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It
has often been said that we are what we are because
of an accident of birth. That is true to an extent.
But it is far from being the whole truth.
To
be what one is always means both accepting and modifying
a range of influences that impact on our lives from
childhood through adolescence and on throughout adulthood.
This is not always recognised by those who accept
uncritically the influences that flow towards them
from their family and their community. In the movement
between parents receiving influences from their parents,
and they in turn transmitting them on to their children,
essential changes take place.
Identity
is not something that is static. It is something that
is being defined and redefined as we grow to maturity.
Yet this process of defining and redefining does not
lead to a new identity. It should, and often does,
lead to a proper understanding of who we really are
and of what it means to be what we already are. If
nothing else it should help us to co-ordinate and
to synchronise the several strands that go to make
up who we are.
We
have the power to either accept in total or to modify
the influences that impact upon us as a consequence
of being born into a particular family, in a particular
country at a particular time in history. To refuse
to use that power is to do ourselves a great disservice.
We have also the power to completely reject and to
turn away from those influences and to embrace news
ones.
In
an impressive speech on the subject of anti-sectarianism
to a recent Progressive Unionist Party Conference,
my colleague Dugald Mc Cullough accused those within
the Protestant and Unionist community who refuse to
engage in fresh independent thinking and critical
self-analysis as being too "terrified to think
beyond the familiar" and of being "traitors
to their Protestant heritage" which prides itself
in being open to the influences of independent and
creative thinking. To accept uncritically the influences
of our parents is just not good enough. "Because
my daddy says it has always been this way, is not
a reason for anything", argued Mc Cullough. He
went on to say that "It is indeed a mean-spirited
and narrow-minded father who wants to see his son
grow up in his shadow, and it is a poor-spirited and
shallow son who apes and imitates his father rather
than do his own thinking".
It
is important that all who claim to have a specific
cultural identity should engage in a critical examination
of their roots. We ought to think for ourselves, so
that when we act politically, culturally or religiously
we are genuinely acting for ourselves. If we are to
contribute positively to a cultural community we must
be constantly bringing fresh ideas and new thinking
to that community. The development of cultural identity
is by its nature a developmental process. It is not
a onetime act to which we can appeal and upon whose
events a traditionalist can rest. Tradition and innovation
are two elements of one process, and the development
of cultural identity requires both elements.
This
means that we must think beyond the familiar. It means
too that we must understand exactly what the familiar
really is. We may start off in life being who we are
because of an accident of birth, but to understand
who we are and to live our lives accordingly, we must
engage in both critical self-analysis and in critical
cross-cultural analysis.
I
was born into an English speaking evangelical Protestant
home to working-class parents of Scots-Irish extraction
who supported the legislative union between Ireland
the rest of the United Kingdom. My parents were born
prior to the secession of the twenty-six counties
from the United Kingdom, consequently they regarded
themselves as Irish Unionists. My father died young
and left my mother a young widow which meant that
my brother and myself were brought up in relative
poverty. I have often referred to this as “privileged
poverty” as a protest against those nationalists
who claim that because I am a Protestant I enjoyed
a privileged upbringing of wine and roses with no
experience of poverty.
This
"accident of birth" has me boxed off into
a pigeon hole labelled " Disadvantaged working
class Protestant Unionist". Different people
looking at me out of their own distinct pigeon holes
will add their own interpretative labels. What exactly
do these labels mean? Can I change the labels? Do
I want to change the labels? These are some of the
questions that I have had to ask myself in recent
years.
Class Identity
There
is little that I can do to change the label "working
class". A lottery windfall might change my economic
status and my lifestyle, but it would not change the
class that I was born into. More importantly, I have
no desire to change the label. I am what I am by an
act of predestination (some may call it an act of
fate) and while I have endeavoured to develop a better
way of life for both my family, and myself, my roots
and my heart lie with a particular class of people.
If
I were to believe all that I read about being part
of the privileged Protestant ascendancy I would have
to reject this label. Nationalist academics and republican
socialists are almost unanimous in their belief that
there was no such a person as an economically poor
or socially disadvantaged loyalist. Yet for many loyalists
our class identity was formed out of our experiences
growing up in disadvantaged families and communities.
My own experience of life was one of watching my young
widowed mother struggle to make ends meet. For our
family, life was a struggle to obtain the basic necessities
of life and to ward off the attention of the moneylenders,
the tick men and the host of other parasites who fed
on the misery of the poor. It is true that I had to
go to Long Kesh to understand that experience in terms
of class identity, but the fact is that the understanding
when it did come, came from an analysis of personal
and group experiences and memories, not from books
by philosophers and social theorists.
It
wasn’t until I went to prison and had time for
both personal reflection and interaction with others
from a similar background that I began to realise
that the struggle that we went through as a family
to make ends meet was something experienced by a great
many other working class families. There was a sense
of pride, fostered by the application of a suspect
theology to social life that prevented Protestants
growing up in my generation from complaining about
their predestined lot. In Long Kesh we explored issues
that we took for granted on the outside.
