The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) are a religiously motivated political party, everyone knows that, everyone is aware of it. However, something quite critical about this religious influence within the party has been missed. Whilst the DUP have gotten better at keeping the small print of their theology out of the public eye the occasional out of place statement or policy still emerges, like Sammy Wilson’s denial of climate change or The DUP’s out stance on the EU referendum. These issues are normally just accepted and put down to the traditionalism or oddity of the party and its members. However, there is more to it than this, it is not down to oddity or traditionalism but to a particular theological strand call dispensationalism.

To make a complicated idea simple, dispensationalism is the belief that human history is broken up in sections called millennials, each time the world enter a new millennial it is one step closer to the end of the world. How dispensationalists know what millennial they are in is by looking for “signs of the time” which usually take on the forms of natural disasters, wars and the return of the anti-Christ. The majority of dispensationalists believe we are currently in the final millennial and the world is coming to an end quite soon. Following?

Now, the founder of the DUP the late Rev Ian Paisley was in fact highly influenced by dispensationalism, you may remember his remarks towards the Pope and the biblical character he saw him as, the anti-Christ. The connection between Paisley and dispensationalism is explained more detailed in Richard Lawrence Jordan’s book the Second Coming of Paisley: Militant Fundamentalism and Ulster Politics (2013). Whilst the DUP distanced themselves from Paisley once he was replaced as First Minister, they did not separate themselves from the Church, many DUP members are members of Free Presbyterian Church and Fraternal Organisations like the Orange Order were dispensationalism as a movement is active. The issue however is that no DUP member states out right they are a dispensationalists but assuming that they are may help explain some of the odder policies.

Firstly, a relatively easy one to explain, Sammy Wilson, climate change denier. Dispensationalism relies heavily on passages of the bible which refer to the end of the world to help them look for “signs of the times.” One such passage is 2 Peter 3:10 which states “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.” (New International Version). As a result the dispensationalists believe the world will be destroyed by fire. Climate Change scientists however state that Global Warming will lead to the world being destroyed by a flood. To the dispensationalists, since this is contradictory to the bible, it is not true. Pretty straight forward.

On to the second questionable issue I raised, the DUP’s out stance on the EU. This one is a bit harder to connect dispensationalism to the DUP but if we work on the understanding that the DUP have dispensationalist tendencies we can start to see the connection. For this issue it is hard to get evidence and thoughts straight from the DUP but by looking at other dispensationalists we can potentially understand the DUP’s position. For this let us look at Joe Webster’s work with the Scottish Brethren in his book The Anthropology of Protestantism: Faith and Crisis among Scottish Fishermen (2013). The Scottish Brethren are a well-known dispensationalist community and they work primarily as deep sea fishermen (this is important for later). Another thing to know is that the Scottish Brethren are also extremely against the European Union. In short how this has come about is in their looking for “signs of the times” in their own lives, as fishermen. They believe that we are in the final Millennial and as such are looking for sign which point to the coming of the end. Signs like Satan creating a great famine (Revelation 6:8), Satan controlling supplies, like food, and only allowing those who belong to him to acquire or buy/sell (Revelation 13:16-17) and the Mark of the Beast (Revelation 13:17). There are many more signs but these are the three interesting one for this argument. Now, where have the Brethren seen signs like this in their own lives? In the fishing industry. Since the EU began to regulate fishing they have been forced to throw away fish if they exceed EU quotas (creating of a famine), mark all their supplies with EU barcodes (The mark of the Beast), and only sell with defined EU markets (control of buying and selling). They are quite convinced that Satan is using the EU to bring on the end of the world. They are further convinced of this as the EU headquarters looks surprising like the Tower of Babel (a biblical attempt of man to build a tower to heaven for which God harshly punished them). See below. All pretty strange right?

Now the big question is what if the DUP think along the same lines, what if in the fishing and agriculture industry which are prominent here in Northern Ireland the DUP believe the same thing as other dispensationalist? What if the DUP’s wanting to leave the EU is not out of the welfare for Northern Ireland or its people but out of a flawed theology which was introduced to the party by its founder. This is something which needs to be considered as these ideas are not reflective of mainstream Christianity but of a small number of radical outsiders. Furthermore, dispensationalists are known for attempting to speed up the apocalypse by trying to fulfil biblical prophesies themselves, from planting trees in the desert as the Brethren did, or by funding extremism in the Middle East to cause wars, as American dispensationalist groups have done in the past. If what I suggest is true this means that our government isn’t headed by a religiously motivated party (an issue already for a good number of people) but actually our Government is headed by a religiously motivated party who believe that the world is going to end and they are quite content to let it happen.