Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
Crawford Gribben is Professor of History at Queen’s University in Belfast. Prior to his tenure at Queen’s University, he taught at University of Manchester and Trinity College in Dublin. His research is focused widely, including a focus on puritanism and early modern political theology, led to the publication of nearly 20 books, dozens of academic articles throughout his career.
Today, we’re going to be talking about his most recent book, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland, a book that chronicles the history of Christianity in Ireland. Again, it’s going to be a lively topic of our conversation today. Professor Crawford Gribben, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Crawford Gribben:
Well, thank you very much. It’s really great to be here.
Albert Mohler:
I have been fascinated, of necessity, with the pattern of secularization and, frankly, theories of secularization. And I’m old enough that I entered this conversation before there was conclusive proof of radical secularization in many societies. Certainly, it’s a process that we could watch. But I have to say that if there is one most interesting laboratory on planet earth right now, it appears to be the nation of Ireland or the people of Ireland, I should say. And you’ve written this astounding book, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland. And I have to tell you, I could not stop reading until I finished the book.
Crawford Gribben:
Well, that’s very kind. Thanks. I wrote the book really to help myself understand what’s happened on the island during the course of my own lifetime. I remember when I was a boy growing up in Scotland, but coming back here for holidays with my grandparents, and so on. On Saturday nights, the local council would send around someone to tie up the children’s swings in case any child would be presumptuous enough to go to the play park on the Sabbath day and the Lord’s Day. Now, I mean, that kind of world is only 40 years ago, but it’s completely changed now. And as you just commented, Ireland, both sides of the border have now become one of the most progressive countries probably anywhere in Europe, and certainly leading the way in this expression of secularization.
Albert Mohler:
Well, trying to understand this in Christian terms, as well as say in historical and sociological terms, is necessary. I mean, we’re living at a time in which it’s not just Ireland that has experienced this, and Ireland experiencing it within a frame of time that’s observable to you and to me. It’s an issue that is addressing basically all nations of the earth to one extent or another, but, in particular, in the west. It’s coming with devastating speed. So, let’s define some terms. When you write about The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland, what exactly do you mean?
Crawford Gribben:
Well, I’m trying to use that term to explain the long history of this phenomenon. So, I’m trying to think about how Christianity arrived in Ireland; how it developed; what kinds of influences it had to shape, and perhaps even create, a culture; how that culture became very distinct within the other Christian cultures of Europe; and then how, more recently, it passed through various crises—the Reformation, I suppose, being the most obvious of those; how religious tensions were overlaid with sectarian, cultural, linguistic, theological tensions as well; how patterns of inequality emerged out of that; but how fundamentally, even in the 20th century, on both sides of the border, there were sustained efforts to set up distinctively Christian countries or Christian states to one degree or another; and then how incredibly rapidly those cultures just seemed to disappear.
Albert Mohler:
I think in the popular imagination and, frankly, even in the sociological imagination, to say Ireland 30 years ago, would be to speak of in the Republic an intact Catholic culture and in Northern Ireland an intact Protestant culture, which was already by say the midpoint of the 20th century being contrasted with the rest of the UK, and in particular with England. England had experienced a secularization from the midpoint of the 19th century all the way until what’s not yet an end point. But I saw a statistic the other day that about 4% of English citizens who are attending church more than once a month. But when you’re looking at Ireland now, both in the Republic and in the North, the astounding thing is that both of them have largely collapsed as experiments.
Crawford Gribben:
Yeah, I think that’s true. I think if you look at a hundred years ago,1922 was the formation of the Irish Free State, which was the Southern Government. And within 10, 15 years of the beginning of that State, there were some really determined efforts by leading politicians to think very, very carefully about what a Christian country ought to look like. And of course, they were listening to various people proclamations about economics, or social justice, or relationships between employers and employees, and so on. They were thinking very carefully about social mores, sexual mores, the family, where a woman’s place really ought to be in society, and so on, and so on. And south of the border, there was a really ambitious attempt to take these ideals and to do something which I don’t think was really ever attempted as successfully anywhere else, which was to embed these ideals in a constitution.
And if you go back and look at the constitution that De Valera promulgated in 1937, it begins with an invocation of the Trinity. And it recognizes that all political power comes from God, and that politicians who are given that deposit of power are ultimately responsible back to Him for the way in which that power is used. So fast forward and we’re in a completely different kind of society. North of the border, Northern Ireland was never an exclusively Protestant culture in the way that the Republic was. The population was probably about two-thirds, one-third in favor of Protestants certainly in the initial years of Northern Ireland. But nevertheless, Northern Ireland’s first Prime Minister, James Craig, said that our local parliament would be a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people.
And even the self-confidence that lies behind that kind of ambition has now completely evaporated as well, as Protestant families largely adopted the use of contraception and began to have smaller numbers of children. Catholic families tended not to do so. And we’ve seen population more or less become equal at the present day. So it’s more or less 50/50. The interesting thing about that though is relative demographics hasn’t really changed the direction of secularization, even in terms of speed. The largely Catholic, overwhelmingly Catholic, society in the South, and a much more mixed society in the North, are both heading in the same direction, really within a couple of years of each other more or less tag teaming each other in terms of the pace of social change.
