Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
History and Religion
Defending the Protestant Nation: The Role of Church History in 1830s Nativism

Defending the Protestant Nation: The Role of Church History in 1830s Nativism

Last updated on: July 28, 2023 at 9:13 am by Guest Contributor

0 Comments

Defending the Protestant Nation: The Role of Church History in 1830s Nativism 2023-07-28T09:13:12-04:00 Guest Contributor

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

We have the pleasure of inviting Dr. Paul Gutacker to the Anxious Bench today. Gutacker is the Executive Director of the Brazos Fellows. He earned his Ph.D. from Baylor University, and this post is adapted from chapters three and four of The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past, published in February 2023 by Oxford University Press. If you would like to learn more about this publication, you may listen to Gutacker’s recent Conference on Faith and History book talk with our editor, Joey Cochran.

In the summer of 1834, Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher returned from Ohio to New England, seeking to raise money for the fledgling Lane Theological Seminary. Beecher wanted to warn Protestants of what he was witnessing in the west. In Cincinnati, where Beecher taught, the Catholic bishop Edward D. Fenwick had opened a Catholic grammar school in 1824, founded a seminary in 1829, started a Catholic college, and launched a weekly Catholic newspaper. Beecher returned east to urge Protestants to step up their investments in education on the frontier.

The message Beecher came to spread was distinctly anti-Catholic. On August 10, he visited three churches in the Boston area, preaching at each on the danger of Protestant children being educated at Catholic institutions. The next evening, in nearby Charlestown, a Protestant mob broke into, ransacked, and burned to the ground an Ursuline convent and boarding school. Afterward, Beecher condemned the mob and tried to distance himself from the violence; yet, only a few months later, he doubled down on his main point in A Plea for the West, an extended case that Catholic education and proselytization posed a serious threat to American liberties.

Beecher’s argument relied thoroughly on church history. He urged Protestants to learn well this history, as it served “to show that [Catholics] always have been hostile to civil and religious liberty.” He reminded readers of the “deeds of persecution and blood” of the Catholic past and worried that a religion that had been “so enslaving and terrible in its recorded deeds” now appeared “mild, meek, unassuming” because “the records of its history [were] denied, or forgotten.” The same church that had gone on crusades and overseen the Inquisition was now seeking to destroy American religious and political liberties.

Beecher was hardly alone among Protestant ministers of the day who believed that church history must be enlisted against the growing presence of Catholic immigrants and institutions. In 1834, Samuel Miller, longtime professor of church history at Princeton Theological Seminary, hastily penned an introduction to an anti-Catholic History of Popery—a book he confessed that he had not time to fully read—and stressed the urgency of its content: the Catholic Church in America was at that very moment being “strengthened by large emigrations from the old world.” He warned Protestants to arm themselves with scripture and history. “He who brings the corruptions of the Papacy to the test of God’s unerring word, and presents a dispassionate and unvarnished history of their rise, progress, and practical influence,” Miller promised, “cannot fail of convincing candid and intelligent minds of their pestiferous character.”

One of Samuel Miller’s students, Robert Baird, shared these concerns. In his landmark work Religion in America, Baird worried about the rising numbers of Catholic immigrants and the growth of parochial education: “Of all forms of error in the United States, Romanism is by far the most formidable, because of the number of its adherents, the organization, wealth, influence, and worldly and unscrupulous policy of its hierarchy.” Like his mentor, Baird believed that church history provided resources to combat Catholicism. In 1845, he published The Life of Ramon Monsalvatge, a narrative of a Spanish monk who converted to Protestantism. In the book’s preface, Baird contrasted Catholic “bigotry, ignorance, and ferociousness” with the light of “this Protestant country.” He then rehearsed the typical historical episodes that proved the corruption of the Catholic Church: the violence of the Inquisition, the martyrdom and persecutions of countless Protestants, and the “Black Legend” of Spanish cruelty in the Americas.

Other prominent Protestants joined the fray. The same year Lyman Beecher published his Plea for the West, Samuel F. B. Morse produced a book warning Americans of the quickly growing Catholic threat. A year removed from the burning of the Ursuline convent in Charlestown—Morse’s birthplace—he published Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States. The book argued that the Catholic hierarchy, in alliance with Austria, was plotting to colonize America’s west through a tide of immigration and Jesuit-led Catholic education. Morse did not rest with words alone: in 1835 he helped found the Native American Democratic Association, and the next year stood as the nativist candidate for mayor of New York City.

Morse’s argument in Foreign Conspiracy shows the connections between church history and political activism, as he relied significantly on historical arguments to galvanize Protestant opposition to Catholic immigration. In fact, Americans, whose friendly experiences with Catholics led them to believe that religion was tolerant, were historically naive, according to Morse: “No one can be deceived by evidence so partial and circumscribed, while the blood of the persecuted for opinion’s sake, stains with the deepest tinge every page of the history of that church.” These horrors of medieval Catholicism were alive and well, as the methods of the “dark ages”—chains, soldiers, and Inquisition—were still in use in Austria. In a creative retelling of national history, Morse urged Americans to remember how their ancestors, the Puritans, fled from “Popish usurpation” to enjoy their religious rights in the new land. Morse implored his readers not to become the generation that saw America’s hard-won liberties undone by the reestablishment of Catholic tyranny.

Tellingly, Morse’s anti-Catholic screed was endorsed by prominent Protestant leaders. Foreign Conspiracy was prefaced by a letter from ministers from four denominations—the Episcopalian James Milnor, the Presbyterian Thomas De Witt, the Methodist Nathan Bangs, and the Baptist Jonathan Going—each of whom recommended the book. In their recommendation the ministers clarified that although they “disapprove of harsh, denunciatory language toward Roman Catholics, their past history” meant that Americans ought to be “jealous of their influence, and to watch with unremitted care all their movements in relation to our free institutions.” It was a shared Protestant memory of the Catholic past, in other words, that justified such virulent anti-Catholic nativism.

Other Protestant ministers agreed that historical memory was of political import. In 1836, William Craig Brownlee published Popery, an Enemy to Civil and Religious Liberty; and Dangerous to Our Republic. A Scottish-born clergyman who taught ancient languages at Rutgers College, Brownlee also served in Associate Presbyterian and Dutch Reformed churches. And he was a tireless opponent of Roman Catholicism: the same year that he wrote Popery, one of his several anti-Catholic publications, Brownlee founded the American Society to Promote the Principles of the Protestant Reformation. He wrote Popery to warn America’s men about the army “annually pouring in upon us,” made up of “prelates, priests, monks, nuns, and hundreds of thousands of the very offscourings of the European Catholic population!”

Like Morse, Brownlee grounded his nativism on religious history. Over two hundred pages Brownlee narrated the history of Catholicism as a story of persecution, violence, and oppression. He spared no rhetorical expense, recounting “agonies, and moanings, and shrieks of the oppressed” during the Spanish Inquisition, which, he told, “cost Spain in all two millions of lives!” The history of Christianity proved that Catholic principles were incompatible with republicanism and religious freedom. What was more, Rome was eager to prevent people from knowing about its sordid past: the histories written by John Locke, Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, and William Robertson, he claimed, had all been banned by the Catholic hierarchy. The modern Catholic Church, Brownlee concluded, was “the same evil, as in the Dark Ages.”

Brownlee’s rhetoric was too strong for some—the Christian Review conceded that the book was “hot and impetuous.” But even so, this anonymous critic appreciated the argument Brownlee was making and used the book review as a launching point to discuss questions surrounding American religious freedom and the dangers posed by corrupt Christianity. Again, religious history grounded the reviewer’s anti-Catholicism: he contrasted the genuine religion that flourished in America with “the mixed Christianity that began its career at an early period in the history of the church” and came to its full fruition in “the intolerance of edicts . . . bloody persecutions . . . sacrifice[s] to the incensed spirit of bigotry.” In other words, even those who disliked the pitch of anti-Catholic rhetoric agreed with the historical justification for anti-Catholic concern.

These anti-Catholic uses of church history fueled the nativism that eventually culminated in the Know Nothing Party of the 1850s. In the face of rising immigration and growing Catholic institutions, American Protestants found reasons in Christian history to limit Catholic participation in national life. The nativism that emerged by the 1830s was not merely a matter of populist prejudice or salacious literature, but was encouraged and propagated by serious Protestant historiography. While anti-Catholicism was driven by economic, ethnic, and gender-based concerns, the history of Christianity also played a significant role in the Protestant ministerial class’s crusade against Rome. Religious memory made anti-Catholic fears more believable, bolstered the informal establishment of Protestantism, and constructed the boundaries of Protestant national identity.

History and Religion

William Craig Brownlee

Previous Post

July 27, 2023

The World Her Wilderness

Next Post

July 31, 2023 Evangelical Anxiety: A Review

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"I have an identical twin, and Thomas was always the disciple I connected with most. ..."

Terry

In the Footsteps of Thomas: A ..."

"I've never thought of Constantine as a villain. Do Christians generally? Maybe the ones who ..."

stevewe

Defending Constantine

"The TV sitcom BEWITCHED was an old favorite of mine"

philipjenkins

How Scotland Gave Us Our Modern ..."

"From now on whenever I see a clipper ship, see a certain brand of Scottish ..."

Terry

How Scotland Gave Us Our Modern ..."

