Protestant–Catholic Divisions in Europe and the United States: An Historical and Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The article opens by highlighting the parallels between expressions of Protestant feeling in the aftermath of the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and Islamophobia in the wake of the 9/11 attacks of 2001. The history of Protestant–Catholic conflict is worthy of attention both in its own right, because it provides context for understanding enduring tensions in the North Atlantic and European worlds, and because it suggests comparisons with the contemporary perceived ‘clash of civilizations’ between Christianity and Islam. Focusing on the nineteenth century, the diversity of anti-Catholicism is explored, and particular attention given to the development of the Protestant internationalism associated with the Evangelical Alliance, contrasted with the Catholic internationalism of the Papacy. On both sides of the Atlantic, Protestantism has sometimes been nationalistic and confrontational, tendencies which have persisted to the present, albeit normally in secularized forms. At the same time though, Protestantism has also inspired a model of ‘unity in diversity’, mediated by American constitutional practice, which may prove helpful in furthering European acceptance of wider religious pluralism.

Notes

¹For the context see J.M. Packard, Farewell in Splendor: The Passing of Queen Victoria and her Age (New York: Dutton, 1995); John Wolffe, Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 222–242.

²British Library, Additional Manuscript 46742, fol. 55.

³Ireland was a leading advocate of ‘Americanism’ in the United States church, and so at first sight a rather curious focus for Wilhelm's fears. However he was also a strong Francophile, and recent (in August 1900) public advocate of the restoration of a civil papal principality, both tendencies liable to alarm the Kaiser, who feared he might be a candidate to succeed the elderly Leo XIII (Marvin R. O'Connell, John Ireland and the American Catholic Church (St Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press), pp. 470–471).

⁴H.S. Chamberlain, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, translated by John Lees (2 vols, London, 1911), ii, 134–135.

⁵ New York Times, ‘Victoria Eulogized in Many Pulpits’, 1901; New York Times, 28 January ‘Funeral Services in New York Churches’, 3 February 1901.

⁶ Services Held in the Parish of the Trinity Church in the City of New York on 2 February 1901 in Memory of Queen Victoria with the Sermon Preached in Trinity Church by the Rector on Sunday 22 January (New York: Edwin S. Gorham, 1901), pp. 39–40.

⁷Wolffe, Great Deaths, op. cit., pp. 79–80.

⁸ The Times, ‘Parliament’, 15 February 1901, p. 6.

⁹John Wolffe, ‘Protestantism, Monarchy and the Defence of Christian Britain 1837–2005’, in Callum Brown and Michael Snape (eds) Secularisation in the Christian World (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 62–64.

¹⁰Walter Walsh, The Religious Life and Influence of Queen Victoria (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1902), pp. 34–37, 94–98, 132.

¹¹For surveys see John Wolffe, ‘Change and Continuity in British Anti-Catholicism, 1829–1982’, in Frank Tallett and Nicholas Atkin (eds) Catholicism in Britain and France since 1789 (London: Hambledon, 1996), pp. 67–83, and Marjule Anne Drury, ‘Anti-Catholicism in Germany, Britain and the United States: A Review and Critique of Recent Scholarship’, Church History, 70:1 (2001), pp. 88–131. For the wider European context of anti-Catholicism and anti-clericalism see Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (eds) Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). The key work on Germany in this period is Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics 1870–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). For the United States see Donald L. Kinzer, An Episode in Anti-Catholicism: The American Protective Association (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1964) and Justin Nordstrom, Danger on the Doorstep: Anti-Catholicism and American Print Culture in the Progressive Era (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), and for Canada, J.R. Miller ‘Anti-Catholicism in Canada: from the British Conquest to the Great War’, in Terence Murphy and Gerald Stortz (eds) Creed and Culture: The Place of English Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society 1750–1930 (Montreal: McGill–Queen's University Press, 1993), pp. 25–48.