Albert Mohler:
I think the impression most people would have of Ireland in the Republic, in the South, it would be such a Catholic culture that Catholicism would pervade every aspect of life. Catholic festivals would be basically the national festivals, Catholic church going, Catholic weddings, Catholic christenings, baptisms. It is going down the list, Catholic funerals, but by the time the reader gets to the end of your book, Catholic priests are so unpopular in the Republic that many of them dare not wear their clerical collars just because they don’t want to confront opposition. That’s in a short amount of time. How can that happen?
Crawford Gribben:
Well, that’s the number one question really that the book tries to think about. And there’s a much bigger conversation about that as well. It’s about, in fact, it’s exactly 30 years ago this year when the first of the great scandals within the Southern Catholic Church began to emerge. And that was the scandal of a bishop who was living secretly with the woman, they’d a child, and so on. And the scandal there was really that church funds, church finances, a small proportion of church finances being apportioned to support this secret family.
Now, 30 years on, we have lived through a sequence of official reports, which have exposed that almost comic stereotype of clerical infidelity to be, but the tip of an iceberg. The rest of the iceberg, including everything from institutional abuse through to the rape of children, through to the exploitation of single mothers and single women, all the way through to the discovery of large numbers of human remains in underground chambers that may or may not be septic tanks at the back of religious institutions. Now, while these have been overwhelmingly linked to the Catholic church, it’s also the case that similar patterns of abuse and behavior have been identified in Protestant denominations too. So, this is overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, a Catholic story, if that makes sense.
Albert Mohler:
Sure. Overwhelmingly, but not exclusively. Yes.
Crawford Gribben:
Yeah. And 30 years on we look back at these almost innocent days of liaisons with housekeepers and secret families. It’s just a completely different world.
Albert Mohler:
It is, and one that I think most Christians will find shocking in the documentation. But there’s a pre-story to this and I appreciate the fact that you take the reader through the pre-story. I mean, the big question is, first of all, the rise of what you call Christian Ireland, because that was by no means inevitable, and it wasn’t any consistent line. I mean, to be honest, Ireland’s, let’s just say religious history, turns out to be one of the most interesting tales in all of this. So, just for a few minutes, just walk us through how Ireland became Christian, the way you define it here.
Crawford Gribben:
Yeah. It’s a really fascinating story. In some ways, the history of Ireland is a history of Irish Christianity, because the earliest date we can identify in the island’s history is the year 431, which is the year when the Pope sends Palladius as the first bishop of Christians in Ireland. Now, that’s a really tantalizing reference because we don’t know who these Christians were. We know that they had not been formed by any official effort of mission, because Palladius was the first envoy from the church ever to cross beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire, crumbling though it was in that period, to make it to this island to begin to minister among those believers. But there they were.
Who were they? They may have been slaves. Ireland was part of an international slave network at that point. Irish pirates were finding slaves elsewhere, enslaving people and bringing them back. And, of course, the most famous of those early slaves was Patrick. And if Palladius is the beginning of that Christian tradition in Ireland, Patrick is the early name that just dominates the story. And in large part, that is because he is so good at speaking about himself. He writes a number of things—a big confession, a letter to another slaver that he tries to combat.
And Patrick sets out this remarkable spiritual experience. He’s the grandson of a priest. He’s the son of a deacon, but by age of 16, he’s not a Christian, and he says that. He gets kidnapped at the age of 16, taken to Ireland. He’s in Ireland for what, six, seven years, something like that, and he begins to pray. And as he prays all of the things that he has learned about Christianity begin to become real to him and he becomes a believer.
Eventually makes it back home, probably in his mid-twenties, late twenties. He’s lost his education. He remains preoccupied for the rest of his days by how poorly educated he’s been and how bad his Latin is. And yet, despite his family bribing him, encouraging him to stay with gifts, and so on, he is determined to go back to the place in which he’d experienced such misery in order to bring the hope of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to people who’d never heard it. And that’s the drama of the early part of the story.
The Irish then go on to convert in huge numbers. Patrick says in one of his writings that he thinks he’s baptized thousands of people on the island, and among those thousands of converts that he baptizes are a number of people who become monks. The most famous perhaps in the early centuries is St. Columba who establishes a network of monasteries up the west coast of Scotland and far beyond. St. Columba took the Gospel to the Picts, that mysterious, almost unknowable, culture in Scotland. We only know about them really from swirls painted on rocks. But we know that Columba went there, may or may not have met the Loch Ness monster. He claims that he did, I’ll leave that for the experts to decide. But that monastic network goes on to set up bases in Shetland and the Faroe Islands, up half-way to Iceland, and even across to Iceland itself. And we know that because when the first Vikings arrived in Iceland, they found Irish monks there ahead of them.
And it’s even possible that an Irish monk called Brendan would’ve set out in a little leather boat to cross the Atlantic and perhaps be the first European to discover North America. That voyage was often thought to be speculative, imaginative, fantastical, until 1977, when an English explorer called Tim Severn set out using basically the same technology, albeit took him two summers instead of one, and he sailed his little leather boat from Dingle all the way across to Canada.