Of
course we knew other people were getting it “as
tight” as we were, and there was a genuine sense
of community that encouraged you to share what you
had with your neighbour. But you didn’t talk
about it. You didn’t analyse it. You accepted
it as part of life. Didn’t the preacher assure
us that the sufferings of this life would be replaced
with joys eternal in the life to come! Joe Hill summed
that spurious theology up in the song “There’ll
be pie in the sky when you die, bye and bye”.
Even
in prison we did not attempt a scientific analysis
of our experiences. I have never read Karl Marx
but I have read Other Marks - the marks of
pain furrowed across the brow of my widowed mother
who was at her wits end because her money and her
food had run out, the marks of pain on the faces of
at least a dozen neighbours or friends who died before
their time as a result of industry induced cancers,
the marks of shame on the face of a school friend
who felt that the only marketable commodity left to
sell was her own body. These marks spoke volumes.
Doctrinaire
socialists may well be correct in producing their
scientific analyses of the causes of poverty and deprivation.
My analysis, flawed as it might be in terms of doctrine
and theory, is the product of personal experience.
I have been there, I have experienced it and I am
entitled to wear the t-shirt. Jon Sobrino, the Latin
American Liberation Theologian, has identified two
classes of “the poor” for whom Jesus the
Liberator had a soft spot. The first class was the
economic poor - the hungry, the poorly clothed, the
badly housed, the sick and the infirm. The second
class included the social outcasts of his day - women,
prisoners, prostitutes, winebibbers, lepers, strangers,
and ‘the one who was different’; the kind
of people whom the New Right have designated as the
underclass. If I must wear labels that identify me
within the context of class and family identity then
I will accept the labels of ‘economic poor’
and ‘social outcast’.
Religious
Identity
Religion
plays an important part in the development of personal
and communal identity. This is true even for those
who reject religion. Philosophic atheism is as instrumental
in developing a world and life view as is religion.
Indeed many commentators have suggested that philosophic
atheism is simply a religion without God.
In
Northern Ireland we tend to adopt a religious or faith
perspective on a broad range of issues. Thus, when
trying to unpack issues about identity, the issue
of religious belief is high on the agenda for discussion.
I was born and raised in a Baptist home. My late mother
was an active member of Glengormley Baptist Church
during the forties and fifties, and
my religious upbringing was heavily influenced by
Baptist theology. Up until I left school and went
out into the world I accepted the moral restraints
and social implications of evangelical Protestantism
as mediated through Baptist teaching.
Baptists
belong to one of the smaller evangelical Protestant
denominations. If we were to identify Baptists within
the framework of Wolfe Tone’s classification
of Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter, Baptists would
be classified as dissenters. They predate the Protestant
Reformation and have developed outside of the framework
of what historians call the Magisterial Reformation.
Consequently they were hunted down and persecuted
as ‘heretics’ by the Catholic Church, the
Protestant State Churches and the Reformed churches.
Their belief that baptism should be by total immersion
as opposed to sprinkling provided persecutors of the
Baptist community with a novel method of putting them
to death - they were immersed in water until they
either recanted or drowned. Thus death by drowning
was how many Baptists became martyrs for the faith.
Three
of the core principles of the early Baptists were
(1) Freedom before God in Faith, (2) Freedom of religion
in the face of the State and (3) Freedom of personal
conscience in the face of the Church. If the slogan
“Civil and Religious Liberty” means anything
to me, it is within the framework of these three Baptist
principles.
Many Baptists supported the English Revolution of
1649 because they believed that only by breaking the
totalitarian power of both the monarchy and the bishops
could they secure civil and religious liberty for
their people. Indeed it was the Baptist leader, Thomas
Collier, who drafted the Somerset Petition supporting
the trial of the despot, Charles I. John Bunyan, whose
classic book “Pilgrim’s Progress” was
written in Bedford Gaol, was the pastor of one of
the more radical pro-revolutionary churches during
the English civil wars. He served twelve years in
Bedford Gaol at the restoration of the monarchy rather
than conform to the dictates of the king and the bishops.
Brian Manning, in his excellent book “The Crisis
of the English Revolution”, acknowledges that
“The driving force for the coup d’etat,
both inside and outside the (New Model) army was provided
by the religious radicals. These were mainly Independents
and Baptists”.
Baptists
have traditionally stood for religious freedom. Sadly,
when in the course of time their hard won battle for
civil and religious liberty was taken for granted,
they lost their radical edge and became part of the
conservative evangelical sub-culture. Instead of aligning
themselves with the Levellers and the Diggers and
pressing home the revolution, they became satisfied
with a hollow victory that eventually led to the restoration
of the monarchy and the state church.
That
must be my point of departure from the church in which
I was brought up. I wholeheartedly embrace the three
core principles of civil and religious freedom espoused
by the Baptists and the Independents during the English
Revolution, but I cannot be satisfied with the limitations
placed by them on the scope of that freedom. They
fell short of supporting freedom for women and Catholics,
and they disassociated themselves from the more radical
elements of the revolutionary movement. It could be
said that, once they had gained the freedom to worship
as they pleased and to be included within the structures
of civic society, the Baptists sold out to Parliament
and deserted the cause. They moved from a position
of radical dissent to a passive non-conformity that
was satisfied with its own legitimisation.
