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Dwight L. Moody in Ulster: Evangelical Unity, Denominational Identity and the Fundamentalist Impulse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2021

ANDREW R. HOLMES  and
STUART MATHIESON
ANDREW R. HOLMES*
Affiliation:
School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queen's University, Belfast, 25 University Square, BelfastBT7 1NN
STUART MATHIESON*
Affiliation:
School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queen's University, Belfast, 25 University Square, BelfastBT7 1NN
*
E-mails: [email protected]
[email protected]
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Abstract

The American evangelist Dwight L. Moody visited Ulster on three occasions – 1874, 1883 and 1892 – and his modern, respectable version of revivalism offered a welcome alternative to the ambiguous legacy of the 1859 Ulster revival. Moody stimulated an outpouring of interdenominational activism and may have contributed to a fundamentalist impulse amongst Evangelicals. His legacy in Ulster, as elsewhere, was to energise Evangelicals but at the expense of weakening the ability, perhaps even the desire, of church members to adhere to denominational principles. In that sense, both so-called ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘modernists’ in Northern Ireland in the 1920s were Moody's heirs.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 72 , Issue 4 , October 2021 , pp. 800 - 821
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The authors gratefully acknowledge that the research for this article was funded by a Research Project Grant from the Leverhulme Trust (RPG–2018–062). They would also like to thank Professor David Livingstone and the anonymous reader for this Journal for their comments on an earlier version of this article.

References

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