"The Protestant Idea of Liberty" – Professor Marianne Elliott (1985) - A Field Day Pamphlet

Times change and so, as CS Lewis once wrote, to escape the biases of the present, old books are essential.

This Field Day Pamphlet from 1985, by (Professor) Marianne Elliott, is excellent reading - especially in this year of USA250.

“… it was in Ireland, Scotland and colonial America that it retained its dogged purity, and the most lasting testimony to presbyterian libertarianism is the American Constitution.

In explaining the foundations of civil society, the contract theory assumes the surrender of individual liberty, by mutual consent of a community, to a government which in return undertakes to act for the general good.

The contract assumes mutual obligation; but in its more radical form of government as a trust, the obligations are one-sided and the government can be rejected when that trust is seen to have been betrayed.

It was this more radical form which reached Irish dissent from Scotland, especially from Glasgow University, where the influence of the Armagh-born presbyterian, Francis Hutcheson, continued long after his death in 1746.” 

 

The pamphlet was designed by my old art college tutor Ralph Dobson, five years before I met him. How time flies. Here's another, magnificently insightful, extract:

"... In a culture where the past is so much part of the present, a protestant who opposes perceived threats to his freedom and his religion is acting radically, in the same tradition as the Covenanters, the Commonwealthmen and the 'real Whigs' of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who made 1688 and the protestant succession fundamental to the British tradition of liberty. 

Behind the seemingly antiquated bigotry, there is a dynamic libertarianism, at times a millenarianism, which still finds its inspiration in Old Testament imagery of the Israelites fighting their way to possess the promised land. It is, however, a brand of libertarianism ill-attuned to modern secular thinking which accepts nationality, rather than religion, as a badge of identity.

There is a tendency to see the problem of Northern Ireland simplistically in terms of a protestant/catholic conflict. But protestantism is not a monolith, and it is the failure to recognise the libertarian tradition, particularly in presbyterianism, which causes many commentators to dismiss such appeals to freedom as either rhetoric or pure hypocrisy. 

Yet the presbyterians' heightened sense of persecution is as old as that of the Irish catholics and the Irish problem is as much one of conflicting ideas of liberty as anything else."