In the early 1970s a colleague of mine found himself Permanent Secretary of the new Northern Ireland Office. I took him out to lunch to find out how he had got on.
I said: 'I hope you realise it is a political conflict, not a religious one'. He said: 'I learned that straightaway'.
He told me he'd been having dinner early on in the Culloden Hotel with Willie Whitelaw's Minister of State, when the manager came in, in great agitation: 'There's a crowd of women outside, who call themselves the Protestant women of the Shankill Road, and they've got their wee lads with them and the wee lads have half bricks and they want to see the Minister'.
When they arrived, minus the wee lads and the half bricks, my friend said: 'I'm not much of a Christian myself, but I always understood that Christ taught that we should love our neighbours, and you want to shoot them up'. How was it that people who had lived together since before the Pilgrim Fathers landed in America, came to distrust and then fear each other, to the point of civil war?
A brief history
Every farmer suffered the British government's neglect in the great potato famine. My Presbyterian great-grandfather had to emigrate to America in the 1840s, leaving his wife and a newly-born son behind. He and his Catholic neighbours would probably have voted for the same party. The divide came in the 1880s with a rising tide of Irish nationalism echoing the nationalism which united ancient German and Italian principalities into two new ethnic states.
It was the arrival of ethnic nationalism which made the Plantation Scots aliens in the country where they had lived for nearly 300 years. Gladstone's Home Rule proposals in 1886 and the creation of the liberal Unionist Party reflected this new split, and, although nationalism and self-government are political issues, the split happened to coincide with the religious divide and put pressure on the churches to take political sides.
The Easter Rising in 1916 and the fighting which led up to the settlement of 1921 made the divide sharper, but that might have been healed had not Lloyd-George made one of the quick political fixes for which he was famous, by drawing the border along the county lines which were ready to hand, leaving half a million resentful nationalists on the wrong side of the border, impotent and fearful of a government with a built-in Unionist majority.
As if that were not enough, within a few years, the new Irish Free State had entrenched a claim on the territory of the new self-governing province of Northern Ireland in its constitution, increasing the fear and suspicion of the north. The surprise is not that there was eventually trouble, but that it took half a century to come to the boil.
Nationalism and Unionism
Nationalism and Unionism are self-standing political issues. In themselves, they have nothing to do with religion. The Irish Free State was not the only small country to come into being at that time. When the border was drawn, ethnic nationalism was the political panacea, the flavour of the time. Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria and Hungary had all been created in the Versailles Treaty two years before the Irish Treaty. (Not only in Ireland did ethnic nationalism leave dissident minorities on the wrong side of the border. The most lethal were the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia.)
So after World War II, in which most of the nation states of Europe were defeated, and which left two super-powers facing each other along an Iron Curtain across the centre of Europe, European political opinion swung the other way and the European Community was created as a way of offsetting the weakness, not just of the new small states like Ireland, but of the largest states, Italy, France and Germany.
So the conflict between the ideas of Nationalism and Unionism in Ireland were quite enough reasons for a political dispute, without bringing religion into it at all. But, sadly, it paid the politicians in this religious island to try to rally the churches to their respective causes. Driven by politicians who told them their faith was at risk, the Catholic Church rallied to Nationalism and the Protestant churches rallied to Unionism.
But the Christian faith is never at risk from politics. Empires have risen and fallen over two millennia, but the Christian faith has survived them all. When the Roman empire fell, the church converted the pagan invaders. They were loving and helpful, and their gospel of love, shown in their own love, was much more attractive than the awful gods of the pagans. All over the former fiercely anti-Christian Soviet Union, Christian churches are springing up again after 70 years of persecution.
God and Caesar
The God who made us does not depend on politicians to protect his church, but he has insisted that church and state should be kept separate. Jesus said: 'Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's.'
We Christians believe that God has ordained three human institutions to keep a sinful and quarrelsome society from doing each other harm. The first is the family, and the other two are the state and the church. The state and church have different functions, different sanctions and different officers, and so they must be kept separate. The definition of a totalitarian state is one in which the government lays down what is right and wrong.
