Rhetoric, Legacy of Strife Mark Ulster’s Bible Belt

It is one of the largest, richest modern churches in the British Isles, but its aura is more like that of the American Bible Belt than of Western Europe.

Its exterior is graced with a clock and the admonition, “Time Is Short.” Inside, three times each Sunday, Northern Ireland’s most prominent political leader, the Rev. Ian Paisley, belts out sermons laced with fire, damnation and political rhetoric.

Angered at Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for signing an agreement with the mainly Roman Catholic Irish Republic that gave Dublin a formal consultative role in the British-ruled province, Paisley last week solemnly told his congregation: “Right now, we hand Mrs. Thatcher over to the devil that she might learn not to blaspheme.”

The outspoken evangelism of Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church and his booming rhetoric are extreme, even for many Northern Ireland Protestants. But his message appeals to a part of their collective spirit.

His combative, uncompromising style personifies the gritty nature and strong sense of religion that sets apart the 900,000 Protestants of the province, also known by the old Irish provincial name of Ulster, as members of one of Europe’s most unusual and controversial communities.

Isolated from the mainstream of European ideas and feeling threatened by the shadow of Catholic Ireland to the south, Protestants here today draw strength from the same fundamentalist values that sustained their forefathers, who settled the north of Ireland for the English Crown nearly four centuries ago.

When Britain granted independence to Ireland in 1921, Protestant threats of civil war led to the partitioning of the island, leaving the Protestant-dominated north under British rule. Ever since, the Irish Republican Army has waged a campaign of assassination and bombings in an effort to end British rule and Protestant domination in the north.

Like Northern Ireland itself, which to this day has remained an enclave of Protestant dominance and British rule, Protestantism here exists in a time warp. Its view of Catholicism as the ultimate evil fits more appropriately into 16th-Century Europe, when religious confrontation shaped events.

The ties binding religion and politics in Northern Ireland are as inseparable as they once were in Puritan New England.

Most Outspoken Politician

It is no coincidence that Paisley is both the province’s best-known preacher and its most outspoken politician. He is a Northern Irish member of the British Parliament, and people attending his sermons here are given excerpts from his House of Commons speeches on their way out.

Another Protestant member of Parliament, William McCrae, doubles as a Gospel singer, with several albums to his credit.

Outnumbering the Catholic minority in the province by nearly 2 to 1, Ulster’s Protestants have held power ever since they arrived. Challenges to their dominance have merely increased their moral fundamentalism:

--One of the biggest political battles of recent times in Belfast came in the mid-1960s when some Protestant liberals suggested untying the swings in public playgrounds on Sundays so that children could use them. Although the swings were eventually unchained, the furor over violating the Sabbath helped destroy the Northern Ireland Labor Party, a budding coalition of moderates from both religions. The party split irreconcilably over the issue.

--Ulster’s Protestant political leaders oppose recent British government plans to permit Sunday shopping throughout the United Kingdom.

--The legalization of homosexuality in 1967, recognized throughout the rest of the United Kingdom, was rejected in Northern Ireland under the evocative banner, “Save Ulster from Sodomy.”

--A successful fight to prevent a British law legalizing abortion from affecting Northern Ireland proved a rare issue where Protestant and Catholic politicians actually joined forces.

--In the rough drinking clubs of working-class West Belfast, signs prohibiting obscene language hang over the bars where shipyard workers relax after work.

But, in one of the many contradictions of Northern Ireland, people who profess such high moral standards talk matter-of-factly about murdering Catholics.

Ulster’s Protestants trace their roots to a rugged pioneering history similar to that of America’s early settlers.

The first band of Presbyterian settlers left Scotland for Ulster in 1609, two years after the English established their first permanent American colony at Jamestown. There has been little peace in the north of Ireland since.

In most parts of Ireland, only a thin layer of landed English aristocracy was required for colonization, but rebellion by several Catholic clans in the northern part of the island against efforts to impose the Protestant Reformation made Ulster a hotbed of resistance requiring a more extensive presence.

The Protestant pioneers confiscated the best land, built cities that served as armed camps and persevered with dogged determination.