So, it’s just an extraordinary story. And along the way, we learn about the beginning of monasticism, construction of hospitals, education. There’s another book, How the Irish Saved Civilization—if it didn’t quite save civilization, they certainly did a huge amount to preserve the written record of learning as the Roman Empire and European continent collapsed.
Albert Mohler:
I appreciate that summary history. I think one of the things that a lot of Christian readers probably need to hear you say there is that there’s really good ample, indeed overwhelming, historic evidence that Patrick is not just the object to some kind of Catholic hagiography. He actually was a very real and vitally important historical human being.
Crawford Gribben:
Absolutely. And I think the most remarkable thing about Patrick is how different he is from the way in which he’s been remembered. So, we have this privilege, we can actually read Patrick’s life. If any listeners are interested, they can log onto a website called confessio—confession without the ‘n’—confessio.ie, and they can read Patrick’s own testimony of his own spiritual experience. And, by and large, he reads like a modern-day evangelical. His writing is suffused with Scripture. He’s not really paying much attention to hierarchical authority within the church. He’s driven by a sense of responsibility. And he’s driven really by the conviction that, as he takes the Gospel to the known ends of the earth, he is fulfilling the last of the great promises, the great predictions, necessary to be fulfilled before the return of Jesus Christ. And actually, if any listeners are interested in that, one of your colleagues at Southern, Michael Haykin, has written a fantastic little book on St Patrick, which really emphasizes Patrick’s interest in apocalyptic and how he has this really strong sense of himself as fulfilling prophecy in order to see the return of Jesus Christ.
Albert Mohler:
As you fast forward from Patrick and Columba and perhaps Brendan, and as you look at the development of Catholic Christianity institutionalized in Ireland, and it was heavily institutionalized. It was also institutionalized in a context of very low urbanization and what was still a rather spectacularly impoverished people hanging onto an incredibly beautiful, but still a largely inhospitable, spot of land, and so Christianity survived along with Ireland surviving for centuries.
Crawford Gribben:
Yeah, that’s true. I’m glad you emphasized poverty because poverty is a real theme in this story, whether we’re thinking about Ireland in the fifth century, beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire and lacking all of the accouterments of Roman civilization, or even whether we’re thinking about 19th century Ireland. So, if we go back, let’s say four generations or five generations in most families, we’re looking at the period around the 1850s, middle of the 19th century. And the census that was taken in the middle of the 19th century established that over half of the people on this island were living in mud huts. So really from fifth century right the way through the next 1,300 years or thereabouts, the lived reality of everyday experience of most people who claimed to be Christians on this island was basically the same, which was dire poverty, but surrounded by the architectural statements of the church.
Back in the eighth/ninth century we see the beginning of urbanization in the formation of monasteries, and some of those monasteries are beautiful. Some of your listeners might have visited Glendalough in County Wicklow or Clonmacnoise. And those are just stunning examples of monastic towns. Gradually those monastic towns extended even into Europe, certainly across the North Atlantic. And gradually we begin to see urbanization come together. But it’s really the Vikings that kick off urbanization in Ireland. And, of course, they’re attracted by the church but for all the wrong reasons. And they’re here for slaves and cash basically. And along the way they set up Dublin, they set up Waterford, Wexford, Limerick, a lot of other coastal towns as well.
Albert Mohler:
Crawford, if we can just speak familiarly here, your book is written by a Christian scholar about the rise and fall of Christian Ireland. You write with, I think, spectacularly clear prose and you tell a story that’s massive, but you tell it pretty briskly with documentation. I really did turn every page with just tremendous interest.
One of the things you really help a reader to understand is that the travail, so to speak, of Ireland and of Christianity in Ireland, has to go through the period of English domination and an attempted English reformation of Irish Catholic Christianity in a way that didn’t go particularly well. This is an understatement. But I have to ask you just point blank. Would you, in some sense, plant the seeds of Irish secularization in the experience of the 16th and 17th centuries in Ireland?
Crawford Gribben:
It’s a great question. And, of course, there are historians who would make that case for Europe generally that secularization begins with the Protestant Reformation. I’m not sure if I would, partly because the Protestant Reformation made such little impact on this island. It’s almost inconsequential. So, whatever may or may not be the experience elsewhere in Europe, I’m probably not equipped to say, but certainly, in Ireland, there was a census taken at the end of the 16th, very early 17th century. So that was a census taken about maybe 80 years after the Protestant Reformation began. And that census reckoned there were less than, fewer than 120 Irish born Catholics who had converted to the reformed faith. So that’s 120. So, how is it possible that after the best part of three generations of effort, only 120 people have been persuaded of the reformed faith?
And I think there’s some really simple answers to that. I think one is that the Irish Reformation was fundamentally legislative, so it was driven by changes in law. It wasn’t like the Scottish Reformation, where there was this great kind of upsurge of popular enthusiasm for the new ideas, or indeed, similar to the Reformation in France or England either. There is no Bible translated into Irish and published for 150 years after the Reformation so-called begins. It takes the Church of Ireland, the reformed Church of Ireland, 90 years, nine zero years, to decide what it is that it believes. So, while in Scotland, the Scottish church pushes out the Scots Confession almost instantaneously, and similar trends can be seen in other European churches, the Irish church just sits and sits and deliberates and doesn’t really do anything, certainly does nothing to win people or persuade people that what they might have to offer is more attractive than what the Catholic church has to offer.
