Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War by John C. Pinheiro (review)

In recent years, prompted especially by Jenny Franchot’s Roads to Rome (1994), a number of historians and scholars of literature have focused on the anti-Catholic tropes in American literature and culture. However, aside from discussing the “Bible Wars” in schools, many of these works do not place anti-Catholicism in specific historical circumstances, especially the type of settings familiar to historians of American military and politics. This is where John Pinheiro comes in, with a short, clearly argued book with a tight focus on the Mexican-American War. Pinheiro begins by establishing, with a wealth of historical and historiographical support, the ubiquity of anti-Catholic rhetoric and sentiment in these years. “Anti-Catholic rhetoric,” he argues pointedly, “constituted an integral piece of nearly every major argument for or against the war and was so universally accepted among whites that recruiters, politicians, diplomats, journalists, soldiers, evangelical activists, abolitionists, and pacifists used it” (1–2). This is a forceful thesis, but Pinheiro supports it well with a range of examples drawn from a wide variety of sources.

Setting the stage, Pinheiro introduces the helpful term “Beecherite Synthesis” to refer to the product that resulted when Lyman Beecher weaved together a number of nineteenth-century Americans’ concerns, with rhetoric of anti-Catholicism as the warp and weft. The synthesis was reflective but also productive, Pinheiro argues, showing how it “drew strength from, even as it reinvigorated, extant anti-Catholicism” (6). From here, Pinheiro includes a short and mostly familiar narrative of anti-Catholicism from 1834 to 1844—from the burning of the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts to the Philadelphia Bible Wars—including discussions of Beecher’s A Plea for the West (1835) and Samuel F. B. Morse’s similar works.

As citizens and politicians debated the annexation of Texas as a slave state, there were three main pro-annexation arguments: “religion, race, and republicanism. What connected each to the other,” Pinheiro demonstrates, “was anti-Catholicism” (38). In this way we see how anti-Catholicism, ever intelligible and efficacious, actually could work as a logical adhesive holding political positions together. As this rhetoric was employed in Washington and in newspapers to influence diplomatic policies and military endeavors, and as the war with Mexico loomed, recruiters used religious arguments to convince soldiers to enlist in the fight. Many young Northern Protestants had their reservations about the war, which would effectively spread slavery and give more legislative power to Southerners. Tales of Catholic idolatry, with their superstitions and “golden Jesus,” mitigated these concerns, though, and soldiers were able to recast the war as a mission of Protestant conquest. As the New York Journal of Commerce succinctly put it, “One nation is full of Christians, the other is full of Catholics” (86).

American Catholics, then, were left in a difficult position. Many of them resorted to criticizing the Catholic Church in Mexico, while denying that “Catholicism itself was the major corruptor of the country” (81). This argument was mostly unpersuasive to Protestant Americans and failed to quell their fear of Catholics, which had been recently stoked by an influx of Jesuit missions to Mexico and some Catholic leaders’ open declarations of intention to Catholicize America. However, this argument lent itself to a racialization of Catholicism. If Catholicism did not make Mexico foreign, backwards, worthy of conquest, then what did? Rather than isolate race, though, many Americans melded religious, racial, and national identities. The Whig Party especially, Pinheiro argues, “effectively tied blackness to Catholic and Mexican, then held that web of meaning in opposition to a conflation of white, Protestant, and American” (91).

Again, this logic was lived out by soldiers. “By branding Mexican Catholic practices as paganism, idolatry, or superstition, American soldiers found meaning in the war even as they discovered a way to demonize their enemy without explicitly mentioning race” (117). As religion, race, and nation were fused together, especially under the authority of...