Christian Gods are Warring on the Beach

A short drive northeast of Belfast in Ireland lies the Giant's Causeway, a site both geologically and mythically fascinating. It's beautiful really, awe-inspiring, a mass of hexagonal pillars formed sixty million years ago by quick-cooling lava, there at the edge of the sea between Ireland and Scotland. Pagan lore about the place appeared well before christianity, in the legend of Finn MacCool, the Irish hero fighting the Scottish giant, Benandonner, in a contest between two Celtic lands. We're talking a feud between cousins, two Celtic peoples whose pre-christian rivalry was in no way assuaged, and in fact was only amplified by, the arrival of christianity, a divide apparent to any visitor to Belfast today. 

Before the seventeenth century both places were catholic, going back centuries. That tradition survived a great deal of outside meddling, primarily by Scandinavians, but others too. All the Viking pillaging, raping, and marauding though was nothing to the body politic compared to the arrival of protestantism. In the sixteenth century presbyterianism arose in Scotland, inspired by calvinism on the continent, then in the seventeenth century anglicanism arrived when James I ascended to the throne of England. Though many suspected he was a closet catholic––he was certainly a closet homosexual-––his actions in both Scotland and Ireland were stridently protestant, and political. 

England had been trying since Henry VIII to anglicanize the catholic island that it had brutally colonized, and, frustrated by their lack of success, in 1610 James dispossessed hundreds of thousands of catholics from their ancestral lands in northern Ireland, properties they'd worked for thousands of years, in order for mostly poor, protestant lowlanders from Scotland to occupy them, the so-called Ulster Plantation. The history is too complicated to go into at any length, but the long and short of it was that after the catholics were forced from their homes they had to be brought back as slave-workers because the Scots were unable or unwilling to do the work themselves. When a famine hit in the early eighteenth century hundreds of thousands of Irish catholics died, up to 450,000, a century before the Great Famine, while their Scotch-Irish overseers fared much better. 

What stressed the mostly presbyterian Scotch-Irish more than famine was when the British crown began putting the squeeze on them to convert to anglicanism. That forced many Scotch-Irish to emigrate to America, though given their history of land-theft they didn't make very good neighbors. They disregarded property laws in Pennsylvania, for example, freely squatting on unplatted sectors and pushing Native Americans off their own lands, until William Penn banned the arrival of any more Scotch-Irish. When they moved south to other states they were ultimately banned there as well, so they moved west, into the interior, to Appalachia, Tennessee, and other places, causing trouble for Native people everywhere they went. There are books on the subject, that is the Scotch-Irish disdain for Indian lives and lands and the trouble it caused,* so it isn't surprising to learn that major American figures hostile to Native peoples, figures like Andrew Jackson, famous for the Trail of Tears; James Polk of manifest-destiny fame; Kit Carson, named the Indian Killer; and others were Scotch-Irish. Full disclosure, I'm nearly a quarter Scotch-Irish myself, and also Irish catholic, from Ohio. The Scotch-Irish were infamous for "clearing" Native people from that state, in what was then called the Western Reserve.

Back in Belfast, still today, and in northern Ireland generally, the past is the present. Signs of sectarian––christian––divisions are rampant everywhere you go. Belfast is a physically divided city, the neighborhoods separated by sixty gates, referred to euphemistically as "Peace Walls." Fences thirty feet high separate catholics and protestants, which is to say the well-to-do from the less-well-to-do. Many of the catholic areas look like "tbe projects" in major U.S. cities, poor and run-down; that is the legacy of British colonialism alive still today. Ninety percent of the schools are separated according to religion; catholic and protestant children can't even learn together. 

Much of contemporary history in northern Ireland is well known by any American of a certain age, including me. Referred to as The Troubles it was violent, deadly, and dire. Intense is too mild a word. What's important to keep in mind is that we're talking a sectarian divisiveness related to religion, and protestant christianity specifically. It's hard not to wonder where the religious leaders have been, and why they're still so feckless; such failures at bridging the divides. It's difficult not to see christianity generally as the sham it has been in the modern world, in fact a politics, a land-grab, and a tribalism––all parading as a religion of peace and love, the hope of humankind. 

The christian gods are fighting in northern Ireland, no less than Finn MacCool and Benandonner on the beach near the Giant's Causeway, who, unlike christians, made no biblical claims. Before I knew anything about the situation, before I visited northern Ireland recently, I didn't really have an opinion about the situation, other than to shake my head and say it's tragic. But learning the history and seeing the situation first hand it's difficult to remain neutral, despite the substantial complications on both sides that characterized The Troubles. Gaza comes to mind, as does1940s India. A people dispossessed after living in a place for millenniums; they don't easily forget, or forget ever. The intransigence of the Ulster protestants, their inability to reckon with their history of occupation, their role in a brutal, deadly past and present, all in the name of god––it's mind-boggling. 

But then again we see it every day in the U.S., a country colonized by people calling themselves christians, protestants for the most part, who arrived on these shores seeking religious freedom and who had no problems dispossessing––genociding––Native peoples, and who fantasize still that the country should belong to people like them, white and christian. Trump and his evangelical supporters, though not all protestants, embody the ethos perfectly. In a sense America is a version of whatever mess is occurring in northern Ireland, though writ large. 

Anyone who reads my blogs knows I'm no defender of the catholic church or catholicism generally––just the opposite. In Ulysses, James Joyce is famous for suggesting that Ireland has had two jack-boots on its neck, one the church and the other the crown. He had his reasons for saying so, for taking the Irish to task for submitting to the catholic church, but post-Joyce and post-Irish-statehood, not to mention post-colonialism in many parts of the world following the 1960s, it's clear that at least in northern Ireland today catholics are second-class citizens, primarily because of their faith; victims of a terrible system still. It's important not to look away from the fact that it's all happening under the banner of protestant christianity in an old, colonialist-imperialist mode. As for the U.S. it departs from the Ulster model only in that many catholics today, though again not all, have closed ranks with the bigots of protestant evangelicalism, virulently anti-immigrant and trying to mask the fact that the U.S. inhabits a continent that was for all intents and purposes completely stolen.

*Two good accounts of the Scotch-Irish in America can be found in the following works:

Calloway, Colin G. Hard Neighbors: The Scotch-Irish Invasion of Native America and the Making of an American Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.

Leyburn, James G. The Scoth Irish: A Scoal History. Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 1962.