Ironically, one of the things I tried to argue in the book is that it’s only during the Protestant Reformation that the Irish people en masse become Catholic because up until the Protestant Reformation, Irish Catholicism had quite a loose relationship with the Catholicism of the European church. So up until the 16th century, the Irish church had married priests, it had lots of unusual, let’s say clerical and liturgical practices that were really quite far from what would be expected in Rome. But it’s only during the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Reformation of the 16th century, that the Catholic church really gets a grip on the collar of the Irish church and says, “Look, this is what you should have been. And if you had been like this, you might not have had to worry about these terrible Protestants and their agenda for religious change.”
Albert Mohler:
Well, just to self-identify, both of us are evangelical Protestants, and we’re talking about the story of Ireland and the rise and fall of Christian Ireland. And at least as I’ve studied Ireland, and by the way, I’ve been reading, over the course of years, everything I could get my hands on because I’m fascinated with this very story in Ireland, Seamus Heaney, and the fall of Christian Ireland, again, or The Death of Christian Ireland, I think is the title of a recent book. Other books written more journalistically about the rather catastrophic secularization that has reshaped Ireland.
But just looking at this, checking the issue we just discussed, the Protestant Catholic understanding, what difference does the Reformation make. It seems to me as an historical theologian that if you look at the Reformation in say Northern Europe, and in particular, the German speaking Reformation, the principle that the religion of the prince was the religion of the people and the breakup of the holy Roman empire and you had the Elector of Saxony and others who were just clearly breaking with the church. And so it was at least partly political, let’s just say that.
Nothing like that happened in Ireland, and I have to wonder if it’s because the political system there didn’t allow for the distribution of say, principalities, we had in Europe where you could have some that would say were no longer under the reign. And then, I just have to ask you, because English domination over Ireland is so much a part of the story here, and then with the English Reformation, Catholicism became a resistance movement over against the English Reformation, right?
Crawford Gribben:
Exactly. Yeah. And I think that’s one of the great achievements of the Catholic hierarchy during the Reformation period is that they identified very successfully the suffering of the people with the suffering of the church. And so, there’s lots of debates, obviously isn’t there, or aren’t there, about the origins of nationalism and the origins of religious nationalism and maybe it’s too early a period to describe that phenomenon as a nationalism. But if it’s not a nationalism, it’s something very close to a nationalism.
Albert Mohler:
It’s a social consolidation, for sure.
Crawford Gribben:
Yeah. Absolutely. And it’s given a religious veneer and that religious veneer does make sense. It made sense then, it makes sense now. And the Catholic Church then becomes the vehicle of preserving a culture, becomes the vehicle of giving of people an identity, they’ve a religious identity rather than a national identity imposed upon them by their overlords. So that connection between the people and the Catholic Church becomes a very important connection all the way through the 17th century. Obviously, the Cromwellian invasion really consolidates that link. All the way into the 18th century where the British government eventually begins to recognize the strength of that association and try to bring Catholics in from the cold or certain Catholics in from the cold.
And it stretches through into the 19th century as well, because just as many Protestants are beginning to identify with the state, the union, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, at the same time, Catholics are still identifying as the people and it provides even in the early 20th century, it provides the nationalist movement with key themes, key images. If you look at some of the writings of the 1916 rebels, martyrs, depending on your perspective, they are deeply, deeply pious men and women, and some of the poetry they write is just suffused with language and images drawn from the passion of the Lord Jesus.
Albert Mohler:
As the story is tracked and you tell it so well, I have to wonder if something like the Brad Gregory thesis plays something here with the modernity basically bringing secularization simply because it brings options. There’s the cleavage between crown and altar or sometimes referred to as throne and altar. And so, all of a sudden, in one sense or another, the state becomes secularized in most places, at least in Europe. And by the time you get to the American Revolution and American constitutionalism, it’s just assumed. And you also have the rise in Protestant dominated lands of an economic empire that emerges—has a dynamic all its own. And so I have to wonder, at least in part, did Ireland remain as Ireland was largely because it escaped both of those massive historical movements? I mean, you basically had no separation of throne and altar throughout most of that time. And also, the nation was largely immune from what we might call capitalism.
Crawford Gribben:
Yes. I think that’s a very fair observation. If you were to look at someone like de Valera, Eamon de Valera, who is President of the Republic of Ireland for a very, very long time and shapes it.
Albert Mohler:
Two different terms.
Crawford Gribben:
Yeah. And not least through shaping that constitution, but also in imagining what Churchill does for Britain during the war, de Valera does the same for Ireland. He weaponizes language. He has this tremendously forceful imagination of what Ireland ought to look like. And in some of his wartime broadcasts, he is, I suppose, making a virtue of necessity, but he is imagining in the most glorious terms, the benefits of a rural pastoral society, where older people are respected, where the young can play innocently, and all are held together by this common Catholic faith. Now, I mean, I suppose the great irony of some of those speeches is that the little children he imagines playing happily on a mud floor by the fire where the broth is cooking slowly, and the bread is slowly rising. You know, those are the children who grew up to be the CEOs of the Celtic Tiger economy that just takes off in the 1990s.
