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  • A View from the Right: Catholic Conservatives
  • Jay P. Dolan (bio)
Patrick Allitt. Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America. 1950–1985. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. xii 315 pp. Notes and index. $29.95.

In recent years historians have become increasingly more interested in American conservatism. A sure sign of this was a forum on the writing of the history of American conservatism featured in a recent issue of the American Historical Review. In the lead essay Alan Brinkley sought to explain why “twentieth-century American conservatism has been something of an orphan in historical scholarship.” Brinkley attributed the neglect principally to the liberal, progressive analyses that the majority of historians use to interpret recent U.S. history. 1 Another way of putting this is to acknowledge that historians, who are overwhelmingly liberal in their politics, “are reluctant to sympathize with people whose political opinions they detest.” 2 For this reason the majority of historians have avoided studying American conservatism. The rise of a new political and religious Right in the 1980s has changed the situation and a new generation of historians is beginning to reexamine the place of conservatism in twentieth-century U.S. history. For many of the same reasons a similar scenario of prolonged neglect followed by increased interest has prevailed in the writing of American religious history.

Historians have traditionally interpreted the history of American Protestantism according to a liberal, progressive paradigm. In this interpretation the Great Awakening was a key catalyst in the development of the democratic revolution of the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century evangelical Protestantism shaped the culture of the nation and, according to William McLoughlin, spurred the people on “to those heights of social reform, missionary endeavor, and imperialistic expansionism which constitute the moving forces of our history in that century.” 3 The decline of the social gospel in the post-World War I period signaled the demise of liberal Protestantism and much of the writing about the history of religion in the twentieth century has been an effort to explain this decline. This interpretation identified conservative Protestantism with the commercialism and ballyhoo of big city [End Page 165] revivals and the rural hayseeds who opposed the modernist challenge to the old-time religion. Neither one was very likable. The demise of fundamentalism after the Scopes trial served to confirm the irrelevancy of the conservative wing of American Protestantism. The rise of the religious Right in the 1980s and the sustained growth of Pentecostalism and Fundamentalism challenged this point of view. At the same time, George Marsden and other historians of Protestant evangelicism were recovering the history of the conservative wing of American Protestantism. 4 Their work has revealed that Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism were not the declining rural phenomena that historians had assumed. Their writings have also challenged the validity of the liberal progressive view and have offered in its place an evangelical paradigm to interpret the history of American Christianity. 5

Patrick Allitt’s study of the role of Catholic intellectuals in the American conservative movement suggests that American Catholic historiography may be following the same trajectory as that of its Protestant counterpart. 6 For much of the past fifty years historians of American Catholicism followed a progressive, Americanist view of the Catholic past in the United States. Becoming American was the grand theme in this story and this meant acquiring American, or more precisely modern, values compatible with the Catholic tradition. This viewpoint reached a high point in the 1950s and 1960s, just when the conservative movement in the U.S. was taking shape, and it has dominated the interpretive landscape ever since. 7 The conservative milieu that has developed in the last fifteen years in the U.S. has found strong support in the Catholic church, whose clerical leadership from the Pope down to the youngest priest has become intellectually and politically more conservative than their predecessors of the 1960s and 1970s. Given the conservative milieu in the nation and the church, it is not surprising that some of the new generation of historians are reexamining the history of American Catholicism, seeking to find the historical roots of contemporary Catholic conservatism. It is a history that has...

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