Fortnight Publications Ltd.

Epistle to the RomansAuthor(s): Victoria WhiteSource: Fortnight, No. 296, Supplement: Religion in Ireland (Jun., 1991), pp. 8-9Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25552966 .

Accessed: 24/06/2014 22:15

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Fortnight Publications Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Fortnight.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.101 on Tue, 24 Jun 2014 22:15:51 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

| |

l ... .. .. ... . .

other denominations, no

tably the Brethren, Con

gregationalist and Elim

churches, who are also

strongly represented in the

province. The fundamental em

phasis is on the Bible as

the inspired Word of God, the basis of church order

and the blueprint for the life of the individual. The Bible is the sole authority in the church?

authority based on tradition or on the state

ments of leaders is rejected. Baptists share with

other evangelicals the belief in the need for the

individual to have a personal faith in God. This

results from an inward spiritual change, or

'new birth', which is the work of the Holy

Spirit. This new birth comes about as a

conscious act of faith. It is this inner renewal

which brings a person into the Christian life rather than any outward rite or membership of

a church.

The belief is that this new birth should be followed by a voluntary public confession of

faith in baptism by total immersion, which

symbolises the conversion experience. The

Baptists therefore do not practice infant

baptism. All who have responded to the Gospel are viewed as members of the worldwide family of God which is the true church. The local

church consists of the gathering together of

committed followers of Christ?it does not

have a territorial or parish basis. Membership of a local Baptist church is by individual appli cation: one cannot be born into a Baptist church

and there is no family membership. Applica tion for membership of a Baptist church also

indicates a willingness to submit to the

discipline of that church. Church membership is not taken lightly and, therefore, Baptists tend

to have a higher degree of commitment to their

church than might be found in denominations

where membership is not so strictly defined.

A further Baptist distinctive is the auton

omy of the local church. This means that each

congregation makes its own decisions

independently of any external leader or

denominational hierarchy. Consequently, there

is a variation in belief and practice between

churches and between individuals within the

churches. This is also related to the Baptist belief in liberty of conscience. Their attitude to

matters of doctrine, worship and personal

morality can be summed up as "in essentials

unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things

charity". One outcome of this is the close

involvement of the individual members in the

decision-making and activity of the church, a

probable contributing factor to its vitality. Because of their views on the independence

of the local church, Baptists do not have a

denominational structure with an authority function. The Baptist Union of Ireland exists to

facilitate fellowship and co-operation between

the churches in matters of common concern,

such as evangelism, welfare and ministerial

training. The union seeks to implement the

directives of the local churches agreed in

annual assembly.

Baptists believe in the separation of church

and state. Because they see the church as a body of believers, they reject identification of the

church with the community and they do not

agree with the idea of a state church. Individual

Baptists are, however, free to engage in public life or in political activity.

As they believe that all true believers (not

just Baptists) are members of the universal

church, they see ecumenical activity to produce visible church unity as unnecessary and irrele

vant. Local Baptists and individual members

co-operate in whatever interdenominational

relations they see as appropriate, in accordance

with their liberty of conscience.

Baptist beliefs unite the relationship of the

individual to God with responsibility to fellow believers in the local church, the independence of the local church with co-operation with

others of like mind.

In other parts of the western world, organ ised religion has declined significantly and the values associated with Christianity have

disappeared as secularism and materialism have

taken hold of society. In Ulster, secular

influences are more obvious than in the past but

church-going remains at a high level and is still

an accepted sign of 'respectability'. Belief, rather than unbelief, still characterises the

majority in Ulster society. However, between

1971 to 1981 there was a decline in the mem

bership of the mainstream churches, an

increase in weakly defined belief and a growth in the strength of smaller religious groups. The

1991 census has still to be analysed but it seems

likely that these trends will continue and may even become more marked.

Paul Doherty is a lecturer in environmental studies at the

Universityqf Ulster

Epistle

to the

Romans

VICTORIA WHITE reports on life as a Protestant

in the republic

In Ireland all that the member of the Protestant

Church knows is that he is not a Catholic ... the clause in the Apostle's Creed professing belief in a Catholic church is a standing puzzle to Protestant children.

