American Catholics in the Protestant Imagination: Rethinking the Academic Study of Religion

• Epilogue
• Chapter
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 186-187
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Epilogue

We have now met the cast of characters that I promised we would meet: the staunch Irish Presbyterians in colonial America who weren’t very staunch, the devout post-Famine Irish Catholics who weren’t very devout, Italian immigrants clinging to localized madonnas and saints who didn’t cling very hard, Cajun Catholics whose Catholicism was possibly more about performing femininity than religion, and Hispanic Catholics who, well, turn out to be not what they seem even if we don’t yet know quite what they are. Along the way, I hope, we have come to understand how a distinctively Protestant imagination, in particular an implicitly Protestant way of relating to the sacred, continues to shape the academic study of American religion—claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Finally, we have seen how this Protestant imagination has diverted scholarly attention from empirical patterns that might otherwise serve as the starting point for new insights into American religion.

What are the implications of the analysis presented here for the academic study of American religion? The answer, as it must, depends upon the reaction that the material in this book evokes in the minds of readers. In thinking about that reaction, one of my worries is that in some sections I may have overstated my case, with the result that some readers will see me as making blanket claims that I really did not intend to make. For example, do I mean to say that all scholars studying Italian Catholicism tell the Standard Story? That no scholars studying the Famine Irish acknowledge that they were not initially devout? That all scholars studying Hispanic Catholicism see it as a strongly matricentered version of Catholicism? The answer of course is no in each case. Indeed, this book would not have been possible had I not been able to draw upon evidence and insights from studies authored by scholars whose work is not susceptible to the criticisms I have raised. My intent has been only to suggest that much—but certainly not all—of the academic literature on American religion is pervaded by biases and metanarratives which in one way or the other derive from a Protestant imagination.

One response to even this limited claim might well be to simply ignore it, or at best, to file this book under a “contains some interesting stuff but I’m not convinced” rubric and then ignore it. Certainly, a great many academic books meet that fate. But another response would be to contest the claims being made here, to demonstrate that my analysis of, say, the academic study of Hispanic Catholicism or the Quest Scale is flawed. For me, contestation of this sort would be the best possible outcome.

This is not because I am confident that my analyses will be vindicated in every detail nor because of a commitment to some ideal that science proceeds by comparing theory with data. No, contestation would be useful because it would promote the only thing that has the slightest chance of promoting change with respect to the historiographical and other biases that have been identified here: getting scholars who study American religion to reflect critically on the conceptual toolkit they now take for granted.