And in some ways in the book, I argue the 1990s are the tipping point. That’s the moment really when traditional patterns of faith or social order, Protestant and Catholic, really begin to collapse, sometimes quite dramatically. And of course, there’s a correlation with a booming economy. There’s also a correlation, I think, with increasingly transatlantic personal connections, so that people are traveling more, they’re seeing how people live elsewhere, even within the English-speaking world. And they’re perhaps coming back and saying, “Well, I’m not really happy with the options that presented to me here,” and begin to vote in response to that. So, I think the 1990s really are the moment when everything very quickly begins to change.
Albert Mohler:
Let’s look at a couple of moments before that. I want to hasten to the ’90s pretty quickly, but just a couple of issues. First of all, the formation of the Republic. I think most Americans just assume Ireland’s always been Ireland. I think it’s important to recognize that the nation state we know as Ireland is a 20th century invention and, frankly, a fairly awkward one.
Crawford Gribben:
Yes. There’s historical claims to nationhood that go back to antiquity. But we’ll sidestep those, and we’ll just focus on the state as you suggested. Yeah, absolutely the state is formed in 1922. It evolves, it eventually becomes a Republic in the late 1940s. Correspondingly Northern Ireland… In some ways the six counties of Northern Ireland are a continuation of British rule in Ireland which doesn’t have the freedom to invent itself anew. So, its whole rationale is continuity. So, it has inherited this body of laws, those are the body of laws that control that society. Those in the 26 counties that make up the Free State, which becomes the Republic of Ireland, are given a completely different opportunity, which is to think from ground zero really, what should a country be? So, they have a complete opportunity to create a Christian country from nothing. And they’re drawing down, as I mentioned before, a lot of recent Catholic teaching in order to do so.
So, I think that speaks to this bigger narrative of secularization, the Brad Gregory thesis, and so on as well, because in some ways there’s a social continuity that exists in Northern Ireland that does not exist in the Republic because 1922, well, 1937, the new constitution is a real interruption in the course of European secularization because it’s resisting it with all the apparatus of the state. And in order to resist it successfully, it has to draw down the social capital of the Catholic Church. So, the Catholic Church has to provide education. The Catholic Church has to provide healthcare, the Catholic Church has to provide essential social services. And in some ways they are… What’s that expression “standing athwart history, shouting stop”? You remember it. That’s not exactly how it’s meant to be. But in some ways that’s exactly…
Albert Mohler:
William F. Buckley Jr. by the way there.
Crawford Gribben:
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. That’s my nod towards the American conservatives out there. But that’s exactly what they’re doing in the 1920s and 1930s as Europe drifts towards war. They’re valorizing what should a Catholic state look like, and let’s be it, let’s be that state.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. And then you fast forward and everything’s different in lived lifetimes. And so, I was reading actually this particular book, it’s by Fintan O’Toole, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, and I got to that after I read your book. But there you’re talking about a young man who was once an altar boy and for whom the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church and the pattern of Catholic education and growing up in a Catholic family, in a Catholic neighborhood, that was everything until by the end of the book, it’s absolutely nothing.
And, of course, all the way back to the 19th century, you have English literature in which that’s true for individuals, but he’s not writing about himself as an individual, he’s writing about Ireland as a project. I think it’s difficult actually to exaggerate the process of change we’re looking at here. You’ve gone from priests being the most respected people in the community to being basically required to walk around in camouflage.
Crawford Gribben:
Yeah. Exactly. So, you take the Victorian crisis of faith, so called, and we’re thinking about George Eliot or a handful of other key intellectuals who are experiencing, in a very individualistic way, what it feels like to lose your religious sense of things, which in their case is how you organize your world. Fast forward to 20th century Ireland, late 20th, early 21st century Ireland, that experience is happening to six million people simultaneously and it’s compressed chronologically, so it’s happening in just a couple of decades. And of course, that leaves massive questions about what kinds of narratives will come into that ideological vacuum, intellectual vacuum, social vacuum, to help people begin to reassemble the different parts of their world. But where’s that going to go? Who knows?
Albert Mohler:
In my adult lifetime, by the way, just to fast forward even beyond your book just because every book has to have a publication date and things keep happening. And Sinn Féin winning the elections there in Northern Ireland, to an American evangelical Christian who grew up in my lifetime, that appears to be absolutely impossible, but it actually happened. And so, it turns out that it happened because Sinn Féin, that had been identified with the IRA and as a driving force for Catholicism, if not a Catholic party, at least part of the reason why it won is because it represents now a secular moral liberalism, as if to say the Protestant-Catholic divide is no longer the main divide.
Crawford Gribben:
Yeah. Well, I think that’s exactly right. A lot has been written about that election result last week here, which has given us this historic result.
