10 things you should know about Catholics and the American Founding
In my essay “10 Things You Should Know About the American Founding” I focused on some little-known facts about the American Founding in general. The final three of those “10 things” mentioned Catholics and Catholicism, including how “every colony had some form of anti-Catholic law, except for Pennsylvania. The farther north one journeyed, the stronger the anti-Catholicism became.” This is not to suggest that Catholicism is incompatible with the Founding, but simply to note that Catholics were usually, at best, the odd men out and were to many colonists the dire symbol of all that was wrong with the world.
In celebrating the 240th anniversary of American independence and the ratification of the Declaration of Independence, it’s worth remembering the role that Catholics and Catholicism played in 1776.
- With the exception of Maryland—but only for a bit—each of the English colonies along the North American coastline despised and feared Roman Catholics as well as Catholicism. For most English Protestants, whether Reformed and Presbyterian or low-Church Anglican, Catholicism represented the corruption of the Christian faith. Catholics, far from being the brethren of Protestants, were the worst enemies—far worse than pagans or even Muslims. Why? Because Catholics, in the eyes of those Protestants, should have known better; that is, they should have seen the errors of their Catholic ways. In many respects, it was a case of nearness creating division. In New England, beginning in the 1640s, no citizen could enter a church on a Sunday morning without bearing both a bible and a firearm. When service ended, the men of the congregation secured the area before allowing women and children to leave the church, just in case Catholics might be out raiding that day. Even as late as the American Revolution, New England militiamen screamed, “No king, no pope” as they charged into enemy lines.
- Protestants, however, were rarely tolerant of even other Protestants; Calvinists, for example, often hated Baptists as much as they did Catholics. Far from the “land of the free” that our textbooks usually portray, colonies sought not religious freedom and liberty, but rather religiousautonomy. That is, they wanted freedom to worship as they saw fit, but they certainly did not believe that other sects should have the same rights. In this, the first century and a half of American colonization (with only a very few exceptions) were defined by a whole variety of intolerances. Because the frontier was huge, however, such tolerances could be alleviated—at least as long as you were willing to move west, away from the respectable folks. From the 1600s through 1774, America was really a sea of intolerance with islands of tolerance. Your freedom was essentially the freedom to choose which intolerance you liked best.
- Of the 13 original colonies, only Pennsylvania and Maryland offered anything that we might today recognize as religious toleration. Maryland, for an almost 30-year-long period prior to 1689, might very well have been the most tolerant place in the world when it came to religion. To enforce its religious toleration, however, it traded its freedom of speech. Society protected the diversity of religious communities by forbidding 1) blasphemy against the Holy Trinity; 2) mocking of Mary or any of the saints; and 3) referring to any Christian sect by a derogatory name. When radicals seized the provincial government in 1689, however, they undid all laws of religious toleration, demanding that every resident of Maryland honor the Church of England as the established Church. The new government of 1689, which lasted until 1774, for all intents and purposes outlawed Roman Catholicism, double-taxing Catholics, forbidding the education of Catholic children, and actually permanently removing children in danger of being “raised in a Catholic fashion” from their birth parents.
- When it came to Catholics, most American Protestants could not decide if Catholics were brilliant or indolent. Supporting brilliance, they saw the Jesuits. Although one might hate a Jesuit, one never underestimated him. Yet, supporting indolence—at least by the lights of the Protestant work ethic—French men freely married native women. This, to good Englishmen, seemed an abomination. One might partake of such a relationship privately, but never in public.
- The very first resolutions passed by the first Congress—meeting in the fall of 1774 and calling itself the First Continental Congress—were complaints against British tolerance toward and of Canadian Roman Catholics. In particular, Americans feared what the British called the “Quebec Act,” passed in June 1774. John Adams, never pro-Catholic (though he very much liked Charles Carroll of Carrollton), claimed that the Quebec Act was “a frightful system, as would have terrified any people, who did not prefer liberty to life.” On October 21, 1774, Congress issued the following, its first official pronouncement ever: the Quebec Act was passed by Parliament to place “in the hands of power, to reduce the ancient, free Protestant colonies” to slavery. “Nor,” it stated, “can we suppress our astonishment that a British parliament should ever consent to establish in that country [Canada] a religion that has deluged your island with blood, and superseded impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellions through every part of the world.”
