When America Was Anti-Catholic

I have been reading Owen Stanwood’s excellent book The 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!) The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism. Stanwood shows just how much weight “anti-popery” 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 – and rumors of Catholic conspiracy – characterized responses to the Revolution even in places such as Barbados, which was not exactly a Puritan stronghold.

In The Protestant Interest, I argued that the classic “Puritan” mindset of seventeenth-century New England was replaced after the Glorious Revolution with an identity that people in Anglo-America called the “Protestant interest.” (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’s 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.