Reformed Covenanter
Cancelled Commissioner
This document is a letter sent by the leading United Irishman William Drennan to his sister Martha McTier, who was married to another United Irishman Samuel McTier. The letter was written in 1799, one year after the failed United Irish uprising. Drennan was the son of a Presbyterian minister, Thomas Drennan; therefore, his views on theological matters (as expressed here) give us an insight into the religious ideas of political radicals at this time.
It is interesting to note that Drennan does not claim to be an atheist or a Deist – the religion of many radicals at that time – instead he still claims affiliation with the Christian religion. He writes to his sister ‘as to the Christian religion, I believe as much in it as your husband’, so Drennan evidently did not want to be known as a sceptic. However, his “Christianity” seems to have been qualified or shaped by enlightenment rationalism and, in particular, that of Isaac Newton. Drennan considers the Christian religion to be ‘a pure system of morality’, a moral code rather than a gospel of grace. His comment that Christianity is a system ‘not beyond men to discover or enounce’ perhaps indicates that he denied some of its supernatural elements, such as a belief in the miraculous.
Moreover, he says something that indicates that he thought that orthodox Christianity, as he saw it, has ‘scarcely appeared on this earth since the death of Christ.’ But what is this true Christianity? Drennan reveals that true Christianity, for him, is Unitarianism: ‘the very first and noblest principle of religion, the unity of God, has scarcely ever generally, and never nationally, been acknowledged by Christians, though the foundation article of the Mohametan religion.’ Drennan, in this statement, reveals his sympathy for the Islamic doctrine of God – which, of course, derives the deity of Christ. This further explains his references to Newton, who was widely suspected of being a Unitarian.
Drennan also reveals his anti-clericalism when he says that ‘I believe the priesthood in all ages has been the curse of Christianity, and I believe there will never be happiness or virtue on the face of the earth until that order of men be abolished.’ These are strange sentiments coming from a man whose own father was a Presbyterian minister. However, it is probable that Drennan was influenced by the anti-clericalism of the French Revolution with its attacks upon the priesthood.
While the political radicals of the United Irish movement were in favour of political equality, Drennan, by this stage at least, seems to have gone down a more consistently egalitarian, and possibly Socialist, route. He calls for ‘a greater equality of property, which may deliver the rich and the poor from the vices incident to their conditions.’ Drennan believed that economic inequality generated ‘almost all the vices we see around us’; this statement reveals another departure from orthodox Christianity, in that he believed man’s problems arose from his environment, rather than from his sin.