The Secularists’ Burns and the Anti-Calvinist Interpretation of Scottish History

This essay focuses on a neglected phase in the competitive history of attempts to appropriate Burns and monopolise interpretations of his work. Although Burns was in his time an ecclesiastical liberal, late Victorian and Edwardian secularists, most notably William Stewart Ross (pseudonym ‘Saladin’) and J. M. Robertson, read Burns as a proponent of secularism and freethought. However, they recoiled from the bardolatry associated with the Burns cult as something that itself smacked of religiosity. Nevertheless, Robertson's alignment of Burns with an anti-Calvinist interpretation of Scottish history has proved an enduring feature of modern Scottish culture and criticism.