Madam, - In last Monday's edition, An Irishman's Diary correctly pointed to the centrality of John Nelson Darby and his "Dispensationalism" in forming the mentality of the North American Christian Right. However, the author's comments misconstrue Darby and perhaps exaggerate his influence.
Darby's ideas did not emerge from nowhere. Theologians at Trinity College had been profoundly influenced by millennial ideas ever since James Ussher in the early 17th century.
At the end of the 18th century, Trinity theologians shared an expectation of the worldwide collapse of Catholicism, the conversion of the Jews, their restoration to Palestine, and the international expansion of the Protestant religion.
What made their millennialism different from Darby's was that it bolstered the confessional nature of the Irish state, justifying the demand that converted Catholics should swear allegiance to the British state, while Darby's prised state and church apart, and made a nonsense of any theological justification for the political status quo.
It would be more accurate to note the influence of the dispensational "Left Behind" novels on the Bush administration. This series of novels first appeared in 1995, and since they have sold 50 million copies. Their Biblical science-fiction imagines, among other things, the rise of the Antichrist in Iraq and the apocalyptic destruction of the US by the United Nations. These novels clearly anticipate major themes in recent American foreign policy.
This kind of apocalyptic myth-making has always been closer to the centre of American evangelicalism than to its Irish or British variants.
Today, most evangelicals in Ireland (or the UK) have not heard of Dispensationalism, or the Co Wicklow deacon who developed it. But all of us benefit from his refusal to identify church and state. - Yours, etc.,
Dr CRAWFORD GRIBBEN,
Centre for
Irish-Scottish Studies,
Trinity College, Dublin 2.