Presbyterianism

Guilt and Calvinist Theology in Lockhart's Adam Blair and Hogg's Confessions

by Amanda McClendon

Written for Professor Ian Campbell at the University of Edinburgh, Fall 2005.

'Anie Gospell Way': Religious Diversity in Interregnum Scotland

by Scott Spurlock

Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 37 (2007), pp. 89-119

"'Two Sons of Oil' Reconsidered: Irish Covenanters and the Challenge of the New World"

by Peter Gilmore

Paper delivered to the Ulster American Heritage Symposium XV, Omagh, County Tyrone, June 2004

In the 1790s Irish Covenanters had refashioned their historic critique of the British Constitution to accommodate... more In the 1790s Irish Covenanters had refashioned their historic critique of the British Constitution to accommodate radical republican ideology. Forced into exile as a result of republican, nationalist politics, Samuel Brown Wylie reshaped Reformed Presbyterian tenets to reflect American conditions in the sermon and pamphlet "The Two Sons of Oil."  US Congressman William Findley--an Iris immigrant and former Covenanter--responded to Wylie's pamphlet with a massive book.  Their controversy is a debate between cohorts of immigrants, a struggle between two approaches of assimilating traditional Ulster Presbyterianism to American culture.

"'Humbug' vs. 'Sin': the Ulster-American Response to Temperance in Antebellum Pennsylvania"

by Peter Gilmore

Delivered to the Ulster American Heritage Symposium XVI, June 2006, Knoxville, Tennessee.

Among Irish Presbyterian immigrants, and Pennsylvanians of Ulster origins, the temperance movement of the 1820s and... more Among Irish Presbyterian immigrants, and Pennsylvanians of Ulster origins, the temperance movement of the 1820s and 1830s represented simultaneously a source of conflict, a cultural disjuncture and a moment in the process of modernization and Americanization.  Many resisted the call to embrace an alcohol-free culture of individual responsibility and industrious sobriety. The temperance movement launched a cultural revolution through which clergy and laity dramatically altered their cultural assumptions about drink, and their cultural practices.

“Scotch-Irish or Merely Irish”: Brackenridge, Findley, and Contestation of Ethnic Identity in the Early Republic

by Peter Gilmore

Delivered to the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early Republic, Philadelphia, July 2011.

The paper examines the conjuncture of cultural, economic and political circumstances which defined and divided Irish... more The paper examines the conjuncture of cultural, economic and political circumstances which defined and divided Irish Presbyterians and Scots in western Pennsylvania in the 1780s.  Ethnic distinctions tended to coincide with political differences in this region heavily settled by Presbyterians from the north of Ireland.  In the transmontane backcountry Irish Presbyterians tended toward political radicalism, the result of mutually reinforcing democratic politics, economic disadvantage and deeply held religious values.  Theirs was an outlook shaped, in part, by the experience of social and political estrangement in Ulster.  Scottish-born conservatives in western Pennsylvania regarded the radicalism of the backcountry Irish Presbyterians with deep anxiety, all the more so because of similar cultural origins and shared religious affiliations.
This ethno-political antagonism reached a literary apogee in the publications of the Scots-born, frontier litterateur and lawyer Hugh Henry Brackenridge, particularly in his disputation with his political nemesis, the Irish-born, western Pennsylvania democratic leader William Findley.  The two men defended their legislative records and assailed each other while both serving in the Pennsylvania legislature in 1787.  Brackenridge further denounced and defamed Findley as both men engaged in the debate over ratification of the United States Constitution; Findley doggedly defended a backcountry moral economy and local democracy.  The Brackenridge-Findley controversy is indicative of a demarcation in the early United States between immigrants from Scotland and Irish Presbyterians, a divide in which conflicting political views and opposing economic interests reinforced conflicted constructions of ethnic identity.

The Law of Nature and the Ordinance of God: Freedom and Independence for the Golden Lands of Australia as Colonial Prophecy.

by Mark Hutchinson

This paper sets John Dunmore Lang's republican apologetic *Freedom and Independence* in the context of Lang's... more This paper sets John Dunmore Lang's republican apologetic *Freedom and Independence* in the context of Lang's religio-political heritage, connecting the contributions of Calvinism, Knox's Godly Commonwealth, the practical example of American puritanism, Great Awakening affectionalism, all as filtered through the thought and influence of Lang's great mentor, Thomas Chalmers. It is suggested that the key contemporary events for unpacking Lang's hermeneutics are the anti-transportation campaigns as a colonial reflection of global evangelical anti-slavery campaigns, while the implicit contemporary counterpoint to the book is John West's groundbreaking History of Tasmania.  By untangling these contributions to Lang's frenetic one-month writing program aboard ship, one begins to see more coherency in his argument than has previously often been suggested.