C h a pt e r 1
The Formation of Alexander Campbell’s Ireland
Alexander Campbell was born September 12, 1788, near Ballymena, County Antrim, in what is today Northern Ireland. His parents were Thomas Campbell, a rising Scotch-Irish Seceder Presbyterian minister, and Jane Corneigle, of Huguenot Reformed descent. Though Alexander would leave Ireland in 1808 at age twenty, returning briefly only once in 1847, what he went through in those early years profoundly shaped him temperamentally, spiritually, and intellectually. These experiences contributed to his commitment to religious reform and formed the basis for his certainty—shared with many before him—that God had prepared America for just such a reform. Much of what young Alexander experienced was mediated through the life of his minister father, including the church into which Thomas was ordained: the Anti-Burgher Seceder Synod of Ulster. The very name embodied two of the rancorous divisions among Scotch-Irish Presbyterians. Yet the fights that fractured the Church of Scotland and its Irish affiliates were only one set of hostilities wracking his homeland. Clashes—theological and sometimes physical—flared between Protestants and Catholics, between Anglican Protestants and Presbyterian Protestants, and between the fissiparous factions of Presbyterians. While these conflicts may seem at first to be strictly religious, each one was linked to competing political loyalties. The Campbell family faced these realities every day. To begin to make sense of these conflicts and how they shaped the Ireland of Alexander Campbell’s youth, we must start with the Protestant Reformation in Scotland.
3
Foster A Life of Alexander Campbell first corrections [Foster_Alexander Campbell_text.indd]
p. 3 27 November 2019 13:56