“This Protestant cast of mind and social view would dominate England’s Thirteen colonies. Did the Protestant spirit then create American civilization? One must beware of possible exaggeration. Had the bulk of the early settlers on the Atlantic seaboard been Roman Catholics rather than Calvinists and Anglicans, would the shape of American society have been unrecognizably different? The Catholic minority in Maryland, or the French Catholics of Canada whom British victories brought within Britain’s colonial structure, did not live an existence radically dissimilar from that of the dominant Protestant colonists.
Suppose that massive Catholic Irish migration to America had occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rather than in the nineteenth; suppose farther that this transplanting had been conducted under English law and within the frame of English political institutions, the Irish Catholics nevertheless being accorded complete religious toleration–as, after the English victory at Quebec, the British government would extend such toleration to the Catholic French of Canada. In such hypothetical circumstances, would not America then have developed socially much as it actually did develop with a Protestant population? Economic growth might have been somewhat slower in such conditions, and surely New England’s republican tendencies would have been less pronounced; still, perhaps these hypothetical colonies, by 1775, would have become rather like the actual Protestant colonies in 1775.
So it is somewhat more true to say that the Christian spirit, rather than the Protestant spirit only, helped to create American civilization.”
Russell Kirk. The Roots of American Order. 4th ed. (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2003), p. 237.
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