible that sensible people who were not paying very careful attention to all that was happening in Ireland might be persuaded that the Catholics were about to become Protestants. In the preceding decade a number of bishops and priests had consented to the reading of the Bible "without note or comment" in schools being provided by mainly Protestant agencies. In the mid-1820s hundreds of Catholic country folk were reportedly converted to the established church in various locations. A prominent Irish Catholic bishop floated the idea of a merger of the Roman and Anglican churches. Although Irene Whelan has added relatively little new detail of what happened in the Second Reformation, she has provided a richly contextual understanding of how and why it happened. In this case, as in so many historical situations, context is (almost) everything.

The first component of this context is the growth of emotionally-charged evangelicalism within the Church of Ireland and the smaller nonconformist denominations of English (not Scottish) origins. For a reviewer accustomed to reading historical accounts of evangelicalism written by evangelical partisans, Whelan's treatment is refreshingly detached, lair and unsullied by any need to make the past fit a present-day religious agenda. She is also careful to distinguish her own perspective from the contemporary popular view that an evangelical was simply a Protestant committed to converting Catholics. Her analysis situates evangelicalism in a larger cultural framework of romanticism, national awakening, and moral reform. She rightly emphasizes the exceptionally contentious role played by a number of evangelical landlords along the border of Ulster from Down to Sligo--the very area in which there had been sufficient non-Presbyterian Protestants for the gentry to mobilize popular resistance to radicalism in the 1790s. Interestingly, the Presbyterians showed little interest in the conversion of Catholics until the late 1830s.

Mobilization of Catholics for democratic politics was the second component. In 1808 Daniel O'Connell had gained secure leadership of lay opinion by thwarting a deal by which a government veto over episcopal appointments would be the price for legislation enabling Catholics to sit in Parliament. Catholic bishops were initially inclined to cooperate with government and Irish Protestant spokesmen in education initiatives, but by the early 1820s they understood clearly that theirs was not the only Catholic voice. By the end of the decade, the power of the Catholic majority was evident even to the British governing classes, when the revolutionary potential of O'Connell's popular movement induced an anti-Catholic government to admit him and his co-religionists to Parliament. Indeed, the events of 1828-32 did constitute a revolution in the United Kingdom as a whole, and Whelan rightly stresses the revolutionary character in particular of the formation of the Irish National Education Board in 1831, which, despite its creators' non-denominational intent, would evolve into a thoroughly denominational, publicly-funded system the likes of which the bishops could scarcely have imagined two decades earlier.

This development reflects a third component of the Second Reformation's context: the growing impatience of English liberals with the claims of an Irish established church that ministered to only 11% of the population. Although Whelan is certainly aware of this component, she might with advantage have highlighted it more consistently. William Magee, the Anglican archbishop of Dublin, clearly understood this threat in 1822 when he preached a charge to his clergy that is often taken as the trigger that set off the Second Reformation. Whelan does not make it sufficiently clear that Magee was a high churchman, not an evangelical. Had he been an evangelical he probably would not have chosen to insult Presbyterians as well as Catholics in his famous charge: "we are hemmed in by two opposite descriptions of Christians: the one [the Catholics] possessing a Church without what we can call a Religion and the other [the Presbyterians] possessing a Religion without what we can call a Church." This point is important because Whelan's title links the Second Reformation to "the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations."

What do we mean by "polarization" in this context? One understanding of such a process focuses on the breakdown after the 1810s of cooperation over education between members of the Catholic and Anglican elites. In a long footnote, Whelan taxes Desmond Bowen for his "nostalgic" emphasis on such cooperation, (and a similar criticism might be made of Nigel Yates' recent The Religious Condition of Ireland, 1770-1850). Nevertheless, the breakdown of elite cooperation, however unrealistic the latter may have been, does seem to be what she means by "polarization." That understanding has little obvious relationship to another usage of the term "polarization," viz. the emergence of pan-Protestant democratic politics, which made a Catholic-Presbyterian alliance reminiscent of the 1790s unthinkable by the 1890s. Presbyterians, comprising more than half of the Protestants in Ulster, had been essentially unrepresented in whatever elite lovefests there may have been in the 1810s for the simple reason that there was no such thing as a Presbyterian bishop and practically no such thing as a Presbyterian landlord who might have attended them.

So the causal links between the Second Reformation and the polarization of Protestant-Catholic relations remain murky. However, the appearance of Andrew Holmes' The Shaping of Ulster Presbyterian Belief and Practice, 1770-1840 (Oxford University Press, 2006) gives us, for the first time, a really deep understanding of Presbyterian evangelicalism. There is reason to hope that at long last the Irish historical profession can come to terms with how changes within Protestantism (and Catholicism) during the nineteenth century contributed to the formation and character of the two Irish civil polities of the twentieth. I suspect that in this enterprise there is as much to be learned from examination of the hard-nosed machinations of ecclesiastics of all stripes over the spoils of gradual disestablishment from 1829 to 1869 as of such relatively flimsy social constructions as evangelicalism and nationalism. Nevertheless, Whelan's contribution is solid, informative and welcome. Especially in its treatment of landlord-sponsored evangelicalism in the northern borderlands it will be seminal.

--Carnegie Mellon University