I DISTINCTLY REMEMBER the day I dis covered I was a Protestant. It stands out in my

mind as a Garden of Eden experience, the day I discovered my shame. "Am I a Catholic or a

Protestant, Mummy?", I asked. "A Protestant",

V ^ * *%* IWk mmmmh. _.^^H^B

t^dWfj^sS^mmmmmmm^^^m^Mlmmm^mmmmm^^^^^

^^^&^W^0" ^SKmmW^m^Bmmmmm^^^MSmwmmL^mm 1

1mJw?Mj?* ,,,.&*> ^^mm^StmmmmmmSSmW^^^>^WetlWm\

l*JJmtflmp> *^^3^^Wa^mm^mmmmmmmmm^mmmm^^^^^^^^^^^i

Seeing things

came the unexpected reply. I was delighted. It

was delicious to find that destiny had singled me out as different. Years later, when we tested

our blood at school, I expected the same to

happen and was bitterly disappointed to find my blood utterly common.

Memories, a few of them, come flooding back. There were two sharp-faced girls down

the road who commented negatively on the

tena- city of my belief in the Virgin Mary. They went on to allege that I did not believe in God; but I squashed them. I did not feel embattled; just different.

Of course, there is no point in my discussing

my experience as a Protestant in the south as if

my experience were typical. There is no typical

experience. My background is this: I was

christened in the Church of Ireland and went to the national school attached to the church, and

to a secondary school of Presbyterian ethos and

international pretentions. Both my parents were

Church of Ireland, my father from Cork of

English extraction, my mother from Donegal, a

medley of Planter, Huguenot and Gael. They were educated and cynical?they did not

believe in God. But their background was

resolutely Protestant and they retained a strong attachment to that cultural background.

The fact that they had no actual belief does not bother me, however, in discussing them as

members ofthe Church of Ireland. What is that

Church, at least in the south, but a social habit?

A group of people held together in Britain because they are English and 'decent' and

'right-thinking' and the Queen is at the helm.

And in Ireland? In Ireland, because they are

'right-thinking' and 'decent' ... for some few, because the Queen is at the helm, for some

because the singing is nice and the words are

beautiful, and for more because it is the only

way they know of not being Catholic.

That's why I started with the quotation from

Shaw, because the reality of the Church of

Ireland in the south boils down to having a

certain sense of being quite different.

Protestants amount to 3 percent of the popula tion?we have no political sway, no power. But

8

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.101 on Tue, 24 Jun 2014 22:15:51 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

we are slightly outside of things and that gives us both freedom and loneliness, depending on

how we are constituted. Only the very dense

can maintain an attitude of confident bluster.

Most of us are laconic and low-key, with a

sense of humour that comes from being forced

to see the other side first.

That is all I can be proud of in the fact that I am a Protestant. I am proud of the fact that that

we are often, in the south, a quiet voice of

dissent: dissent from the bullying and tribal

catch-cries which majorities often indulge in.

As for Tone, Yeats, Grattan, Synge?yes, the

distance their isolation gave them was useful to

them, but mostly they got there because in

those days more Protestants got an education.

Protestants in the south tend to dissociate

themselves completely from the tradition of

unionism in the north. We see ourselves as a

different 'race', and, of course, we are of differ

ent extraction. Ours is also an aristocratic

tradition?which is not to say that Protestants

in the south are aristocrats. There is nothing in

it of Presbyterian populist ideals.

As to the 'Big House' and its attendant

myths, I call it the 'Thady Syndrome'. Thady is the Catholic peasant servant in Maria Edge

worth's Castle Rackrent and some commen

tators see him as engineering the destruction of

the family while he pretends to chronicle its

history. So, too, the obsession with Big Houses

is an attempt to relegate Irish Protestants to

history. The truth is that the number of Irish

Protestants who live in Big Houses is minis

cule. I don't know a single one. Most Irish

Protestants are middle-class, but they are bank

clerks, accountants, auctioneers, engineers, farmers and shopkeepers?that's a run-down

of the main professions in my family. A fair

number of us are writers, artists, singers (even U2 has its Prods), or generally off-the-wall, which belies the image of decent, stupid Prods

which even I perpetuate. My mother means

someone is dull when she describes them as

"very Protestant".