A century after the formation of the Northern Ireland state, where the First Minister should be appointed by Sinn Féin, although the unionist politicians are conspiring to stop that happening. Nevertheless, I think what’s really interesting about this election is what it demonstrates about the weakness of the appeal of the Catholic hierarchy. In every election in Northern Ireland that I can remember over the last 15, 20 years, the Catholic bishops locally have issued a proclamation to the faithful before the election saying, “Do not vote for a party or for candidates that do not support the pro-life position,” or more recently, that do not support the normal tenants of Christian marriage.
And think what’s so staggering is that, in this election, for the first time really, we have had a Republican party, Aontú, led by Peadar Tóibín who’s formerly of Sinn Féin, but left Sinn Féin about five years ago, I think, whenever it changed its position in abortion. And that was a party that was really set up as a vehicle for conservative, socially conservative, not politically conservative, but socially conservative Catholics to vote for in good conscience and hardly any of them did. It was 6/7,000, I think offhand, I can’t quite remember. Contrast that with a 250,000 people who voted for Sinn Féin. So, in some ways the election result is a result that tells us what the social capital or the credibility of Catholic political appeals now is, and it doesn’t amount to very much.
Albert Mohler:
As you’re thinking about this process we call secularization, which just to define it means the receding influence of theism in a society. The society is reshaped by non-religious tenants, currents, patterns of thought gaining dominance, but there’s always a memory there, or at least in the Western secularizing experience, there’s always a memory. The memory seems to be coming back. So, in the United States the debate over abortion, the secular left just responds with, “This is nothing more than Christian nationalism,” as if it hadn’t shaped the entire society for centuries. And in Ireland I watched the situation there very closely. Let me just test a thesis. It’s almost as if, yes, there’s a Christian memory, but that memory is now poisonous in the views of many people who live both in the North and the South. I’m thinking particularly in the Republic of Ireland, it’s as if, yes, there’s a memory, but we’re trying our best to run from it.
Crawford Gribben:
I think that’s exactly right. You mentioned Fintan O’Toole’s book and there’s been a slew of other books have come out recently as well, memoirs often, or reportage often, working with people who are trying to process what’s happened. Let’s remember for many of them it has been an extremely painful experience. The levels of abuse, especially in the Republic, have been very, very high. There’s a lot of traumatized people who need space, time, et cetera, to work through sometimes terrible things that they’ve experienced. So, I wouldn’t underestimate the difficulty of that.
It just seems to me that there’s this huge question mark now as to what happens next. So, if a country is rejecting its past, which countries are entitled to do, but if a nation or if a community, a national community, is rejecting its past, it’s got to have some different plan for the future. And it doesn’t really seem to me that that kind of conversation has started yet. There are simply aspirations to let’s be like all the other nations and try to develop this policy, that policy, or the next, but there’s no controlling narrative.
I can’t see what was going to hold these people together. And actually, the holding of people together is going to become an increasingly important thing to think about if the election success of Sinn Féin in the North last week or the week before is matched by the election success of Sinn Féin in the South in the next election down there. They’re currently cruising about 10 to 12 points ahead of the opposition. So, if we are heading towards that moment of reunification, we’ve got to think about what that is going to be based on socially. What are the markers that are going to make sense of that imaginatively?
Albert Mohler:
Right. When I think of Ireland and I think of Ireland’s history, there’s a part which is kind of how the Irish saved civilization. I mean, the book’s overwritten and not particularly good history, but there’s some good arguments to be made there.
Crawford Gribben:
It’s a lot of fun.
Albert Mohler:
It is.
Crawford Gribben:
It’s a good book to read. It’s a lot of fun.
Albert Mohler:
There’s some great arguments to be made there. And one of the arguments is the survival of civilization with monks who kept copying texts when the vandals were burning them. And so, I concede that. I actually celebrate that. I mean, it’s one of the reasons why you go to see Irish monasteries. Thanks to Henry VIII you don’t get to see British or English monasteries. But at the same time, the evangelical in me just has to say, the Reformation committed theologian in me has to say, in one way, Ireland is predictable by Luther, which is something I’m actually thinking of writing up, and it may offend you as a historian there. But at least in the Reformation, Luther said, confronting the institutional Catholic church simply said, “Look, these things aren’t going to work. It’s not natural to put all these women together in a nunnery and, having been a fryer, it’s not natural to put all these men together, and it’s not natural to sequester away the education of children,” which is one of the reasons why Luther celebrated the seer or the domestic in his own family with Katie and his children in such a way as to say, “This is public. We’re not putting these children away.” Am I exaggerating that or are we onto something? I’m putting you on the spot.
Crawford Gribben:
You are, you really are. Let me see. Well, I think that the New Testament epistles have their own warnings about the dangers of trying to impose restrictions on the flesh, as Paul puts it, which actually don’t help you.
Albert Mohler:
Unbiblical restrictions.
Crawford Gribben:
Yes, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So forbidding to marry, First Timothy, and so on. So the warnings, we can trace the warnings back further beyond Luther, right the way back to the New Testament itself. And if we pay attention to that I think it does explain something. It never takes away responsibility. It never takes away responsibility of those who have committed sometimes terrible sins and iniquities upon innocent people.
Albert Mohler:
Oh, absolutely.