Sociologists
and economists have pointed to the collusion of Protestantism
with the spirit of capitalism. The church into which
I was born had an opportunity to challenge that collusion
but it became comfortable with its hard won liberties
and veered away from its radical potential in exchange
for legitimisation. Freedom for “me” and
for “mine” while others remain unfree is
not freedom at all. Freedom for selective groups shackles
others to a life of injustice and social exclusion.
A religion that fails to challenge the root causes
of social exclusion and injustice because it has fallen
into an “other worldly” comfort zone is
a parody of true Christianity.
My
sense of identity as an evangelical Protestant remains
in a state of tension because the evangelical community
to which I belong, and from which I cannot in conscience
divorce myself, refuses to leave its bunkers and engage
with the real world. Thus my spiritual life is being
developed on the fringes of mainstream evangelicalism
and I tend to identify with liberation theology and
the new leftist brand of evangelicalism that is slowly
emerging (unfortunately not at a great pace in Northern
Ireland).
Cultural
Identity
Born
and raised in south-east Antrim to parents who came
from Scotch-Irish dissenting stock I have a natural
affinity with what has become known in recent years
as the Ulster-Scots tradition. The Ulster-Scots culture
has its own particular modes of expression and celebration
- language, literature, drama, dance, music, ritual,
symbols and emblems. However, as I have written elsewhere,
“Both
the Anglo-Irish and the Ulster-Scots cultures have
been in Ireland long enough to have assimilated
elements of the Irish-Gaelic culture and of each
other’s culture. The same is true for the Irish-Gaelic
culture. It has embraced elements of both the Anglo-Irish
and the Ulster-Scots cultures.”
Prior
to the politicisation of Irish culture by the republican
community my family were always comfortable with regarding
themselves as Irish and with enjoying traditional
Irish culture. Indeed the several elements of both
the Irish and the Scottish cultures that merged in
County Antrim have provided us with a richness in
cultural expression and enjoyment that the family
circle has always cherished. Thus, I have no problem
whatsoever in accepting and embracing my sense of
Irishness. The term Scotch-Irish or Ulster-Scot is
no more contradictory than the term Irish-American.
It is a term that keeps alive the historic cultural
strains that my family have enjoyed for generations.
This
country is as much my country as it is the country
of Gerry Adams or Anthony Mc Intyre - now there’s
two good old Scotch sounding surnames - it is the
land of my birth and it’s soil holds the bones
of generations of both my maternal and my paternal
family lines. views on culture generally are expressed
in my article Culture &
Identity and need not repeat them here.
Where
I differ from Adams and Mackers is that I am an Irish
person who wishes to see a social and political union
established and maintained between all of the peoples
of the islands commonly called the British Isles (but
any other name would do) whereas they desire a smaller
union between the peoples of one island. I would certainly
differ greatly from Adams, but perhaps not so much
from Mackers, on the issue of nationalism. A single
identity confessional state where the terms Irish,
Gaelic and Catholic mean the same thing has no appeal
for me. Nationalism - whether it be British or Irish,
Protestant or Catholic - is something that I just
cannot reconcile with my belief that the value and
worth of each human being should be based on our common
humanity and not on ethnicity, cutlure or religion.
I
differ from Adams and from most nationalists and Irish
republicans in that I just cannot accept the notion
that by forcing the unionist community into an all
Irish state we will bring an end to sectarianism and
the vicious cycle of alienation, conflict and violence
that goes with it. Geographical unity will be meaningless
without the unity of the people and that sort of unity
cannot be brought about by force of arms or by the
decree of London and Dublin. Adams, in particular,
is naïve to believe that once geographical unity
is achieved the scales will drop from the eyes of
the unionist community and, miraculously, we will
all realise that we were closet nationalists all along.
A united Ireland, whether by force or by stealth,
does not mean a united people and without a united
people nothing will change in terms of that vicious
cycle of alienation, conflict and violence that we
have been so used to. Culturally I remain an Irish
Unionist.
Conclusion
Keeping
my sense of identity under critical examination is
something that I believe is part and parcel of daily
living. This may mean redefining some of the beliefs
and values that have been passed on to me. It could
even mean rejecting beliefs and values that were one
time considered precious and indispensable to those
who went before me. But if I am to be “me”
rather than being what is expected of me by others
who have shared my journey in the past then I must
expose myself to critical self-examination. If I remain
committed to my working class identity it is because
that is where I personally want to be. If I remain
an evangelical Protestant, albeit a of a radical kind
that may not be accepted within conservative or liberal
evangelical circles, it is because that is where my
faith and religious convictions have led me. If I
remain an Irish Unionist it is because I believe in
the social and political union of all the peoples
of these islands. Others can take these labels and
place their own interpretation on them, and on me,
all I can do is live by what I believe and present
my identity to others the way I personally see it.
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