The purpose and authority of the state is explained in Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2. It is to lay down and en-force laws to protect the citizen, and, even in the Roman empire and Maoist China, it is the duty of the Christian to obey the laws so long as they do not in-fringe the authority of the divine laws. If their laws do infringe divine laws, then we reply as Peter replied to the Sanhedrin when they told him not to preach the gospel - that he must put God's law first.
This separation of church and state follows the separation in the Old Testament, where Moses was the law-giver and Aaron was the priest. The reason for the distinction was shown by the Lord Jesus when he was asked why, if Moses allowed divorce, he, Jesus, forbade it. 'Moses, for the hardness of your heart allowed divorce, but from the beginning it was not so'.
So, in laying down the civil law, as Moses did, and as politicians today have to do, we have to allow for sinful human nature. Laws cannot be enforced unless they have widespread support. Politics, is, as has been said, 'the art of the possible'.
The politician's place
That is why the pragmatic politician who has to adjust the law to what the people will support, must not be confused with the man in the pulpit who preaches eternal and unchanging truth. Political opinion changes, but God's law does not change. So long as this distinction is kept clear, the state and the church can and should support each other in their separate functions.
The church should teach citizens to be law-abiding, and should also help to create a strong and stable moral order which allows people to get on with each other without going to law. And, when the state is tempted, as it is now, to engage in the social experiments of the secular humanists, which are destroying the first divinely-ordained institution, the family, they should listen to the church, which brought Europe out of barbarism and which has fought with increasing success, for 1,500 years on behalf of the dignity of the individual and has tried, also with increasing success, to make princes morally accountable for their use of their powers.
The function of the church is to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, and each generation has its own moral battles to fight. The big moral battles today are not between Catholics and Protestants, but between those who believe in a Christian moral order as the basis of a healthy society and those who are making every effort to remove all the moral structures, so that today society is slipping rapidly into moral melt-down.
Forgiveness
When it comes to the main issue today in Ireland - forgiveness - we need a church which does not play politics, but which argues, with all the authority of the Word of the God who made us, that we must forgive. At the centre of the Lord's prayer and the centre of the Christian gospel, is the issue of forgiveness. 'Forgive us our sins, as we forgive others their sins against us'. We cannot ask God for forgiveness if we do not ourselves forgive.
Of course, forgiveness is hard. We all know those who had friends and relatives who have been killed and injured. But the alternative is the self-perpetuating pagan feud, carried down from generation to generation, until the original injury is lost in the mists of time. The only way to stop that terrible culture of everlasting retaliation is to forgive. The French and the Germans are no worse for forgiving each other more terrible injuries than Ulster has ever suffered.
The culture of the feud says: 'They have killed before and they can kill again; nothing has changed'. But that culture shows lack of imagination. Think what it would feel like to try to bring a killing machine to a halt. Think of all the arguments used against you: 'Have we lost all those lives for nothing? Is all we fought for, for 30 years, to be put in the rubbish bin? What guarantees do we have for the future if we give up the weapons?'
Think of the risks of failure; the accusation of being a traitor to the cause; the short way the paramilitaries have of dealing with traitors. The former paramilitaries who have tried to bring their followers round to ceasefires and peace are taking their lives in their hands. Forgiveness reaches out a helping hand to them and tries to bring them on to the solid ground of a lasting settlement. Forgiveness breeds forgiveness, trust breeds trust.
And what is the alternative for Northern Ireland? It has the eyes of the world on it. If this most Christian part of Europe cannot show the forgiveness which the world is entitled to expect from Christians, it will do the church enormous damage. Every effort to put a Christian point of view will be met with the response: 'Don't talk to me about a Christian gospel of a forgiving God: just look at Northern Ireland.'
And what are we frightened of? That we might lose our identity? That is what fuels English nationalism today. That new English nationalism comes from loss of self-confidence which blames all the English problems on foreigners. A self-confident people does not worry about loss of identity. And if you know why you believe what you believe, nothing can shake you.
The young Scot, coming home from his first visit to London, was asked what he thought of the English. He said: 'I didna see any English. I met only the heads of department'. There is no need for any Ulster Scot who sticks to their faith to lack self-confidence. If we do not forgive our enemies, God will not forgive us, but if we do what it right and forgive our enemies, God will bless us. And if we do not believe that, we may call ourselves Protestants, but we cannot call ourselves Christians.
Fred Catherwood
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