Crawford Gribben:
We always have to be very mindful of the pain and misery that a society has endured that has really led it to act in the way that it has.
Albert Mohler:
But we also have to learn from history some of what facilitated it, made it possible. And looking at this, and of course, I’d have to add to that theologically the Catholic Church’s sacramental understanding, which made it possible to have a class of people who are basically independent of having to live faithfully because of their status. And you put all that together, and I guess, sociologically, it becomes easier to understand how it could fall so quickly in the light of evidence of massive abuse. And I mean, I think, again, the scale that you document in your book and are so documented in the commission reports that have come out. I mean, frankly, in America, we’ve had our own horrifying sex abuse crises, but nothing on the scale and nothing institutionalized to the extent that we see in Ireland. It’s just heartbreaking. It’s just staggering in its heartbreaking magnitude.
Crawford Gribben:
It is. But I think it’s also important for us to remember that what leads to these kinds of activities in Ireland or anywhere else is something that’s common to all people, no matter what their religious identity is. And of course, the Bible explains that is sin. And we talk more about the scale of abuse in the Catholic church, and that’s because it’s bigger, but it’s bigger than what? Well, it’s bigger than the abuse that also took place in Protestant denominations. So, the Protestant denominations, especially in the South, didn’t have the cultural power to do what the Catholic Church was doing and, therefore, perhaps didn’t fall into the same problems in this to the same extent, but they did often fall into the same problems.
And some of the more recent reports that the government has produced down there have paid attention to that. And in fact, just about six, eight weeks ago, there was a formal apology issued by a number of governments, by a number of government agencies, I should say, religious denominations, Catholic and Protestant, collectively apologized to victims of abuse. I think that was appropriate because sometimes the media presents us, and the memoirs that we’ve been chatting about, often present this as a kind of exclusively Catholic problem but, of course, it isn’t. It’s everywhere. It’s in every place actually. We’ve just had it worse than most.
Albert Mohler:
Well, and it also is by opportunity. So, I mean, eventually just in a fallen sinful world, the headlines are going to be in a secular age of secular institutions. And we need to pray it will not happen. But in a fallen world, opportunity and sin collide in a way that the Bible demonstrates very, very clearly.
I want to take us to the end of your book, which is bracing. And by the way, so many Christian scholars pull back, frankly, so many academics, Christian and otherwise, just pull back from their own data, from their own analysis when they come to the end. One of the most important sections of your book is where you write about the consequences of this secularization. And on page 214, you wrote something that I’ve cited actually in lectures I’ve given in academic settings. Your book came out just as I was finishing a series of lectures on The Secular Moment, which is the title of the lectures. And here on page 214 in your book, you write about the secularization of the society there, and you went on to say, “If current trends in public opinion continue, some of the traditional moral claims of Christianity will cease to be socially acceptable, and in the absence of robust free speech legislation, the public statement of these claims may no longer be permitted.”
Crawford Gribben:
Yes. And when I wrote that approximately two years ago now. I think that things have changed a bit since then again, and I think it’s now obvious that a forthright articulation of views on some moral issues that were once common to all Christians would be met with some quite difficult consequences.
Albert Mohler:
Well, we certainly see that, by the way, on both sides of the Atlantic. And here the commanding heights of higher education, the cultural creatives as they’re known, and what we see increasingly, even with announcements made the morning you and I are having this conversation here in the United States of corporations who are simply saying, “This is not acceptable.” A major American corporation had put out a statement saying that it was calling on employees to respect one another if they had differences on the question of abortion. And employees, activists for the pro-abortion side, came back and said, “That’s unacceptable.” And the company just caved and said, “No, you’re right, there aren’t two acceptable positions on abortion.” And it’s the Christian pro-life position that’s now just out. In 24 hours, just out! And so, I don’t think you were a prophet, professor. I think it was happening as you wrote, but your prophetic voice is just incredibly clear here. So, let me ask you, what is the future? You’re a Christian in Ireland. What’s the future of Christianity in Ireland?
Crawford Gribben:
Well, not being a prophet, it’s impossible to be exact, but I think you can see some of the trends and project those trends into the future. And I think that the numbers of “the faithful”, let’s say, in the Protestant denominations are probably going to continue to decrease. I don’t see that necessarily as a bad thing, if it means that you’re decreasing to a hardcore of people who genuinely believe what they confess. The social proprium that will follow the articulation of Christian convictions in the public sphere will sort things out a lot, but I think it’ll be really difficult. And I think that, here in the North where I’m based, a lot of evangelicals, as we’re talking about evangelicals, a lot of evangelicals have become so accustomed to a fairly cozy situation vis-à-vis the state are probably going to be quite shocked when the extent of withdrawal from those convictions on the part of the state or major corporations becomes clear. So, I mean, it’s very obvious in the moment, if you look at the last election campaign here over the last six weeks or so, that some of the bastions of conservatism are no longer articulating any kind of positivity about core Christian convictions, for example, about the sanctity of life.
