A “Traiterous Religion”: Indulgences and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Eighteenth-Century New England

Anti-Catholicism, or antipopery, was one of the broadest and deepest cultural biases in the early-modern English-speaking world. Eighteenth-century New England, in particular, evinced a strong concern with and opposition to imagined Catholic teaching regarding indulgences, believed by many Protestants of the period to mean license to commit sin in advance. This perception informed many aspects of anti-Catholic legislation, history, and literature prior to the American Revolution. These perceptions, inseparable from emerging tropes of the Protestant Reformation as they developed in early-modern England, also provide a key to understanding Protestant apprehensions and fears about unrestricted Catholic religious practice and participation in civic life during the colonial period and into the early republic.