JOURNAL OF THE IRISH LABOUR HISTORY SOCIETY

ESSAYS 73claimed authority but which reached deep into folk history - birth, death, marriage, Easter andChristmas. 5o There was often a good deal of tension between clerical and popular attitudes to thecelebration of these occasions. Easter Monday outings to Cavehill with drinking, dancing, eating andsinging, for example, were the despair of religious leaders,51 but when Thomas Drew, the energeticcurate of Christ Church in Belfast, and other Sunday school managers set out to promote a 'moraloption' , they wisely compromised by investing their religious celebrations with all the noise and colourof more traditional festivities. 52 Sunday school anniversaries and the opening of new churches werealso celebrated in this way in an attempt to offer a lively alternative to the temptations of the new age.The process of modernisation - in the shape of cheap Sunday railway excursions, for example -prompted a vigilance more suggestive of the urgency of the campaign than of its success. 53It is already clear that, despite evangelical intentions and claims, a series of compromises and mutualaccommodations was a greater actuality than the supposed imposition of a code of behaviour on anunwilling but passive section of society. The interaction between religious expression and secular lifecan most clearly be seen in the emergence of 'respectability' as a central feature in the Protestantculture. 54 The desire for upward mobility on the part of the working classes is too often overlooked asan explanation for the encroachment of evangelical principles on popular culture. For many UlsterProtestants the temporal advantages of moral elevation were self-evident and personal ambitions werejustified by the Puritan idea that worldly position was a reflection of divine approbation. 55 Religion andrespectability were thus mutually reinforcing, and divisions between classes were perhaps less distinctthan those between types of social behaviour and values which cut across class boundaries. Thechurches, for example, offered support for an orderly and self-respecting way of life, while for wivesand mothers and for members of the lower and middle classes wishing to improve their situation, thevirtues advocated by evangelical leaders - frugality, temperance and education - had temporal as wellas religious benefits. 56For their part, the traditional religious denominations were motivated by a growing awareness ofcontemporary social problems and pressure from evangelical groups and individuals to reconsider theirrole in society. ·From about the 1830s, doctrinal abstractions became less important than practicalinvolvement in the everyday life of the community. As urban society became more complex andconcentrated, the churches were able to fill an important, if transitional, social gap by meeting thefinancial and material as well as spiritual problems of their flocks. By providing charity and sociability- in the shape of loan funds, clothing funds, dispensaries and a proliferation of societies - churchmenhoped to make their facilities relevant and their theology meaningful. 57 In the event they were far moresuccessful in the former than the latter. It is clear that the idea of self-improvement could uniteevangelicals and non-evangelicals in a cultural identity reflecting conservative social values. Indeed,by the late nineteenth century the Protestant churches had thoroughly appropriated those early -evangelical characteristics of voluntary associations and moral improvement by establishing aformidable array of denominational improvement societies (the Church of Ireland Mutual ImprovementSocieties and the Presbyterian Young Men's Guilds, for example), Sunday schools, YMCA andYWCA auxilaries, Boys' Brigades and Boy Scouts, Women's Temperance Associations and Daughtersof Empire, friendly societies and recreation clubs, and musical and literary societies. When theHome Rule crisis awakened the slumbering unionist associations in provincial Ulster, they foundthemselves already lying on a bed of respectable Protestant culture that was not too difficult topoliticise. 58For those who embraced it, evangelicalism's conservative social code provided a framework ofstability in a period when the rapid progress of migration, urbanisation and industrialisation generatednew tensions in the social structure of the north east. Belfast was most dramatically affected by the paceof socio-economic changes; the liberal market town of the late eighteenth century was transformed ina few decades into a bustling centre of manufacturing. 59 Migration from the depressed southern andwestern areas of the province brought a large influx of Catholic labourers,6o so that the pressures ofpoverty and urban hardship both played upon and provoked outbursts of the sectarian strife by then