Anti-Catholic nativism prefigured the pattern of religious othering in America

Evidence

An outcome of this close association of religion with national interest and identity in American history has been to leave religious differences open to politicization. Religious minorities find themselves not only theologically but also politically suspect as doubts are raised about their national loyalties and adherence to democratic principles. In the mid-nineteenth century, as the United States was moving closer to civil war, the nativist American Party elected six governors in 1855 on a platform of national homogeneity and “American feeling” fueled largely by anti-Catholic sentiments and opposition to new Catholic immigrants. Catholicism, by virtue of its institutional hierarchies, was seen as foreign and “un-American.” It was also regarded as intolerant and opposed to individual liberty, and Catholics were depicted as the pope’s foot soldiers who were coming to the United States with the expressed purpose of reinstituting the religious and political tyranny that “the Roman church” had imposed upon much of Europe. “Americans should be ‘Wide Awake,’ ” warned a popular nineteenth-century song sung to the tune of Yankee Doodle, “For we are free and won’t submit/To intolerance and aggression/From papists, who from foreign lands/Come here to rule this nation/Yankee Doodle, Wide Awake/Be silent you should never/Until you drive the popish snake/From off the soil, FOREVER.” — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 272

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s article on moral panics over immodesty — religious othering as a recurring American script, and finds echoes in Beydoun and Grosfoguel’s present-day anti-Muslim framing. — connects to: Masonry’s secrecy let nativists link it to any evil group — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 609; Nativists framed Catholic immigrants as a papal plot to subvert American institutions — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 39; Anti-Catholic, anti-radical, and Anglo-Saxon patterns predated later nativist surges — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 72 (+1 more)
• ADDENDUM: Sharply parallels article (2) ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — moral panic over a group’s ‘foreign’ practices as class/political signaling; here Catholics are the template before Muslims.
• SEED: Essay angle: the exact rhetorical template (foreign priests/loyalties, intolerance accusation, invasion fear) recurs across American epochs — Catholics, then communists, then Muslims — as a reusable script.
• CANDY: The anti-Catholic ‘Yankee Doodle Wide Awake’ song calling to ‘drive the popish snake / From off the soil, FOREVER’ is a wild concrete slice of 1850s American hate rhetoric.