[8] Ulster awakened: the 1859 revival

The phenomenon of religious revival, now that it scarcely troubles the Protestant churches of the northern hemisphere, has become an avid subject of inquiry for historians, sociologists and social anthropologists. Such intense study has thankfully improved our understanding of what are bewilderingly complex events. In the past social historians had a tendency to reduce explanations of revival to economic depression, political excitement, or chancy notions of societal modernization. Ecclesiastical historians responded by emphasizing the importance of theology, personal religious experience and the centrality of revivalistic preachers. Such explanations no doubt have their place, but they often fail to describe or interpret the process of religious revival in a way that would be recognizable to those who were revived. While admitting that human beings are not often the best judges of what is happening around them, it is surely churlish not to pay some attention to the human emotions, expectancy and experiences of those who engaged in the community rituals of religious revivalism. More recent work, by suggesting that religious revivals have an internal dynamic of their own, and by paying more attention to the laity and their religious experiences, has shed new light on old problems of explaining outbreaks of dramatic religious enthusiasm.1 In particular, a number of studies of transatlantic revivals have drawn attention to the way in which vibrant community-based rituals, such as the Methodist love-feast and the Presbyterian communion season, have acted as focal points of intense emotion.2 With expectations raised by cottage prayer meetings, vigorous preaching and hymnand psalm-singing, such occasions were often the catalyst for the manifestation of striking religious phenomena, especially in the lives of young, unmarried women.

In explaining the timing and extent of such revivals it is clearly appropriate to pay attention to the wider cultural environment in which they occurred, but such explanations in themselves do not do justice to the profound sense of sinfulness and unworthiness, and the ecstatic sense of forgiveness and release, which recur again and again in the personal accounts of revivalistic experiences. While it would be foolish to ignore the specific social, economic and political setting within which the Ulster revival was located, explanations of what happened in Ulster in 1859 have tended to reduce its religious significance because its interpreters have been largely ignorant of both a much wider tradition of transatlantic revivalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and an indigenous tradition of popular revivalism in Ulster stretching back a quarter of a millennium. Those who have studied transatlantic revivals on a much broader canvas conclude that