The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism<\/em><\/a>. Stanwood shows just how much weight \u201canti-popery\u201d carried in early English America, and how it framed discussions of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689, in which the Catholic King James II was booted out in favor of Protestant monarchs William and Mary. One might expect anti-Catholicism to have colored New England Puritan culture, but Stanwood demonstrates how the same rhetoric \u2013 and rumors of Catholic conspiracy \u2013 characterized responses to the Revolution even in places such as Barbados, which was not exactly a Puritan stronghold.<\/p>\nIn\u00a0The Protestant Interest<\/em>, I argued that the classic \u201cPuritan\u201d mindset of seventeenth-century New England was replaced after the Glorious Revolution with an identity that people in Anglo-America called the \u201cProtestant interest.\u201d (I have come to realize that George Whitefield used that term, too, in sermons a half-century later.) The defining qualities of the Protestant interest were British nationalism, international Protestantism, and anti-Catholicism. Earlier Puritans were often skeptical of English imperial power. And while Puritans certainly allied against what they saw as the ultimate earthly enemy of Roman Catholicism, they spent a great deal of time battling over the relative merits of Anglican, Presbyterian, and Congregational distinctives. The Glorious Revolution set in motion two generations of intermittent war between England and Europe\u2019s Catholic powers, especially France and Spain. The friends of the Protestant interest realized that whatever their ecclesiastical differences, orthodox Protestants could not afford to squabble in the face of a global Catholic menace.![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.upenn.edu\/pennpress\/img\/covers\/14936.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThere\u2019s nothing like war to fuel prejudice of all kinds, and the imperial conflicts of the first six decades of the eighteenth century fostered a particularly intense anti-Catholicism among many Americans. Virginia Presbyterian pastor Samuel Davies warned in 1755 \u2013 not without some basis in fact, given the recent outbreak of the Seven Years\u2019 War \u2013 about the threat of \u201cPopish slavery, tyranny, and massacre.\u201d He summoned Virginia militiamen to fight against \u201cthe infernal horrors of Popery.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Americans debate the role of religion in the American Founding, they\u2019re often given two stark choices \u2013 either it was a religious founding in which religion worked for good, or a secular founding in which secularism worked for good. But in anti-Catholicism, we see a third type of role that religion played in early America, a species of religious opinion that was, from a modern perspective, less than constructive. Their anti-Catholicism may have been\u00a0understandable<\/em>, given the background of the Reformation, the serious theological concerns that birthed it, and the interminable wars prompted by the religious alliances of European states. Just ask French Protestants, the colonists would have reminded us, what happens when a Catholic state takes away Protestants\u2019 very right to exist. (Catholics had evidence of such nightmare scenarios, too.)<\/p>\nBut for evangelicals today who have grown to appreciate our Catholic friends\u2019 advocacy for life, traditional marriage, and religious liberty, as well as their defense of doctrines such as Christ\u2019s divinity in an era of liberal Protestant heterodoxy, the pervasiveness of early American anti-Catholicism makes one wince. Yes, Christianity played a major role in the founding of the colonies, and of the new American nation, but we should not assume that their religion was always<\/em> a force for good.<\/p>\nFriends, I\u00a0<\/em>have recently started a Thomas S. Kidd newsletter.\u00a0Each newsletter will update you\u00a0on what\u2019s happening in the world of American religious and political history. It will contain unique material available only to subscribers, and each will help you keep up with my blog posts, books, and other writings from around the web. [Your e-mail information will never be<\/em>\u00a0shared.]\u00a0If you\u2019re interested, you can\u00a0sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I have been reading Owen Stanwood\u2019s excellent book\u00a0The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution, which has taken me back to my own doctoral research and first book (now a cult classic!)\u00a0The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism. Stanwood shows just how much weight \u201canti-popery\u201d carried in early English America, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1000,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[500,1396,5],"tags":[194,1659,1656,1657,1658,2800],"class_list":["post-8783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-religious-history","category-catholicism","category-thomas-kidd","tag-anti-catholicism","tag-glorious-revolution","tag-owen-stanwood","tag-the-empire-reformed","tag-the-protestant-interest","tag-thomas-kidd"],"yoast_head":"\n
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