In A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, Hugh MacDiarmid writes of Robert Burns:
Main nonsense has been uttered in his name
Than in ony's barrin liberty and Christ.
Burns himself wrote to his friend Alexander Cunningham in September 1792 Of all nonsense, religious nonsense is the most nonsensical.” Certainly there has been more nonsense talked about Burns and religion, mostly by ministers, proposing Burns Immortal Memory, and struggling to say something which would justify a supper being held in a church hall in memory of someone who frequently endured the censure of the church.
Thomas Carlyle, in his famous essay on Burns, wrote “He had no religion….His religion, at best, is an anxious wish; like that of Rabelais, ‘ great Perhaps'”
In the recently published Robert Burns and Religion (Ashgate, £45.00) Dr Walter McGinty shows very clearly that Carlyle's assertion that Burns “had no reloigion” is as false as the attempts of clerical proposers of his Immortal Memory to baptise him as a Christian.
McGinty is well placed to survey the theme of Burns' attitude to religion since, for many years he was Church of Scotland minister, whose kirk was immortalised in Tam o' Shanter.
“Kirk-Alloway was drawing nigh
Whare ghaists and houlets nightly cry.”
McGinty shows how Burns moved from viewing the world in his young days from an essentially Christian viewpoint “to a more generalised view of religion, one that concentrated its hold on just a few basic understandings of a person in relation to his God, a God who remained his creator, before whom he was accountable, and whose nature was benevolent. McGinty traces in Burns' letters and poems references to a benevolent God, and very helpfully he lists every description in the poet's writings to God with the description of Him given. Only once does Burns refer to God in specifically Christian terms (“God was in Christ”) and even then he is not saying that the this is something he believes but a conviction he was pass on to his children for it will make their lives happier and better. The other main expression of Burns' attitude to religion in a conviction of his own accountability is also very helpfully treated.
Burns' poetry contains biting, satirical verses about prominent ministers in his native Ayrshire, and McGinty provides very helpful biographical accounts of them and of their theological views, for it is clear that whatever Burns' views were about God, his attitude to the church, leaves little room for uncertainty.
When Queen Victoria's favourite minister, the great Norman MacLeod was in his first parish in Ayrshire, he was asked by the local doctor, just forty years after Burns' death, to take the chair at a Burns celebration, and in his reply the young MacLeod asked “how can we, with the shadow of consistency, commemorate Burns after sitting down at the Lord's Supper to commemorate the Saviour”. So he refused the invitation, though he later made amends by praising Burns at a meeting to mark the centenary of the poet's death, though proposing that a centenary edition of Burns' works be published “from which everything would be excluded which a Christian father could not read aloud in his family circle.” Later still, he wrote to his wife during one of his frequent visits to Balmoral: “The Queen sat down to spin at a nice Scotch wheel, while I read Robert Burns to her: Tam o' Shanter and A man's a man for a' that.
The present minister of St Giles' Cathedral, Gilleasbuig Macmillan tells how after preaching at a school about the parable of the prodigal son, a woman told him that the prodigal's father should have given the boy a good hiding when he got home. Young people should not get the impression that they can do bad things and not be punished. Later in the conversation the woman criticised the decision to install a stained glass window in St Giles' in memory of Burns with his notorious sexual behaviour. Gilleasbuig Macmillan says “As I prepared to murmur some placatory defence (it was late on a Sunday evening and I didn't feel like an argument, her husband said quietly, ‘The prodigal son'. ‘Exactly' said I, with relief.'”
It has always been one of the failings of the church in Scotland to regard sexual sins as more serious than any other kind of sins. But if I read the Gospels correctly, I find there far more condemnation of injustice and exploitation and corruption than I do of sexual peccadilloes. And where he saw injustice or encountered exploitation, or suspected corruption, Robert Burns was always to be found on the side of the angels!