¹²Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

¹³See for example, respectively on the UK, the United States and continental Europe, Chris Allen, Islamophobia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008); Liz Fekete, A Suitable Enemy: Racism, Migration and Islamophobia in Europe (London: Pluto, 2009).

¹⁴For an excellent recent overview and bibliography of the extensive literature on Northern Ireland see Claire Mitchell, Religion, Politics and Identity in Northern Ireland: Boundaries of Belonging and Belief (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).

¹⁵Philip Jenkins, The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Mark Stephen Massa, Anti-Catholicism in America: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (New York: Crossroad, 2003).

¹⁶D.M. Green, The Europeans: Political Identity in an Emerging Polity (London: Rienner, 2007), p. 103.

¹⁷Brent Nelsen, James L. Guth and Cleveland R. Fraser, ‘Does Religion Matter? Christianity and Public Support for the European Union’, European Union Politics, 2:2 (2001), pp. 191–217.

¹⁸Paul Freston, Protestant Political Parties: A Global Survey (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 28–30, 50.

¹⁹J.T.S. Madeley, ‘E unum pluribus: The Role of Religion in the Project of European Integration’, in Jeffrey Haynes (ed.) Religion and Politics in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), pp. 114–136.

²⁰In addition to works cited in note 11 above, see in particular John Wolffe, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain 1829–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); D.G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); Michael B. Gross, The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004), and Manuel Borutta, Antikatholizmus: Deutschland und Italien in Zeitalter der europäischen Kulturkämpfe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2010). Two seminal older works on the United States are still worthy of attention: R.A. Billington, The Protestant Crusade 1800–1860 (New York: Macmillan, 1938), and John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955). The most substantial account of Dutch anti-Catholicism in English is J.A. Bornewasser, ‘Mythical Aspects of Dutch Anti-Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century’, in J.S. Bromley and E.H. Kossman (eds), Britain and the Netherlands Volume 5: Some Political Mythologies (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), pp. 184–206. Scandinavian anti-Catholicism remains relatively under-researched, but is the focus of an ongoing comparative project led by Yvonne-Maria Werner of the University of Lund. One outcome from the author's ongoing AHRC/ESRC funded project, ‘Protestant–Catholic Conflict: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Realities’ will be a full annotated bibliography, which from late 2011 will be downloadable from the project website: www.open.ac.uk/arts/protestant-catholic-conflict.

²¹The only partial exception to this is France, on which see Steven C. Hause, ‘Anti-Protestant Rhetoric in the Early Third Republic’, French Historical Studies, 16:1 (1989), pp. 183–201; Michèle Sàcquin, Entre Bossuet et Maurras: L'Antiprotestantisme en France de 1814 à 1870 (Paris: École des Chartes, 1998); Jean Baubérot and Valentine Zuber, Une haine oubliée. L'antiprotestantisme avant le ‘pacte laique’ (1870–1905) (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000).

²²The nineteenth-century focus of this article thus complements discussion of the long-term legacy of the Reformation era in Daniel Nexon, ‘Religion, European Identity, and Political Contention in Historical Perspective’, in Timothy A. Byrnes and Peter J. Katzenstein (eds) Religion in an Expanding Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 256–282.

²³W.R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 103–107.

²⁴For detailed accounts of eighteenth-century English-speaking anti-Catholicism, see F.D. Cogliano, No King, No Popery: Anti-Catholicism in Revolutionary New England (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995), and Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth Century England, c 1714–80: A Political and Social Study (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).

²⁵Smith, op. cit., pp. 117–166.

²⁶For more extended discussion and documentation of these categories, see John Wolffe, ‘North Atlantic Anti-Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century: A Comparative Overview’, unpublished paper.

²⁷As had recently been argued by Michael Gross in relation to mid-nineteenth-century Germany (Gross, op. cit.).

²⁸For a full account see John Wolffe, The Expansion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers and Finney (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2006).

²⁹John Wolffe, ‘British Protestants and Europe, 1820–1860: Some Perceptions and Influences’, in Richard Bonney and D.J.B. Trim (eds) The Development of Pluralism in Britain and France (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 209–212.

