Paisley: Religion and Politics in Northern Ireland. Steve Bruce. Abstract. Ian Paisley is unique in having founded his own church and party, and led both to.
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- It was religion, not politics that drove Ian Paisley
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Personal ambition aside, Paisley has always been driven more by religion than by politics. It was the fact that he saw the defence of "Ulster" and defence of the Reformation settlement as one and the same which made him the most intransigent of unionists. If Ulster was the last unsullied patch of Protestantism in Europe, the duty to defend it was god-given, essential for salvation. To compromise was to risk the wrath of the Almighty. To give an inch to nationalism was to go against God.
It is not possible to fully understand the intensity of Paisley's decades of fulmination against "weak" unionist leaders other than in this context.
It was religion, not politics that drove Ian Paisley
Contrary to what seemed implied on Monday night, the DUP, founded in , was not Paisley's first political party. He was top man he was always top man in Ulster Protestant Action, set up in supposedly to defend Protestant areas against allegedly imminent IRA attack. The explicit references to religious commitment are important. It was when opposition to the civil rights movement gave Paisley's message a resonance well beyond the ranks of religious fundamentalists that the DUP was formed as a more conventional — these things are relative — political formation, with fundamentalists front and centre but aiming to appeal also to voters more concerned with immediate issues than with the end-times.
Paisley: Religion and Politics in Northern Ireland - Steve Bruce - Google Книги
Throughout this period and for years afterwards, Paisley was preaching religion as well as well as proclaiming politics and there was no doubting which he reckoned should have the higher priority. In he opened the Martyrs' Memorial Church on the Ravenhill Road, reputedly at that point the largest Protestant church built anywhere in the 20th century, where, on Sunday evenings, in ebullient and belligerent terms, he would liken the political trials of Ulster Protestants to the travails of the Israelites wandering in the desert sustained only by certainty that they were God's chosen people and would prevail.
God would smite their enemies, he vowed.
It would have been interesting to hear him ruminate on that distinctive and defining element of his history and what he made of it now. We might usefully have heard, too, of the distorted class dimension of his appeal. In February , Mary Holland, in the Observer, wrote one of the first lengthy articles about Paisley to appear in the British press, covering his campaign to take the Bannside Stormont seat from his then bete-noir, Terence O'Neill.
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She rightly predicted that, standing as a Protestant Unionist, he would do a lot better he was to come within a thousand votes of the Stormont Premier than the generality of commentators expected. Her opening paragraph referred to "the revolt of the bucket-carriers" — the rural Protestant poor who didn't have running water and lugged buckets from the well.
That didn't figure at all on Monday night, and it was a big miss.
Paisley's religion also helps explain the U-turn which took him into coalition with Sinn Fein. This book draws on the author's twenty years of close acquaintance with Paisley's people and on his knowledge of religion and politics in other settings to describe and explain Paisleyism.
Paisley: Religion and Politics in Northern Ireland
Paisley's religious identity wa Paisley's religious identity was an important part of his political appeal to a minority core of unionist voters, but his constant criticism of liberal and ecumenical trends in the major Protestant churches alienated many unionists. However, between and , those unionists became so frustrated with the British Government's concessions to the Irish Republican movement that they finally set aside their dislike of Paisley's divisive religion and made the DUP the majority unionist party.
Ulster unionism , religion , politics , political violence , fundamentalism , Democratic Unionist Party , British Government. Don't have an account?
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