But a lot of the electorate simply hasn’t noticed that yet. When they do, the question is when they do, will it make a difference? And I suspect that one of the tragedies of Northern Ireland, if I can speak of someone who lives here, is that constitutional issues will always trump moral issues. And so actually it’s not going to matter that the major, let’s say unionist party or traditionally the major unionist party moves away from any kind of articulation or defense of these ideas. It’s not going to matter to most voters because what they actually care about is not a defense of Christian values in the public square, but it’s a constitutional connection to the United Kingdom.
Albert Mohler:
There’s also something else perhaps more fundamental going on here. And I’ve been working on these questions now for 30 plus years. When I try to describe it just to make it as simple as possible to people, secularization was at one point a process going up a mountain and now it’s coming down a mountain. And once a secular process and a secular view of life is understood in society as the means of personal liberation, it’s very, very hard to slow it down. I mean, we see this with LGBTQ plus at the end of that. And I think Christians, thinking in fundamentally different terms because we are Christians, find it difficult to believe that secular people actually become increasingly more secular. Now, I realize they’re still made in God’s image, they still have a religious impulse, and we could talk about how that comes out in various ways, but what they are unwilling to do is to tie themselves to any revealed morality or any morality that would put limits upon individual self-expression.
Crawford Gribben:
Yeah. That’s an interesting comment. I mean, I suppose there’s a discussion to be had about what freedom means, isn’t there? And from a Christian perspective, we look at Galatians, for example, stand fast in the freedom in which Christ has set you free. So, the language of freedom, the language of liberation, the language of escape and the self-fulfillment, that’s Christian language. Now, other people might be co-opting it. I call that cultural appropriation.
But it’s our language and I think we need to own that language. “You shall know the truth, the truth shall set you free”—those are wonderful promises that so many people just need to hear and want to hear, but true freedom we know as Christians we know is only found in Jesus Christ.
Albert Mohler:
Pitirim Sorokin, I don’t know if you know that name. He’s a Russian immigrant, the founder of sociology actually at Harvard University, but very much a traditionalist in understanding how societies work. Pitirim Sorokin just points out, he said, “Look, harnessing the human sexual drive is the first achievement of civilization”, and most people living in the 20th century when he wrote have no idea how long it took civilization to restrain what he called “the fires of unbridled sexuality”. And I think of that very often, Crawford, because I think once those fires are set loose… And so, I look at the Irish newspapers digitally. I listen to the Irish conversation, and it is so driven by this liberationist theme. I feel like I’m in Berkeley, California. I don’t believe that historical trends are inevitable. As a Christian I don’t believe that, but it does seem to me that authentic Christianity in Ireland and, by the way, in the United States, but in a different way, is going to have to become, oddly enough, more like Patrick. Does that make sense?
Crawford Gribben:
Yeah, there’s a teleology built into the title of the book, The Rise and Fall. And I think that teleology is something that resonates with us because we think we are at the end of something, but what if we aren’t? What if we aren’t? So, we can read Psalm 2, for example, and we read in Psalm 2 that there has been a conspiracy of governments and societies and nations and cultures, a conspiracy of rebellion of Gentile nations and that’s perennial, it’s perennial. So, we think of ourselves as being at the end of something, but we’re just in the perennial moment. Our struggle is still the same struggle of Ephesians 6, not against flesh and blood, but against other kinds of powers. And, of course, we have the weapons to deal with them.
Patrick knew that. And I think the faith that he brought to Ireland was quite a simple faith, very straightforward faith. It was robustly biblical, Scripture just oozes out of his writing. That was the world that he lived in. And I think Patrick could have looked at his circumstances, the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, the withdrawal of Christian political power across large parts of Europe, and I think he could easily have given way to despair if he thought that political institutions were vehicles of the Kingdom of God. But what if they’re not? What if the great vehicle of the Kingdom of God is a guy in a robe and a staff shouting at people about good news about Jesus Christ, telling them to get baptized, to form themselves into churches and to live as Christians in the most unappealing circumstances? Maybe that’s what it’s all about.
Albert Mohler:
Well, and we’re also able to speak as evangelical Christians to say that we’re absolutely convinced that upon this rock Christ built His church and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.
But that doesn’t mean the Christian influence, or Christian good fortune, or Christian liberties, or—to use the language of The Left in the United States now—’Christian privilege’ is respected by society.
Professor Gribben, your book is just outstanding. It made me think in a way that has genuinely given me ammunition, fodder for thought. A book that reached my heart as well as my head. And I thank you for that.
Crawford Gribben:
Well, thank you so much. Thank you for taking the time to read it. And I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about it too.
Albert Mohler:
I have to ask you one other question because you, as a Christian scholar and author, range across some of the most remarkable territory. So, I just want to ask before letting you go today, what are you working on now?
Crawford Gribben:
I’m writing a book about John Nelson Darby who’s often thought to be the founder of dispensationalism. And I’m going to be, hopefully, trying to show his deep commitment to Augustinianism– Calvinism–and other such delights. So that’s what I’m doing at the moment.
Albert Mohler:
Well, be sure to send copies of that manuscript to my friends at a school in Dallas, Texas. I say that in a friendly way. Now, I very much look forward to seeing that. And until then, just know my appreciation. Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.
Crawford Gribben:
Thank you for your time.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, Crawford Gribben, for thinking with me today.
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Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public. Until next time, keep thinking.