Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (review)

Few scholars of anti-Catholicism have tried to understand the role of religious discrimination in shaping a uniquely American liberalism. In Religious Liberties, Elizabeth Fenton shows how “U.S. conceptions of religious pluralism and its corresponding ‘right of conscience’. . . drew their force from anti-Catholicism” (p. 1). From the Quebec Act of 1774 to Reconstruction, with a brief afterword on the role of anti-Catholicism in the politics of the 1960s, Fenton shows how popular American writers from Thomas Paine to Mark Twain exploited the ideology of a tyrannical—and thus inherently antidemocratic—Catholicism that functioned to construct an American political consensus, positioning “Protestantism as the guarantor of religious liberty” (p. 18).

To preserve political representation and “deliberative democracy, ” defined as “a political mode that promotes a public sphere in which citizens engage in rational debate with one another” (p. 12), religious freedom had to be restricted if not fully denied, “sacrificing democracy in the name of deliberation” (p. 63). This revealed the paradox of deliberative democracy. Anti-Catholicism was used, Fenton argues, as a negative contrast to the freedoms inherent in a Protestant political establishment, revealing how deliberative and representative democracy was also “fraught with tension and uncertainty” (p. 84). Regardless of Catholicism’s effort to participate in “representative governance, ” especially given the political reform efforts of Pope Pius IX in Italy or the revolutionary accomplishments of Haitian Catholics, a politically driven Protestantism could never recognize the possibility that non-Protestant could participate in a religiously plural society.

Research on this topic is limited, especially in the number of historians engaged in it, making it somewhat disjointed. Fenton admits that “anti-Catholicism did not fade from public discussion of democracy and difference at the close of the nineteenth century . . . [but] persisted well into the twentieth century” (p. 143). Yet close to a century is missing from Fenton’s discussion of postbellum America in the last chapter and the anti-Catholicism of the 1960s in the afterword. The question remains: if anti-Catholicism has been a key element in creating a Protestant political establishment, how has it influenced religious tolerance today? Have the contemporary Catholic sex scandals been informed by earlier anti-Catholicism? Although anti-Catholicism has had a long history, it seems to be an erratic—perhaps latent—phenomenon. Scholars need to continue to explore the reasons for such historical gaps and also the conditions that give rise to such phenomena.

The selection of literary works, which speaks to the author’s comprehensiveness, may also raise questions. Readers may wonder about the selection of anti-Catholic works. For instance, Fenton does well in uncovering publications largely unknown in the contemporary context, such as George Bourne’s Lorette (New York, 1833), but neglects more familiar works such as Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures (New York, 1836), Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent (Boston, 1835), or Jemima Thompson Luke’s The Female Jesuit (New York, 1851)—the latter a story about a Catholic girl who converted to Catholicism but could never truly break the chains of popery, a narrative that would have worked well in chapter 3.

Notwithstanding these observations, Fenton has offered a much-needed study of anti-Catholicism in particular and the limits of representative democracy in general. Religious tolerance is central to America’s national identity, but, as Fenton has shown, such a commitment has required intolerance. This bespeaks a sobering but important question. Can humans create truly tolerant societies?