³⁰John Wolffe, ‘The Evangelical Alliance in the 1840s: An Attempt to Institutionalise Christian Unity’, in W.J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds) Voluntary Religion. Studies in Church History, Vol. 23 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 333–346.

³¹John Wolffe, ‘Transatlantic Visitors and Evangelical Networks 1829–1861’, in Jeremy Gregory and Hugh McLeod (eds) International Religious Networks (Woodbridge: Boydell, in press).

³² Addresses of Rev. L. Bacon… and the Rev. E.N. Kirk, at the Annual Meeting of the Christian Alliance, held in New York, May 8 1845 (New York: S.W. Benedict), p. 3.

³³Ibid., p. 38.

³⁴Ibid., pp. 13–18.

³⁵John Wolffe, ‘Unity in Diversity? North Atlantic Evangelical Thought in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, in R.N. Swanson (ed.) Unity and Diversity in the Church: Studies in Church History, 32 (1996), pp. 363–375.

³⁶ Evangelical Alliance: Report of the Proceedings of the Conference held at Freemasons' Hall London, … 1846 (London: Partridge and Oakey, 1847), p. 25. See also Ian Randall and David Hilborn, One Body in Christ: The History and Significance of the Evangelical Alliance (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2001).

³⁷ Evangelical Alliance: Report of Proceedings, pp. 28–29, 58–59, 245–246.

³⁸Edward Steane (ed.), The Religious Condition of Christendom (London: James Nisbet, 1852).

³⁹Robert Baird, The Progress and Prospects of Christianity in the United States of America (London: Partridge and Oakey, 1851), pp. 41–48.

⁴⁰For more detailed accounts see John Wolffe, ‘British Protestants and Europe’, op. cit., and Nicholas M. Railton, No North Sea: The Anglo-German Evangelical Network in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2000).

⁴¹C.T. McIntire, England against the Papacy, 1858–1861: Tories, Liberals and the overthrow of papal temporal power during the Italian Risorgimento (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

⁴²Philip D. Jordan, The Evangelical Alliance for the United States of America, 1847–1900: Ecumenism, Identity and the Religion of the Republic (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1982), pp. 75–97.

⁴³Philip Schaff and S. Irenaeus Prime (eds), History, Essays, Orations, and Other Documents of the Sixth Conference of the Evangelical Alliance (London: Sampson Low, 1874), p. 14.

⁴⁴Ibid., p. 721.

⁴⁵Ibid., pp. 50–51.

⁴⁶Jordan, op. cit., pp. 146–148, 181.

⁴⁷Josiah Strong, Our Country, edited by Jurgen Herbst (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1963), p. ix.

⁴⁸Ibid., pp. 59–88, 200–218.

⁴⁹W.J. Arnold (ed.), Jubilee of the Evangelical Alliance: Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference (London: John F. Shaw, 1897), pp. 481–483.

⁵⁰ Maintaining the Unity: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference and Diamond Jubilee Celebration of the Evangelical Alliance held in London July 1907 (London: Religious Tract Society, 1907), pp. 371–372.

⁵¹Ibid., pp. 161–171; Adolf Harnack, Protestantismus und Katholizismus in Deutschland (Berlin: Georg Stilke, 1907).

⁵²Brian Stanley, The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), pp. 10–12.

⁵³Randall and Hilborn, op. cit., p. 153.

⁵⁴Blandini Chelini-Pont, ‘Papal Thought on Europe and the European Union in the Twentieth Century’, in Lucian N. Leustean and John T.S. Madeley (eds), Religion, Politics and Law in the European Union (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), p. 129.

⁵⁵Robert de Traz, The Spirit of Geneva, translated by Fried-Ann Kindler (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), pp. 119–121.

⁵⁶C.A.M. Noble, ‘The Background to the British Constitution’, The Battle Standard: The Journal of the European Institute of Protestant Studies, 1:2 (1997), p. 7.

