Welcome to Ulster Worldly, a blog about the history of Presbyterianism. Many of these stories come from my own family, many others come from my own denomination.
Ahead of the country’s 250th birthday, Kevin DeYoung taught a two-part combined Sunday school class at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, NC, on the role Presbyterians played in the American Revolution. As DeYoung puts it, “of all the religious groups, Presbyterians played the essential role in the revolution in this country.”
The first lecture, “The Mad Men and Ministers of Mecklenburg County,” is a local history: the Scots-Irish migration from Ulster to the Carolina backcountry, the seven sister Presbyterian churches around Charlotte, and the fiery Covenanter pastor Alexander Craighead, who was preaching independence from England as early as 1743. By 1775, 70% of Mecklenburg County belonged to one of Craighead’s churches, and though Mecklenburg held just 3% of North Carolina’s population, it supplied a quarter of the colony’s soldiers.
The second, “Declaring Independence from Great Britain,” weighs the evidence for and against the disputed Mecklenburg Declaration of May 20, 1775, then walks briskly through the twelve Presbyterian signers of the national Declaration in Philadelphia: Witherspoon, Benjamin Rush, Richard Stockton, James Wilson, and the rest. DeYoung’s case for why Presbyterians were almost uniformly for independence: a polity already shaped for representative government, a long memory of being dissenters under Anglican establishment, and a conviction that civil liberty and religious liberty stand or fall together.
A few of the contemporary verdicts DeYoung gathers are worth pulling out:
King George III called it “a Presbyterian war.”
A Hessian captain in 1778: “Call this war whatever name you may, only call it not an American rebellion. It is nothing more or less than a Scots-Irish rebellion.”
Cornwallis, on his reception in Charlotte: “the hornet’s nest of America.”
And the 19th-century historian George Bancroft: “The first voice publicly raised in America to dissolve all connection with Great Britain came not from the Puritans of New England, nor the Dutch of New York, nor the planters of Virginia, but from Scots-Irish Presbyterians.”
A four-part video series from Mid-America Reformed Seminary tracing the history of the United Reformed Churches in North America, from the controversies in the CRC through the founding and growth of the URCNA.
Tracing the Dunlap family from a Covenanter minister in Scotland through seven generations to George Dunlap Hopper of Kentucky, and the strain of Presbyterianism that ran through them all.
The daily journal of missionary J. Hershey Longenecker during his work building Beechwood Seminary in the Kentucky mountains, documenting his journey from tradesman to missionary.
Over the past few months I’ve been collecting the full text of some of J. Gresham Machen’s letters to the editor from the 1920s and 30s.
The collection spans a critical decade in Machen’s life: from his battles at Princeton Seminary against theological liberalism in the early 1920s, through the fundamentalist-modernist controversy and the formation of Westminster Seminary in 1929, to the final years before his suspension from the PCUSA ministry. During these same years when he was fighting modernism in the church, he was equally engaged fighting statism in the public square.
On August 2, 1936, Stanford Presbyterian Church in Stanford, Kentucky celebrated “Hopper Day,” honoring the children of George Dunlap Hopper. The program featured three of his children who had entered ministry:
Rev. W. H. Hopper, D.D. (William Higgins Hopper), pastor at Burnside, Kentucky, delivered the sermon and benediction.
Rev. Joseph Hopper, my great-grandfather and PCUS missionary to Korea, read the Scripture and led in prayer. This was during his family’s furlough year, shortly before they would return to Korea after their trip around the world in 1935.
Miss Margaret Hopper, Joseph’s sister and missionary in Mokpo, Korea, conducted the vespers service with Mrs. W. O. Martin serving as organist.
My grandfather, Joe B. Hopper, who was fifteen at the time, later recalled attending this service and noting that “the three uncles were sitting in the front pew with backs to the congregation, and it was amusing to note that all three were completely (and similarly) bald.”
The day included morning worship, lunch at the church, and evening vespers.
