Anti-Calvinism and the Ayrshire enlightenment

This essay locates Burns in the context of the intense and combative ecclesiastical politics of Ayrshire during the second half of the eighteenth century, a period when the county saw not only a culture of robust pamphleteering on theological matters but also a couple of high-profile heresy trials. Whereas the Scottish Enlightenment as a whole was, the issue of lay patronage apart, a relatively sedate affair which—surprisingly—witnessed no major theological controversies over subscription to the Calvinist doctrines enshrined in the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), Ayrshire was a disputatious outlier from those consensual norms. There was a marked theological gulf in Burns’s Ayrshire between hardline Calvinist ‘auld lichts’ and theologically liberal anti-Calvinist ‘new lichts’, including the Reverend William McGill of Ayr, who was tried for heresy, and the polymathic layman John Goudie of Kilmarnock, who published a direct attack on the doctrine of original sin which Burns celebrated in verse. Burns’s ecclesiastical satires emerged in a local environment of vigorous, vicious and personalized theological debate, much of it focused on the core doctrines of Calvinism.