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.
Two chapters cut from the published Mission to Korea: Joe B. Hopper's letters home about pheasant, goose, and deer hunting with his sons in 1950s and 60s South Korea — including the day a flock of generals' stars helicoptered in for a pheasant hunt.
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.
