Evangelicalism and National Identity in Ulster, 1921–1998. By Patrick Mitchel. Pp. xii + 362. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. isbn 0 19 925615 2. £60

Abstract

Patrick Mitchel is Lecturer in Theology at the Irish Bible Institute, and his study of Evangelicalism in Northern Ireland between 1921 and 1998 is as much a contribution to theology as to history. His ultimate aim is to suggest how Christians, and especially Evangelical Christians, should behave in this intensely political situation. At the heart of the book is a protest against the popular identification of Ian Paisley as the representative figure of ‘Evangelicalism’ in Ulster. The Presbyterian Church in Ireland, Mitchel says, has lost its traditional social and religious dominance and faces a daunting challenge in regaining a distinct, independent identity. He admits, with regret, that ‘the evidence suggests that the [Presbyterian] Church has been shaped by the conflict between Unionism and Nationalism more than it has been shaped by an alternative to that conflict’. Twentieth-century Presbyterianism had to struggle against both ‘liberal theology’ and against the political attractiveness of the Orange Order. Mitchel distinguishes between what he calls the ‘closed’, fundamentalist Evangelicalism of Paisley's Democratic Unionism, which is, he says, attracted by the ‘tribal nationalism’ of the Orange Order and willing to legitimize nationalist objectives with its own version of Evangelical belief and imagery, and an ‘open’ style Evangelicalism, less obsessed with fundamentalism and prepared to accept the Good Friday agreement as a positive step towards political and religious peace.