If she calls them "very English", they are

bone-stupid. The unionist Protestants in the

south are few and far between. They mostly hold out in rural areas, where change has been

slower. Nearly all of the Protestants I know are

proud to be Irish. When I defined myself by Protestant back

ground, I neglected to mention that the main

influences on me have had nothing to do with

religion. Much more than a Protestant, I am a

middle-class Dublin female, born in 1962. I

have always lived in a large city and, for most

of my life, it has been a city of the EC. Of course, I am outraged that there is no divorce or

abortion information in the south, but a

majority of Dubliners agrees with me, and

it is certainly not because Dublin is a

Protestant city. In 1975, my late father, Jack White, wrote a

book called Minority Report, in which he discussed the Protestants of the south and made

a plea for their survival. He wanted Protestants

to have access to Protestant education and

hospitals. Ironically, he made an appearance in

church only twice yearly but, of course, he

recognised that Protestants in Ireland make up a social grouping, not a religious one. He was

concerned, he said, that minorites generally should survive.

My father would be 70 were he alive today and he could not have foreseen the kind of

Ireland I am living in. Of course, the Protestant

community is dying but, in Dublin, so is the Catholic one. Slowly, yes, but surely. We are

getting more educated, more affluent, more

cosmopolitan and less religious. Not one of my Catholic friends goes to Mass.

We are finding new social groupings within

our society, new ways of being different. Very

slowly, but very surely, the power of Catholi

cism as the insignia of our nationhood is dying. We will lose a lot but, hopefully, we will gain

a lot too. It is exciting to live in such a rapidly

changing society.

Meanwhile, however, I am different and, unlike most Protestants who pass completely

unremarked, my first name is Victoria. My

parents could have picked Zuleika or Aoife and

got the same kick out of it, but no?and I am

stuck with it. This, along with a few anglicised vowels I picked up from my English class

mates, marks me out as a Protestant, more than

most. I would love to say I had never been

hassled. But, of course, I have.

I remember a Donegal man in a pub wonder

ing how I could have done well in Irish in the Leaving Cert., considering I wasn't

even a ... then he stopped short. I remember a man at

the Yeats Summer School

describing me as "not prop

erly Irish". One of my friends constantly com

mented on mv "problem", once descending in argument to the line: "I can

hurt you and you can't hurt me".

I remember a ghastly St Patrick's Day party in Milan, during which the host got drunk and insulted me snidely for most of the evening. I

deliberately leave out experiences I have had in

the north and with northereners?whether as a

Paddy or as a Prod?because they aren't

relevant.

Sometimes I got steamed up and thought, "If I'm not Irish then neither is Shaw or Yeats

or Beckett, but they're quick to claim them ";

but that only brings me down to the same level.

Literary geniuses should not be given team

shirts and made to line out. In every case, the

real cause of the hassle was the fact that the

hassler felt the need to go on the defence

against the education, money and confidence

my class gave me; and religious weapons are

still more ready-to-hand in Ireland than politi cal ones. The attacker was desperate to attack

me and bring me down to size and so seized on

the Protestantism. But all the explanations in

the world cannot destroy the memory of a most

revealing reduction of religious differences in

Ireland to their truly ridiculous size. We were

sitting in a pub discussing the Dublin Street Carnival. I was with friends and he had never

met me before:

"You're a West Brit," he said.

"I'm not," I said.

"You think Margaret Thatcher is a good

woman," he said.

"I don't," I said.

He swallowed hard.

"Well," he said, tremulously, "you like Morris

dancing more than Irish dancing"!

Victoria White is a writer in Dublin

Conceived in the silence

of the heart

GERALD DAWE ruminates on being an agnostic in Ireland

ONE MORNING, IN 1965,1 remember sitting on the 64 Downview bus in Belfast, heading into town for school. It was raining and the top ofthe

bus was packed with people, most of whom were smoking cigarettes and

looking out the steamed-up windows. A strange thing happened. I

looked around me and, in an instantaneous flash of histrionic insight,

realised, almost smugly, that they all, we all, would some day die. No

proverbs, no sandwich men, no ministers, no amount of praying, no

church-going or piety could get us round that simple fact of life.

A few years later I read, until I was blue in the face, everything by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and considered that my earlier

experience had been, what every good existentialist knows to be,

an encounter with the Absurd.

If Roquentin, Meursault and Mathieu weren't exactly the best of

role-models for a Belfast teenager with a paltry attendance at Sunday school and church, who was to know any different?

The irony is, I suppose, that the family I came from, while not being orthodox in its religion?anything but?did have a lot of time for

spiritualism. Life-after-death was a fairly average acceptable norm: not

things that go bump in the night, hovering tables and trumpets of

ectoplasm like a week's washing?although there was one book with

photographs of such things that had a faintly Faustian sense of transgres sion about it and still has to this day. No, the spiritual dimension to my

9

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.101 on Tue, 24 Jun 2014 22:15:51 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions