America's Long March to Grudging Acceptance of Catholics

A lesson on the impermanence of social divisions

Built from a photo by Dan Kitwood via Getty.

Each episode of my podcast begins with a recap of the news from this week in 1925. Recurring themes include political chaos in Europe, surprising levels of interest in sled dog racing, and wild optimism about Zeppelin travel. But the biggest, unmissable, baked-into-practically-every-story theme is the split between Protestants and Catholics.

It seems worth reflecting on that history now that we have an American pope. I’m not sure what direct benefits accrue to Americans now that one of our own is Making Poping Great Again; I think maybe we get a discount on the absolution required for venial sins, plus free Crazy Bread at Little Caesars.¹ At a minimum, though, the fact that almost all Americans are greeting this as an interesting, positive development — kind of like finding $5 in a coat pocket — is a cultural marker. A hundred years ago, “WAR AGAINST POPERY LOST”-type headlines would have been everywhere. And I think it’s worth thinking about what Catholics’ arc in America tells us about the divides that exist in society today.

For well over a century, one of the main projects of America’s Protestant majority was beating back the “threat” posed by papist hordes. In the 1850s, an entire party devoted itself to defeating popery: The Know Nothing Party. The Know Nothings were sort of a proto-QAnon, except that Q’s name back then was Maria Monk, a fraud who wrote a tract accusing priests of — among other things — strangling babies. Back then, America was not diverse enough to have the beautiful patchwork quilt of ethnicity-based conspiracy theories that we have today; we were light on theories of Central American immigrants stuffing ballot boxes or Jews controlling…well, you name it. Much nativist hostility at the time was directed against German and Irish Catholics.

The Know Nothings were America’s third party back when “third party” meant something more than “win a school board seat in East Polycule, Vermont and declare that the Glorious Revolution has arrived”. Know Nothings held more than 100 congressional seats and eight governorships. Though they dissolved in 1860, other groups embodied anti-Catholic sentiment, like the turn-of-the-century American Protective Association and the KKK. Yes, the KKK; much like Yamaha — makers of crotch rockets and clarinets — the KKK had a surprisingly diverse portfolio.

Catholics were high on the KKK’s enemies list. Before I started reviewing old news on my podcast, I knew that the KKK hated basically everybody — and not in a fun, Don Rickles kind-of way — but I didn’t realize how much time they spent cracking Catholic skulls as a self-appointed militia enforcing Prohibition. And Prohibition was, to a large extent, a proxy fight in the Protestant/Catholic split. The dynamic in the eyes of the people at the time was basically: Protestants got to America before Catholics and established strict cultural norms against fun, Catholic immigrants were changing the country with their booze-addled ways, so the Protestants took away Catholics’ liquor just to be dicks. One thing I find funny is that immigrants’ argument was generally not “The stereotype of us enjoying alcohol is hurtful and untrue,” but rather “drinking rules — get the stick out of your ass and try it.” That argument, of course, was a winner: The amendment creating Prohibition is the only constitutional amendment to have been repealed.

The Protestant/Catholic split dominated politics. In 1924, the possible nomination of Catholic Al Smith led to a Democratic convention so disastrous that it changed how conventions are done. Smith won the nomination in 1928 and was defeated partly because people worried that he would be influenced by Rome; John F. Kennedy overcame similar speculation in 1960 only because people as good-looking as JFK tend to not give a fuck what anyone says. For generations, being Catholic was a political liability in much the same way that being gay or being Vivek Ramaswamy is a liability today.

I find all of this fascinating, because the Catholic/Protestant split is now mostly a red herring. Joe Biden’s Catholicism was barely an issue; we talked more about his aviator shades than we did about his religion. How many Americans even know that seven out of nine Supreme Court justices were raised Catholic?² That would have blown people’s minds in 1925; they would have assumed that we somehow lost a war to the city-state of Piedmont. Virtually nobody cares about the Catholic/Protestant split now — I don’t know how we did it, but America woke up one day and just went “Eh…fuck it.”

I find that encouraging. I don’t like societal divisions — I think we should sort ourselves not by arbitrary categories, but according to wealth and physical appearance, like God intended. And the splits we have today — especially those based on race — often seem immutable. But I think the sudden abating of the Catholic/Protestant rift reminds us: They’re not.

Some might respond to that by saying that racial divisions are different, because they reflect inherent group differences. I would respond to that first by pointing out that people in the 19th century absolutely believed that differences between, say, Irish and English were natural, immutable, and important. And second, I would point out that our racial categories make very little sense. We have a category called “Black”, which covers descendants of people from Ghana, Sudan, and Ethiopia alike, and you fall in that category even if your ancestry is 20 or 50 or 75 percent from somewhere else. The “white” category includes everyone from Azerbaijan to Iceland — i.e. a strip of land that has fought centuries worth of wars based on the belief that they are not one people — and some people from North Africa and the Middle East are included but not others, and Ashkenazi Jews count on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays. “Hispanic” means everyone south of El Paso no matter what color, except for people who consider themselves something else, and some parts of the Caribbean count but not others, and I maybe should have said “Latino” instead of “Hispanic” even though no living soul knows what either word means. “Native American” is basically “Hispanic” but for people whose ancestors were north of El Paso, and those groups also spent centuries fighting each other, and some people in that category these days look a lot like Margot Robbie. Finally, “Asian” covers the remaining 58 percent of humanity — Koreans, Cambodians, Indians, Saudis and many others are thrown into one big, totally-not-ridiculous “miscellaneous” pile.

I think these categories are moronic, and I reject right-wing and left-wing ways of thinking that treat them as important. I look forward to the day when we wake up and say “Eh…fuck it.” The waning of the Catholic/Protestant split proves that you’re allowed to just do that — you can just decide not to care about these things. Maybe the new American pope can talk to God and ask him to make that happen.

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1. I think…check with someone who is Catholic and/or works a Little Caesar’s to be sure.

2. Six of the seven are definitely Catholic, and the question mark is Gorsuch, who was raised Catholic, attended an Episcopal church, and has not said much publicly about his religion.