Presbyterian Church In Ireland

The stronghold of Ulster Protestantism is the Presbyterian Church. This is a study of the Presbyterians of Ireland, who they are, where they have come from, their theological and political conflicts, their identity and ethos, and their significant role in Irish religious and political history.

Irish Presbyterians and the Shaping of Western Pennsylvania, 1770–1830 is a historical study examining the religious culture of Irish immigrants in the early years of America. Despite fractious relations among competing sects, many immigrants shared a vision of a renewed Ireland in which their versions of Presbyterianism could flourish free from the domination of landlords and established church. In the process, they created the institutional foundations for western Pennsylvanian Presbyterian churches. Rural Presbyterian Irish church elders emphasized community and ethnoreligious group solidarity in supervising congregants’ morality. Improved transportation and the greater reach of the market eliminated near-subsistence local economies and hastened the demise of religious traditions brought from Ireland. Gilmore contends that ritual and daily religious practice, as understood and carried out by migrant generations, were abandoned or altered by American-born generations in the context of major economic change.

If there is to be a lasting Irish solution, Protestants will have to be accommodated. Presbyterians, the largest Protestant denomination in Northern Ireland, have had a profound effect on the region's history and politics. Yet they are often misunderstood or simply ignored in the search for political solutions to the conflict. In this timely book, former Presbyterian Moderator John Dunlop explores the identity of modern Irish Presbyterianism, explaining its complex sense of Britishness and Irishness, but arguing against the siege mentality which "will be the death of us all".