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abolitionism Abortion Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Kuyper Abraham Lincoln Academia Activism Adam Renberg Advent Adventist africa African American Religion Agnes Howard Albert Camus American History American Religious History American Revolution American West Anabaptists Ancient History Andrea Turpin Andrei Tarkovsky Anglicanism Annales Ansley Lillian Quiros anti-Catholicism Antisemitism Anxious Bench apologetics Apparitions Arash Azizi Archaeology archives art Artificial Intelligence Asia Asian Americans Augustine Authors Bad Bunny Baptism Baptists Barack Obama Battle of Hastings Benjamin Franklin Bernard-Henri Levy Beth Allison Barr Beth Moore Bethany Mannon Bible Bill Cunningham Billy Graham Black Music Bob Dylan Body Boenhoffer Books Breastfeeding Bruce Springsteen C.S. Lewis Calvinism Cancel Culture Capitalism Carmelites Catholicism Cedric Robinson Cesar Chavez Charismaticism charity Charles Dickens Charles Lindbergh Che Guevara Chicago Children Chinese Christianity Chris Gehrz Christ Christian death Christian Higher Education Christian life Christian Nation Christian Nationalism Christianity Today Christmas Church life Church Practice cinema Civil Religion Civil Rights Movement Civil War civility Classics Climate Change Cold War Colonial Mexico colonialism Comer Communism community complementarianism Conference on Faith and History Congregationalism Conspiracies Conspiracy Conversion Narratives Coronavirus Costa Rica Council of Nicaea Covid-19 Creation Critical Race Theory Crusades Culture culture wars Daniel K. Williams David Barton David Swartz Death Ways death with dignity DEI democracy Democratic Party Devotion Digital Age Diplomacy discipleship diversity Donald Trump Drama Dua Lipa Early Church early modern Early modern Catholicism Easter Eastern Christianity economic exploitation Education elections Elie Wiesel Elizabeth II Elizabeth Taylor emotions Empire Engineering England enslavement Entertainment Episcopal Church Erica Ramirez eschatology Eurocentrism Evangelicalism Evangelicals Exegesis Family Feminism Film Flannery O'Connor folk music Food Foreign Policy founding fathers Franciscans Franciscus Junius fundamentalism Funerals G.K. Chesterton Gender Genocide genre geography George W. Bush George Washington George Whitefield Global Christianity Global church Grief Guadalupe Guest Post guest post gun control gun violence Gustavo Gutierrez Hamid Dabashi Harold John Ockenga Harvest Hate Hawaiian Christianity Healing health care Heather Cox Richardson Hell Heresy Hermeneutics Higher Education Hinduism Hippocratic oath Historical Fiction Historical Methodology Historical Profession Historical Profession Historical Theology Historical Thinking historiography Holidays Holocaust horror movies Human rights Humanitarian Work humanities Hummingbirds Hungary hymns Imago Dei Immigration Injustice Interviews Iran Islam Islamophobia Israel Ivan's Childhood Jacob Randolph James Bratt Janine Giordano Drake Japanese history Japanese Literature Jean Paul Sartre Jesse Miranda Jesus Jesus Christ Jimmy Carter Joan Baez Joan Didion Joanne Freeman João B. Chaves Joao Chaves Joey Cochran John Calvin John Fea John Tillotson John Turner Johnny Cash Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Tran Joseph Smith Josh Howerton Journalism Jr. Judaism Jürgen Moltmann Just War Justice Justin Brierley Karl Barth Katelyn Beaty koi ponds Kris Kristofferson Kristin Kobes Du Mez Latin American Religious History Latino Americans Lectio Divina Leisure Lent Leonard Cohen liberal arts liberalism Liberation Theology Linda Ronstadt Lisa Clark Diller Literature Lou Reed Lynchings Lynneth Miller Renberg Mainline Protestantism Malcolm Foley Marilyn Monroe Maritime history Mark Noll Marriage Martin Luther Martin Luther King Martyrdom Marxism Mary Masih Alinejad mass shootings material culture medieval Christianity Medieval Ethiopia Melissa Borja memory Mennonites Mental Health Mental Illness Methodism Mexican Americans Mexicans Mike Madrid Miles Mullin Min Jin Lee Miscarriage Missionaries Mister Rogers Mitt Romney modernity Monasticism Mormonism Motherhood Mothers of the Church Moving Music Musicals Nadya Williams Nahua Christianity Native Americans Natsume Sōseki New Contributor New England New Year New York Nico Non-Violent Protest Orthodoxy pacifism Paleo Evangelicals Palestinians Parenting Patti Smith Paul Kingsnorth Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pentecostalism Philip Jenkins Phillis Wheatley physician-assisted suicide pilgrimage Pilgrims Piracy pluralism Plutocracy Poetry Politics Pope Francis Pope Leo XIV post-modernism prayer preaching Presbyterians prosperity gospel Protest Public Executions Public history Publishing Puritans purity culture Quakers race Race Massacres Racial Capitalism racial reconciliation racialization Racism Raha Bahloulipour Re-Enchantment reading Reformation Refugees religion and the university religion and war Religious Freedom Religious Nones Religious Pluralism Religious Symbols religious violence Republican Party Revival Rita Coolidge Ritual Roger Williams Roman Catholic church Royalty Russell Moore same-sex marriage Sarah Irving-Stonebraker Scandinavia Science Science and Technology Scopes trial Scriptural Interpretation secularism Selena Quintanilla seminary Seventh-Day Adventists sexual morality Sexuality Sikhs Silence slaveholders theology Slavery Slavoj Zizek social justice Social Media Southern Baptist Convention Southern Religion Spain Spiritual Autobiography Spiritual but not religious Spiritual Discipline Sports Stanley Hauerwas Suffering Summer Camps Sunday Night Odds and Ends Supernatural Supreme Court Syriac Christianity Tal Howard Taylor Swift Teaching Technology Television Thanksgiving The Beatles The Mission theater TheoBros Theology Thomas Dixon Thomas Jefferson Thomas Kidd Thomas Merton Tim Gloege Tim Walz Tom Holland Tourism tradition Tragedy Translation Transnationalism Travel Trump Ukraine Uncategorized Unitarians United Methodist Church US History Vanessa Chan Velvet Underground Verónica A. Gutiérrez Veronica Gutierrez Vikings Violence Virgin Mary Virtue Virtue ethics Visions Voting War WCTU Wendell Berry Westminster Assembly White Evangelicalism Wildfires Winnie the Pooh Witches women Women in Ministry Women's and Gender Studies Work Worship writing Yasunari Kawabata Zena Hitz

Select a Month November 2026 October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who insulted and opposed David, then died after Abigail pleaded his case?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Amasa Ahithophel Nabal Joab