The victory of William of Orange over the Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne on July 12, 1690, which consolidated the Protestant domination, remains cause for the biggest annual holiday in the province. It is an occasion for menacing, often-intimidating Protestant marches, accompanied by music provided by what participants call “kick-the-Pope” bands.

Although an active lobbying effort has given Catholic Irish-Americans a visibly higher profile in the United States, Ulster Protestants, known in America as Scots-Irish, are quick to point to their own contributions to American history, including Presidents Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan and Chester A. Arthur.

And their claim to Davy Crockett, Kit Carson and Daniel Boone is as much a measure of admiration for men of strength as a symbol of pride in their link with the American frontier.

But the determination and Calvinistic zeal that enabled them to survive a frontier existence in a hostile land are those same qualities that today result in knee-jerk rejection of compromises, such as the recent Anglo-Irish agreement aimed at ending their 300-year-old feud with the Catholic minority.

To a community that talks admiringly of “hard men” and tends to place faith before reason, such compromise smacks of treachery, betrayal and sellout.

“The battle has gone on for so many generations that people can only think in terms of an enemy--and you don’t compromise with your enemy,” said Frank Wright, a political scientist at Queens University in Belfast who has studied Protestant political ideology.

The Rev. David Armstrong, a Presbyterian minister, found this out the hard way. After crossing the road to visit a Catholic congregation in the western town of Limavady earlier this year, he received threats against his family and was eventually driven from his job by the elders of his church.

Threat to Freedom

One reason for this uncompromising attitude is that many Ulster Protestants view the possibility of Catholic domination as a threat to their individual freedoms.

“We shall not be enslaved by tyranny and popery,” Paisley thundered last week. “We are free people--and for freedom we shall contend and, if need be, lay down our lives.”

On a less dramatic level, middle-class Protestant women worry about such issues as contraception if Northern Ireland should ever be united with the Irish Republic in a country that would have a huge Catholic majority.

Consequently, a fierce loyalty to the British Crown is an important pillar of the ideology of Ulster’s Protestants.

The death of 5,766 Ulster soldiers on a single July afternoon in France during the battle of the Somme in 1916--seen as a symbol of this loyalty--has become a powerful part of the Protestant heritage here. That the slaughter occurred within a few months of the Catholic-led Easter Rebellion in Dublin against British rule is a fact they are quick to point out.

But despite the depth of this loyalty, Ulster Protestants have always placed one condition on it: Britain must protect them from Catholic Ireland.

It was the perceived withdrawal of this protection that led to Protestant threats of civil war and the eventual partition of Ireland in 1921. A similar backlash in 1974 brought down a carefully constructed regional government that gave Catholics a share of power for the first time. Today, Protestant reaction threatens the recent Anglo-Irish agreement, which gives the Irish Republic a formal consultative role in Northern Ireland.

What is especially upsetting to Protestants is that the latest compromise has been shaped by Thatcher, who once said that Ulster is as British as her north London constituency of Finchley and whose refusal to yield to imprisoned IRA hunger strikers won praise from Protestant hard-liners.

“It isn’t fair,” commented a woman demonstrator clutching a Union Jack outside the building where British and Irish leaders sealed their pact earlier this month. “You bring your kids up to respect . . . (the government) and then it turns against you.”

But changes are occurring in the Protestant community.

Television and modern communications have exposed the province to progressive ideas and, as a result, a more moderate, liberal middle class of Protestant has emerged that advocates reconciliation with the Catholic minority.

A Belfast grammar school that opened a few years ago accepts children of both religions. The school now has a long waiting list.

Traditional hard-line Protestant organizations, such as the Orange Order, admit that their memberships are down. Mainly, it seems, their appeal to young people has waned.

His congregation’s expulsion of Armstrong, the Presbyterian minister, for entering a Catholic church even brought a brief, but noticeable public outcry and drew condemnation in some Protestant newspaper editorials.

So far, however, these more moderate forces remain no match for the power of Paisley and the forces of Protestant fundamentalism.

“Paisley captures part of the Ulster character,” Methodist clergyman Robin Roddie noted, in a recent interview. “When the community feels threatened as it does now, the appeal of people like him stays strong.”