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  • 15 - Protestant-Catholic Ecumenism and the Meanings of American Freedom

  • from Part II - The Religious Culture of American Protestantism
  • Edited by Jason E. Vickers, Asbury Theological Seminary, Kentucky, Jennifer Woodruff Tait
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to American Protestantism
  • Published online: 11 May 2022
  • Print publication: 26 May 2022, pp 277-296

  • Summary

    Long before the United States was any more than a collection of British colonies in North America, Protestants viewed Catholicism as a threat to national identity, individual liberty, personal salvation, and the stability of free government. Their fears continued up through the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy. Understanding why Protestants viewed Catholicism with fear and loathing reveals much about the evolution of American understandings of freedom, which for decades were forged unabashedly in opposition to the Catholic Church and its understanding of what freedom was and how people could attain it. To be sure, social issues like birth control and gay marriage have helped to create a “new ecumenism.” Just as important, however, have been the inequities caused by the advent of modern industrial capitalism, which have forced American Protestants to stop using the Catholic Church as a foil when defining freedom and the conditions that sustain it.

Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860
  • Maura Jane Farrelly
  • Published online: 20 November 2017
  • Print publication: 09 November 2017
  • Using fears of Catholicism as a mechanism through which to explore the contours of Anglo-American understandings of freedom, Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620–1860 reveals the ironic role that anti-Catholicism played in defining and sustaining some of the core values of American identity, values that continue to animate our religious and political discussions today. Farrelly explains how that bias helped to shape colonial and antebellum cultural understandings of God, the individual, salvation, society, government, law, national identity, and freedom. In so doing, Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620–1860 provides contemporary observers with a framework for understanding what is at stake in the debate over the place of Muslims and other non-Christian groups in American society.

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