‘The Reformation must be Fought Again’

Abstract

This chapter investigates the intrusion of militant Protestantism into the municipal politics of Scotland’s largest cities. The SPL in Glasgow, and the Protestant Action Society (PAS) in Edinburgh achieved remarkable, but brief, success in the 1930s. Whilst their success suggests a reservoir of latent anti-Catholicism, the rapidity of their emergence and decline suggests that the potential of anti-Catholicism was severely limited. Militant Protestant success was contingent on localised and short-lived social and political factors, not the vibrancy of anti-Catholic sentiment. The historiography on the militants is interesting: only obliquely referred to by the contemporary commentator Compton Mackenzie, and ignored altogether by Handley in the 1940s, they re-emerged from obscurity with the publication of studies by Bruce and by Gallagher in the 1980s.¹ Few subsequent accounts have ignored the phenomenon. Indeed, these organisations have been central to the view that the inter-war period represents the zenith of religious conflict in modern Scotland. Writing of PAS, for example, Tom Devine has claimed they provoked ‘the most violent anti-Catholic riots’ in Scotland’s twentieth century.²