The Editor

Dissident Republicans need to come back to Christ

The thought of more republican dissident activity will give most of us cause for concern. Those who are not concerned are either not politically-minded or simply do not believe in the efficacy of Christianity.

That is the conclusion that any fair-minded person will reach for make no mistake about it, it is the rejection of Christ that is at the heart of dissident republican activity. To make it absolutely clear, I consider all republican violence, dissident or mainstream, to be motivated by forces deep in the human psyche that are, whatever the protagonists say in public, in fact profoundly hostile to Jesus Christ and in the final analysis are antichristian.

I am only writing this letter so that those involved in republican dissident violence cannot suggest that no-one ever presented an argument to them that their violence was evil and not good as they may think. Otherwise they will continue on their way killing and maiming in the mistaken belief that a higher force is behind them.

The problem relates to injured egos. The ego is a profoundly misused faculty of human beings. Many people are intolerable when they go into the shell of their ego and think only in terms of themselves and not others. The political ego will nonchalantly list off grievances and complaints against those it perceives to be its enemies. It will convince itself that its enemies are evil and it is good.

What is actually at play with republican dissidents is an almost unchallengeable belief that because history favours their side of the argument, that there is no worth at all in the arguments of their enemies on the unionist and British side. They have all sorts of arguments to explain away the fact that their arguments have not been accepted.

“Unionists are racist, supremacist, anti-Irish and anti-Catholic,” they argue, “and that is why they cannot ever concede to what are in many ways the overwhelmingly strong arguments for Irish unity of mainstream Nationalist parties like the SDLP.”

In this sense they take characteristics that are present among small numbers of unionists and apply them to all unionists. The fact is that many of these characteristics are present in the republican community too. In fact, it has been argued that inside every republican there is a little Englander wrapped in an Irish tricolour trying to get out.

However, the reality is that we would probably not know about these negative traits were it not for the fact that we have seen them first in our own community. Therefore, it is disingenuous in the extreme to try to blacken one side or other with complete purity of either good or evil.

The ego does this when we listen to it. When we sit down and make a list of all the grievances we have, and forget about all the just grievances we have made others experience through our violence, we go into a dangerous mode.

The antidote to this is that we must learn to think rather than remember. That is the key to Christianity. Jesus came into a world where there was a history of oppression against his own people for hundreds of years. He didn’t dwell on the past. He set about changing the present in order to make the future better.

There is a false premise underpinning both dissident and mainstream republicanism that you can make the future better by destroying the present. But Jesus lived in the present, expanding the good present there and crowding out the evil. Can anyone truly suggest that Jesus tried in any way to make the present worse so that the future would be better? Why not? Isn’t it because it would be a nonsensical argument?

My writing this letter may be a fruitless exercise in the sense that Irish republicans take their inspiration from all sorts of views expressed and actions undertaken over the course of history. None of those views are typically Christian though they will argue that they are being consistent with the Old Testament portion of the Bible.

Republicans tend to lack the maturity to accept that the Old Testament has no Christ and the relationship between God and people tends to be very shallow such that the Old Testament world is effectively without divine inspiration.

Consequently there tends to be nothing divinely inspired about the history of Irish republicanism. It tends to be man-made in inspiration and Godless in action. That is why there was so many disturbing actions carried out by republicans during the Troubles. Republicans can have no Christ in their lives and it’s about time that they admitted this to themselves and to the community.

It’s time that republican dissidents came back to Jesus Christ and began to try to make the world better, not worse.

You may enclose a copy of this article if you wish.

*John O’Connell is Derry-based author.

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