My Ancestry and the Bane of "Christian Nationalism," Part 1

One hundred years ago today, my grandmother Sarah, my Uncle Willie, and Aunts Maria and Isabell arrived at Ellis Island on the SS Carmania from Liverpool to join my grandfather John, who had emigrated the previous year from Stranocum, County Antrim, in (Northern) Ireland to work for the Carpenter family in Montchanin, Delaware, outside of Wilmington. My dad, John, was born 9 months and 4 days later.  

The SS Carmania (photo: Priestley & Sons Ltd. Egremont)

My grandparents, John and Sarah (Holmes) McGahey, on their wedding day, 23 February 1907, in Belfast

My Uncle Bill McGahey at Montchanin, Delaware

My Aunt Isabell McGahey Smith

My Aunt Tillie (Holmes) Phillips with my Aunts Maria (l) and Isabell (r)

My brother and I standing in front of the house where my dad was born, Montchanin, Delaware, 31 December 2014

My mom's side of the family is quite different. My 7th Great Grandfather, Thomas Angell, was born ca. 1616-18 somewhere in England (Bedfordshire? There is a baptismal record dating to 1617 for a Thomas Angell in St. Paul's Church, Bedford), and emigrated to Massachusetts some time during his teen years. While there, he became associated with the Puritan theologian/minister Roger Williams, and was one of four men who, in January 1636, with Williams fled Salem in haste to form the Providence Plantation on the Providence River in what is today Providence, Rhode Island. In 1643, Angell married, and he and his wife Alice eventually had 7 children. In 1652, Angell was one of 6 men elected to make laws for the colony. Later he served in many prominent capacities, including Constable and, for 17 years beginning in 1658, as Town Clerk. Today there is a street in the East Side of Providence named after him.

Now, as you might surmise, my purpose here is not merely one of antiquarian or genealogical interest, as stimulating as they may be for me. As I see it, there is an instructive thread to be gleaned from their disparate stories. This thread concerns what is now referred to as "Christian Natonalism," a moniker which can run the gamut from the (at first blush) seemingly harmless, ceremonial types of "civil religion" to the more obviously harmful Theonomy or Christian Reconstructionism.

My McGahey grandparents came to America in 1919-1920, which was certainly not a coincidence. They were Ulster Scots--as my dad always made sure people recognized, "Scots-Irish"--who were devoutly Anglican, and later Presbyterian when they ultimately settled in North Jersey. Not only this, but they were also, not surprisingly, resolutely and patriotically British. Indeed, I still recall my Uncle Willie and my dad instructing me in my youth to make sure to wear orange rather than green on St. Paddy's Day because, as they put it, "we are British" (I still do so out of habit every March 17). For good or bad, they passed down to me an Anglophilia that remains to this day, not to mention a love of strong Indian tea (with milk, of course), fish and chips, Premier League football (Go Gunners!) and British TV.

1919, when my grandfather came to the United States, was the year of Michael Collins and the Irish War of Independence. Conflict between Irish Unionists and Nationalists had festered for decades, leading to the so-called "Home Rule Crisis." Matters came to a head during the second half of the second decade of the 20th century. In 1916 Irish Republicans fomented the so-called Easter Rebellion (Easter Rising). Then, in the general election of December 1918, Sinn Féin won a majority of parliamentary seats in Westminster. And they weren't done. They proceeded unilaterally to establish an Irish Parliament and declare independence on 21 January 1919, which led to the long-lasting war between the Irish Republican Army and British forces in Ireland. Finally, on 11 November 1920, the Parliament in Westminster voted to authorize the Government of Ireland Act 1920, which divided the island into 2 territories, Southern Ireland (26 counties) and Northern Ireland (6 Ulster counties in the island's northeast), which were to be largely self-governing while remaining in the United Kingdom. The Act was given Royal Assent by King George V on 23 December 1920, just weeks before my grandmother and her children left for New York.

The problem was that, like the Schuylkill Expressway in my hometown of Philadelphia, this Fourth Home Rule Bill was already obsolete when enacted. The vast majority in "Southern Ireland," not to mention a healthy minority in "Northern Ireland," wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than independence for the entire island. And the Bloody Sunday assassinations in Dublin on the 21st of November were but a foretaste of what would, from the late 1960's until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, be referred to euphemistically as "The Troubles."

What I, as a Protestant of Northern Irish descent, have had to wrestle with is the realization that Northern Ireland is, as Kevin Mooney has articulated, "a state forged in sectarianism and anti-Catholicism." Indeed, as Mooney reminds us, "James Craig, Northern Ireland’s first prime minister, called it ‘a Protestant state … for a Protestant people’." Decades of discrimination--let's call it like it was: "oppression"--of Catholics in the name of the Protestant faith! As Paul the Apostle would have put it, Mē genoito! Theological disagreements aside (and who this side of the late Rev. Ian Paisley actually thinks 16th century dogmatic niceties were behind this conflict?), how can anybody who takes the Jesus of the Bible seriously acquiesce to, let alone defend, such patently unchristian practices? Don't get me wrong. I am not excusing "Catholic" IRA terrorism any more than "Protestant" prejudice and discrimination of the Catholic minority, let alone "Unionist" paramilitary thugs. Indeed, a relative's business in Portrush was destroyed by an IRA bomb in the 1970's. But what this (ultimately) barbaric struggle demonstrates is both the futility and the theological heinousness of civil religion, in particular an imagined Christian nationalism. To riff on a more recent American iteration of such civil religion, they ended up taking the "Christ" out of "Christian," exposing this nationalism for what it really was, namely, garden variety ethnic nationalism.

On the other side of my family, the Thomas Angell-Roger Williams connection is also instructive. American evangelicals love to lionize the Puritans for their courage in leaving (what they considered to be) the apostate Anglican church and embarking on a journey across the Atlantic to establish a new outpost of the kingdom of God on American soil. What the Puritans didn't allow for, however, was liberty of conscience. Roger Williams was every bit the Calvinist the Massachusetts Puritans were, but he strongly disagreed with them, as he did with Calvin himself, on how Christian faith ought to intersect with the state. In particular, he disputed the magistrates' right to judge any person's adherence to the "First Table" of the Ten Commandments. Indeed, in a pamphlet he wrote in February 1644, using language similar to that later utilized by Thomas Jefferson in his 1802 Letter to the Danbury Baptists, Williams wrote, “[W]hen they have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of Separation between the Garden of the Church and the Wildernes of the world, God hathe ever broke down the wall it selfe, removed the Candlestick, &c. and made his Garden a Wildernesse.”

"The hedge or wall of Separation between the Garden of the Church and the Wildernes of the world." Thus wrote the fountainhead of American Baptist Christianity. This inexorably leads me, like Dartmouth historian Randall Balmer, to wonder where all the real Baptists have gone in America. And, as one who has often found himself to be at loggerheads with the most "conservative" of that stream of the church, like him I find myself amazed to wish there were more Baptists in the ecclesiastical sea. For, as I see it, Williams's concerns were well founded. History has shown, nowhere more so than in the present, that he was right, that "Christian nationalism" is a dead end that harms both the state and the very church that sees itself entitled to prominence.

What is wrong with such nationalism? That will be the concern of my next post.