[5] Religion and society: conversions and controversy

The nineteenth-century confrontation between a more assertive Protestant evangelicalism and the emerging nationalism of the Catholic Irish has been recognized as a significant contributor to the deep divisions in contemporary Irish society.1 What is less clear, however, is the precise relationship between cause and effect. Was political conservatism, for example, a stimulant or a consequence of anti-Catholicism? What precisely was the mixture of religious and political convictions in the minds of those Protestant enthusiasts who committed themselves to the conversion of the masses? Any attempt to unravel the complexities of the Irish Protestant psychology must take as its starting-point the overriding sense of moral responsibility with which evangelicals were imbued, and which blurred the distinctions between religious and political activities. For evangelical contempt for the Roman Catholic Church emanated not only from its doctrinal ‘heresies’ but from their social and political consequences. Evangelicals throughout Britain saw the Catholic Church in Ireland as another branch of the same international institution that was so busily engaged in perpetuating its own wealth and despotic power in Spain and Rome. The Protestant Union, formed in London in 1813, pointed out that Catholic Emancipation would give Roman Catholics, ‘not only the exercise of unlimited and uncontrolled religious liberty, but…the grant of the most extensive political power’.2 It was felt that Irish peasants, already burdened by poverty and ignorance, were exploited in every manner by a devious priesthood under vows of obedience to the ‘man of sin’. Their submission to superstitious ritual and their inability to rise above their poor standards of living were seen as a direct result of their lack of access to religious truths which alone could inspire them to better themselves. Gideon Ouseley’s diagnosis of the nation’s ills was not untypical: ‘the Priests and their fatal doctrines are the chief, if not the sole, cause

of the peculiar sorrows of Ireland.’3 The belief that the fault lay not with the people, but with their priests, inspired evangelicals with confidence in their ability to convert Ireland to Protestantism.