This article considers the existence of a distinctive form of fundamentalism in the northern-Irish province of Ulster. It does so by examining the Protestant minorities that grew significantly in the decades after the Ulster revival of 1859. These evangelical others are important because their members were more likely to have fundamentalist tendencies than those who belonged to the main Protestant churches. The existing scholarship on fundamentalism in Northern Ireland focuses on Ian Paisley (1926–2014), who was a life-long adversary of Irish republican separatism and a self-identified fundamentalist. Yet, the focus on Paisley draws attention away from the potential origin of fundamentalism in the early twentieth century that is associated with religious revival in the early 1920s and the heresy trial of a “modernist” Presbyterian professor in 1927. George Marsden's classic study defined fundamentalism as an American phenomenon, yet, with Paisley and developments in the 1920s in mind, he noted that “Ulster appears to be an exception.”1 To what extent was that true? Was there a constituency of potential fundamentalists in the north of Ireland in the early twentieth century? If there was, did the social and political circumstances of the region and period produce a distinctive Ulster variety of fundamentalism?

This article explores the religious response of one neglected writer to the evolutionary philosophy of Herbert Spencer. William Todd Martin was a minister of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and in 1887 published The Evolution Hypothesis: A Criticism of the New Cosmic Philosophy. The work demonstrates the essentially contested nature of “evolution” and “creation” by showing how a self-confessed creationist could affirm an evolutionary understanding of the natural world and species transformation. Martin's approach reflected a transatlantic Presbyterian worldview that saw the harmony of science and religion on the basis of Calvinism, Baconianism and Scottish Common Sense philosophy. Martin's critique is also relevant to issues that continue to animate philosophers of science and religion, including the connections between mind and matter, morality and consciousness in a Darwinian framework, and the relationship between subjective conscious experience and evolutionary physicalism. Martin was able to anticipate these debates because his critique was essentially philosophical and theological rather than biological and biblicist.

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.

The Protestant portion of the population of the north of Ireland experienced an extraordinary outburst of religious fervour in 1859. This article provides a critical overview of some of the interpretations of the revival offered by scholars and suggests a number of hitherto ignored themes under three headings: causes, controversies and consequences. The first section moves beyond questions of social and economic determinism to outline the sense of expectancy for revival that was created through the Evangelical reform movement amongst Presbyterians in the north of Ireland. The second considers the controversies of the revival, especially the various physical phenomena that accompanied some conversions, and the Evangelical critique of the revival offered by William McIlwaine and Isaac Nelson. The final section shows how the revival consolidated religious identities in Ulster and contributed to obscuring the dominance of conservative Evangelicalism within the Presbyterian Church.

The links between Presbyterians in Scotland and the north of Ireland are obvious but have been largely ignored by historians of the nineteenth century. This article addresses this gap by showing how Ulster Presbyterians considered their relationship with their Scottish co-religionists and how they used the interplay of religious and ethnic considerations this entailed to articulate an Ulster Scots identity. For Presbyterians in Ireland, their Scottish origins and identity represented a collection of ideas that could be deployed at certain times for specific reasons – theological orthodoxy, civil and religious liberty, and certain character traits such as hard work, courage, and soberness. Ideas about the Scottish identity of Presbyterianism were reawakened for a more general audience in the first half of the nineteenth century, during the campaign for religious reform and revival within the Irish church, and were expressed through a distinctive denominational historiography inaugurated by James Seaton Reid. The formulation of a coherent narrative of Presbyterian religion and the improvement of Ulster laid the religious foundations of a distinct Ulster Scots identity and its utilization by unionist opponents of Home Rule between 1885 and 1914.