The Second Coming of Paisley: Militant Fundamentalism and Ulster Politics

1. The Transatlantic Background to Fundamentalism

17 1 The Transatlantic Background to Fundamentalism When the Reverend Ian Paisley preached his first sermon to Martyrs Memorial Free Presbyterian Church, his message painted an image of the long transatlantic history of Calvinism, revivalism, and Bible Protestantism. He derived much of his Christian faith from the connection between British and North American culture and religiosity that had begun with the Puritan emigration and culminated in American militant fundamentalism. Paisley’s religiosity betrayed his western Scottish and militant Ulster Protestant heritage. His immediate family came from a Scottish lineage that included the evangelical Church of Ireland and the Orange Order (the Loyal Orange Institution or, later, Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland) and that for generations had resided in County Tyrone in a contentious area evenly divided between Catholic and Protestant. The family’s religious and political traditions inspired Paisley’s father to join the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1912, to adopt staunch Loyalism and Unionism , and to develop an antagonism toward the Catholic Church.1 Paisley’s family history supplemented his theology: James Kyle Paisley , Ian’s father, a preacher who espoused an anti-Catholic, antimodernist , and antiliberal message, pushed his son toward theological militancy. Kyle Paisley’s parents’ devout Protestantism had influenced their son to become “saved” at age seventeen while attending a gospel campaign held in the Omagh YMCA. After this experience, the young man believed that he was divinely destined for the Lord’s work. Within months of his conversion, Kyle Paisley joined the Baptist Church and took to itinerant preaching, organizing house meetings and open-air prayer sessions 18 † The Old Testament until called to lead a small, independent group that met in the Omagh Orange Hall in Grangemore. His ministry quickly expanded, and he began preaching to a wide range of Ulster’s Protestants, including Independents , Baptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists. Kyle Paisley’s tent-meeting ministry and his willingness to preach to diverse but conservative churches indicate an early path toward revivalism and nondenominationalism separatism.2 In October 1918, Kyle Paisley became the pastor of a small Baptist congregation in Armagh, whose members embraced the new fundamentalist doctrine. The twelve-member church espoused biblical infallibility and the divinity of Christ as well as the Reformed doctrines of salvation through God’s grace and God’s covenant with the righteous. Over the next decade, Kyle Paisley built the congregation to fifty-four members, and his Armagh ministry served as a stepping-stone. In May 1928, he moved to the larger Hill Street Baptist Church in Ballymena, a city that lay in the heart of Ulster’s “Bible Belt.”3 The elder Paisley did not agree with the entire doctrine that the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland professed, and within five years he broke with it over what he saw as a tolerance for modernism. English Baptists, in communion with their conservative Irish brethren, were extremely active in adopting ecumenical ideas, and there were concerns that the Baptist Missionary Society supported liberal missionaries. Like many evangelicals in Ulster, Kyle Paisley was influenced by the fundamentalism of W. P. Nicholson, a position that drove him to withdraw from the Baptist Union.4 Copying Nicholson, he preached a strong, uncompromising message against ecumenism and liberalism—a message that was not universally popular within his congregation. Not every member of his church accepted the decision to leave the Baptist Union or his attacks on several church congregants he charged with immorality. One member owned the land under a pub, and another reputedly had numerous affairs with local women. Refusing to heed a demand from the Baptist Union to repudiate his accusations, Kyle Paisley led a minority into a new independent fundamentalist church, the Waveney Road Tabernacle.5 The new congregation drew up a Reformed and premillennial statement of faith Transatlantic Background to Fundamentalism † 19 adopted from the confession written by the famed nineteenth-century evangelical preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon: We the undersigned, banded together in fraternal union, observing with growing pain and sorrow the loosening hold of many upon the truths of Revelation, are constrained to avow our firmest belief in the verbal inspiration of all Holy Scripture as originally given. To us, the Bible does not merely contain the Word of God, but is the Word of God. From beginning to end, we accept it, believe it, and continue to preach it. . . . We hold and maintain the truths generally known as “the doctrines of grace...