⁵⁷Scott M. Thomas, The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 155–166.

⁵⁸Edmund A. Moore, A Catholic Runs for President: The Campaign of 1928 (New York: Ronald Press, 1956).

⁵⁹Thomas J. Carty, A Catholic in the White House? Religion, Politics and John F. Kennedy's Presidential Campaign (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

⁶⁰The Roman Catholic Iain Duncan-Smith briefly led the Conservative Party from 2001 to 2003, but was obliged to resign when he failed to establish himself as a credible potential prime minister.

⁶¹Bernt T. Oftestad, ‘Norway and the Jesuit Order’, unpublished paper.

⁶²Frank J. Coppa, Politics and the Papacy in the Modern World (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008), pp. 77–98.

⁶³Chelini-Pont, op. cit., pp. 130–137.

⁶⁴Dale T. Irvin, ‘Benedict XVI, the Ends of European Christendom, and the Horizons of World Christianity’, in William G. Rusch (ed.) The Pontificate of Benedict XVI: Its Premises and Promises (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), pp. 8–9.

⁶⁵Gerald Parsons, The Cult of Saint Catherine of Siena (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 2, 145–150.

⁶⁶Anton Pelinka, ‘European Christian Democracy in Comparison’, in Michael Gaeler and Wolfram Kaiser (eds) Christian Democracy in Europe since 1945 (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 205.

⁶⁷Steve Bruce, No Pope of Rome: Militant Protestantism in Modern Scotland (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1985); Steve Bruce, Paisley: Religion and Politics in Northern Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

⁶⁸Nelsen, Guth and Fraser, op. cit., p. 200.

⁶⁹See www.protest-the-pope.org.uk, accessed 4 October 2010.

⁷⁰Massa, op. cit., pp. 59–60, 73–74.

⁷¹See www.au.org, accessed 3 November 2010.

⁷²Barbara Welter, ‘From Maria Monk to Paul Blanshard: A Century of Protestant Anti-Catholicism’, in Robert N. Bellah and Frederick E. Greenspahn (eds), Uncivil Religion: Interreligious Hostility in America (New York: Crossroad, 1987), p. 56.

⁷³Benedict XVI's phrase during an in-flight interview on 16 September 2010. See www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2010/september, accessed 4 October 2010.

⁷⁴For further illustration of this general point see Philip M. Coupland, Britannia, Europa and Christendom: British Christians and European Integration (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

⁷⁵Cf. Massa, op. cit., p. 194.

⁷⁶Mark A. Noll, ‘The Eclipse of Old Hostilities Between and the Potential for New Strife Among Catholics and Protestants Since Vatican II’, in Robert N. Bellah and Frederick E. Greenspahn (eds), Uncivil Religion: Interreligious Hostility in America (New York: Crossroad, 1987), pp. 86–109; William M. Shea, The Lion and the Lamb: Evangelicals and Catholics in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

⁷⁷Wolffe, ‘North Atlantic Evangelical Thought’, op. cit.

⁷⁸Notably in Allen, Islamophobia, op. cit.

⁷⁹Significant differences from historic anti-Catholicism lie in the preference of most church leaders for interfaith dialogue rather than theological polemic, and the lack of a tradition of ritualized popular antagonism other than the marginal activities of the English Defence League.

⁸⁰For example Niall Ferguson, ‘Decline and Fall of the Christian Empire’, The Sunday Times, 11 April 2004. See also the critique of such arguments in Philip Jenkins, God's Continent: Christianity, Islam and Europe's Religious Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

⁸¹Bassam Tibi, ‘Europeanizing Islam or the Islamization of Europe: Political Democracy vs. Cultural Difference’, in Timothy A. Byrnes and Peter J. Katzenstein (eds) Religion in an Expanding Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 210–211.

⁸²‘A Small Step Back from Mayhem’, Independent, 11 September 2010.

⁸³Cf. Timothy A. Byrnes and Peter J. Katzenstein (eds) Religion in an Expanding Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 6.