Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross: Catholic-Protestant Relations in the Old South by Andrew H. M. Stern (review)

Andrew Stern traverses a largely uncharted historiographical terrain by exploring Catholic-Protestant relations across the antebellum South, from the Atlantic seaboard to west of the Mississippi River. In doing so, he discovers a southern world of accommodations and toleration rather than the visceral, and sometimes violent, anti-Catholicism that marked the North and that scholars have assumed characterized the South. According to Stern, even the wave of European immigration that came to southern urban places, like northern ones, during the 1840s and 1850s did not significantly alter a basic pattern of Protestant support for Catholic church building and civic improvement or Catholic support for southern positions on slavery and a conservative social order. To be sure, Stern notes incidents of anti-Catholic riots and suppression, especially in the hothouse of urban politics during the 1850s, but overall and over time, he argues, Protestant toleration ruled the day.

To make his case, Stern looks closely at three southern cities that had long Catholic traditions and significant Catholic populations – Charleston, Mobile, and Louisville – but he also ranges widely, including small towns, rural counties, and other cities in his canvass. Stern appreciates that place and personality informed the particular kinds of interactions and experiences Catholics and Protestants had. Thus, for example, he attributes the Irish-born Bishop John England’s “success” in Charleston to his intellectual acumen, compelling preaching style, careful courting of friendships with the local elite, respect for republican principles, and accommodation to southern norms on slavery and race – all of which made England a most welcome civic partner among the ruling class. England understood Charleston’s ways and adapted accordingly.

The most important part of Stern’s argument rests on the evidence for Protestant support for Catholic enterprises. Protestants gave material and social support for Catholic institution building such as schools, orphanages, and hospitals, and even their churches, because they recognized them as civic investments. In a South with few schools and public services, Catholics provided essential needs, and Protestants availed themselves of them. And in those areas where churches of any kind were few and ministers of any faith were only irregular visitors, Catholics and Protestants worshipped together in whatever “church” they could make for themselves. At the same time, Catholics did not force their views on Protestants, preferring to shore up their own institutional foundation and to meet the needs of a growing Catholic population.

Stern’s argument begs for a reconsideration of the dominant narrative of inevitable and invariable Protestant hostility to Catholics, especially as Catholic immigrants supposedly threatened to swamp Protestant America. But it needs its own cautionary, for almost all of the specific examples of Catholic-Protestant accommodation Stern provides come from the early republic era rather than the late antebellum period, when growing urban populations of immigrants and non-southerners worried the slaveholding elite as to their loyalties and when nativism disrupted local politics. He also needs to consider the extent to which the so-called “plain folk” accepted Catholics, and, indeed, what immigrant Catholics thought about the Protestants who ruled the marketplace, workplace, and much social space. Princes, pastors, and prelates do not represent the whole people.

All that said, Stern’s intelligent book should re-orient discussions on the creation and character of “American” Catholicism and on inter-faith relations, as it also should bring into view a more diversified and dynamic southern religious landscape than the commonplace description of evangelical Protestantism holding sway everywhere. And it should re-invigorate investigations of the effects of place on faith and of church on place. For that, and more, Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross will repay several readings.