In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America by Jon Gjerde
  • Elizabeth Fenton
Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America. By Jon Gjerde, Edited by S. Deborah Kang. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 292 pp. $32.99.

The late Jon Gjerde's book is a thoughtful reconsideration of the mutually constitutive relationship between Christian and national identities in the antebellum United States. Beginning with the premise that the story of Protestant/Catholic conflict is more than one of simple animosity boiling over in the face of immigration, the book argues that Catholicism in fact served as the "first enormous test" of the nation's conflicting promises of religious liberty and national unity. Through explorations of Protestant and Catholic responses to a variety of cultural concerns, Gjerde shows that negotiations between the two groups had a formative influence on U.S. notions of the contours of the relationship between church and state.

One of the main strengths of Gjerde's book is the attention it pays to both Catholic and Protestant perspectives on religion and politics. Scholars of the period have tended to assess these viewpoints separately or to focus on Protestant attitudes toward Catholicism. Gjerde, however, shows that Catholics and Protestants simultaneously, if differently, brought their vantage points to bear on American democracy. Protestants generally believed that religious liberty was essential to democracy but worried that "despotic" religions might infiltrate and destroy the tolerant society produced by liberal Christianity. For their part, Catholics struggled to embrace religious liberalism while asserting that their own church held particular value within an American context. Following two chapters that define these distinct "conundrums," Gjerde shows how [End Page 75] Protestants and Catholics distinctly addressed such issues as westward expansion, public education, family dynamics, and the economy. The chapter entitled "Schools and the State" is especially enlightening, as it traces the development of public schooling to argue that Protestant calls for liberal Christian instruction – generally made in opposition to Catholic parochial schools – ironically produced public schools that were increasingly "secular" in their instructional models. This is another strength of the book: individually, its chapters have much to teach us about religious conflict in the antebellum era; together, they chart the evolution of U.S. conceptions of secularism out of these negotiations.

Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America describes an earlier era, but its argument resonates into our present moment. Gjerde's larger project is to show how early religious conflicts produced a social structure that still undergirds negotiations among U.S. religious groups. This would have appeared more fully in the final chapter he had intended to write, but it hovers around the entire work, and Kang's careful editing makes it possible for readers to see the longer arc of Gjerde's argument. Even without this complete final chapter, though, Gjerde's book is an essential study of Catholicism's shaping impact on the U.S. nation. To read this book is a bittersweet experience: sweet, because the book offers new and exciting insights into discussions of religious liberty and pluralism in the United States, bitter, because it is the final and unfinished work of a scholar whose life and career ended too abruptly and too soon.

Elizabeth Fenton
The University of Vermont
...

pdf

Share