Irish Episcopalians in the Scottish Episcopal Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway during the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In his recent doctoral thesis, the author has undertaken the fundamental research of a close examination of the composition of congregations, to establish the substantial contribution of working-class Church of Ireland immigrants to the nineteenth-century expansion of the Scottish Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway in the west of Scotland. He has thereby supplied a correction to the usual Episcopalian idea that the Scottish Church was the outcome of the interaction between a native Scottish tradition and influences from England. He has also redressed the other emphases in this area, by working-class historians, who tend to neglect working-class religious activity altogether, and by historians of Irish emigration, who concentrate primarily upon Catholic emigrants, or in a secondary sense, stress the role of Presbyterian emigrants at the expense of members of the Church of Ireland. This essay delineates the limits to this Irish influence, in the barriers to working-class participation in religion, and in the different characteristics of the Episcopal tradition in Scotland and Ireland, the former increasingly Catholic-minded, the latter strongly Protestant.