This major new book represents the first serious study of Irish evangelicalism. The authors examine the social history of popular protestantism in Ulster from the Evangelical Revival in the mid-eighteenth century to the conflicts generated by proposals for Irish Home Rule at the end of the nineteenth century. Many of the central themes of the book are at the forefront of recent work on popular religion including the relationship between religion and national identity, the role of women in popular religion, the causes and consequences of religious revivalism, and the impact of social change on religious experience. The authors draw on a wide range of primary sources from the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. In addition, they display an impressive mastery of the wider literature on popular religion in the period.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Over seven million people left Ireland over the course of the nineteenth century. This book is the first to put that huge population change in its religious context, by asking how the Irish Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian churches responded to mass emigration. Did they facilitate it, object to it, or limit it? Were the three Irish churches themelves changed by this demographic upheaval? Focusing on the effects of emigration on Ireland rather than its diaspora, and merging two of the most important phenomena in the story of modern Ireland – mass emigration and religious change – this study offers new insights into both nineteenth-century Irish history and historical migration studies in general. Its five thematic chapters lead to a conclusion that, on balance, emigration determined the churches’ fates to a far greater extent than the churches determined emigrants’ fates.

At the end of the eighteenth century, an evangelical movement gained enormous popularity at all levels of Irish society. Initially driven by the enthusiasm and commitment of Methodists and Dissenters, it quickly gained ascendancy in the Church of Ireland, where its unique blend of moral improvement and conservative piety appealed to those threatened by the democratic revolution and the demands of the Catholic population for political equality. The Bible War in Ireland identifies this evangelical movement as the origin of Ireland's Protestant "Second Reformation" in the 1820s. This effort, in turn, helped provoke a revolution in political consciousness among the Catholic population, setting the stage for the emergence of the Catholic Church as a leading player in the Irish political arena. Extensively researched, Irene Whelan's book puts forward a uniquely challenging interpretation of the origins of religious and political polarization in Ireland. Copublished with Lilliput Press, Dublin. The Wisconsin edition is for sale only in North America. "Essential reading for anyone interested in the emergence of an Irish Catholic identity in the nineteenth century and in Protestant-Catholic relations in that period not only in Ireland but in the Anglophone world."--Thomas Bartlett, The Catholic Historical Review