Reformation Italy » Archive » Anti-Catholicism: The Good, the Bad, and the Un-Christian
Good reasons may exist for opposing Roman Catholicism and remaining Protestant, but throughout United States church history the reasons were usually bad rather than good. For much of American history – at least until 1980 – Protestants regarded Roman Catholics as people who were not good Americans. And the reason for suspicions of Roman Catholics, as John F. Kennedy needed to refute repeatedly during the 1960 presidential campaign, was that their loyalty to the pope was supposedly at odds with swearing allegiance to the U.S. Constitution.
Why American Protestants with supposedly a higher loyalty to God’s word than to the Constitution did not recognize a similar tension between their own faith and status as American citizens speaks volumes about the nature of anti-Catholicism through American history. Whether or not the United States was founded as a Christian nation, it was clearly the case that the American Revolution did not have the anti-clerical and anti-Christian flavor that the French Revolution did. What is more, the American founders and many Reformed Christians believed that the ideals of a republican form of government and the virtues encouraged by Christianity went hand in hand. The founders also regarded the papacy as an enemy of social progress. And as much as that conception of the papacy tapped anti-clerical prejudices, it was also a fair assessment of the Vatican, especially after the terrors of the French Revolution. From 1789 until Vatican II (1962-1965), the papacy was the European institution most committed to preserving a pre-modern and feudal social order. Pope Leo XIII even condemned Americanism in 1899 as a heresy – part of the pope’s definition of Americanism was the effort to adapt Christianity to the separation of church and state and freedom of conscience.
If Rome was an opponent of republican forms of government and liberalization of thought and economic life during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, American Protestants were equally wedded to modern political arrangements in their condemnation of Roman Catholicism. Rome stood for ignorance, bigotry, and superstition while Protestants conceived of the Reformation as a harbinger of the Enlightenment, like General Electric, bringing the good things of knowledge, tolerance, free markets, and political liberty to light.
In which case, the opposition between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism throughout most of American history was based not on doctrine but on politics. And this history of anti-Catholicism makes contemporary Protestant objections to Rome awkward. Not only are many Roman Catholic politicians some of the most vigorous political conservatives – Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity come to mind, not to mention the conservative justices on the Supreme Court. But ever since the papacy of John Paul II, many Americans have recognized Roman Catholics as important allies first against Communism and then in the trench warfare against abortion and same-sex marriage. Still, just because Roman Catholics are good Americans doesn’t make their Christianity better.
If Protestants are going to oppose Rome any more, they will need to find good arguments, better than the ones their American forefathers produced. Not to worry – the arguments against Roman Catholic faith and practice that produced the original Protestant churches are still as compelling today as they were in the sixteenth century. Unfortunately, many of those objections have been forgotten thanks to the political arguments that dominated American anti-Catholicism. Still, as much as Rome has changed some of its views since Vatican II, it has yet to come close to embracing the biblical truths that the Protestant Reformers recovered. Roman Catholics now are, and likely always have been, fine American citizens and patriots. But the question that remains from the Reformation is whether Roman Catholicism is a fine form of Christian faith and practice.
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