Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth Century America by Jon Gjerde

Author:Jon Gjerde [Gjerde, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781139202749
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-12-06T05:00:00+00:00

Perhaps the most significant outcome of the battle for the conversion of the West was the failure to create a homogeneous society amid an ever more heterogeneous immigration. It became increasingly clear that missionaries would not convert the cacophonous masses that peopled the countryside and cities of America. The West, and by implication America, was not transformed into the idyllic Protestant environment of freedom and true belief; nor did it become the Catholic wasteland of Protestants’ worst fears.

Edward Beecher confessed that he placed his “main dependence upon the power of God, acting through an enlightened and energetic public sentiment.” Yet he also had come to realize by the mid-1850s that this was not enough. He dreaded the influence of nunneries, which he termed the “prisons of deluded and hopeless victims.” He worried about the influence of the Church in the press and in politics. And he would not discount the use of the state to enact legislation that would combat the “pernicious influence of Romanism” on the American nation.136 The conflict between the Protestant and Catholic leadership did not cease. But the power of God through conversion would have to be complemented by other more coercive forms of behavior in state and society. In short, the forging of an American homogeneity might not be a voluntary individual conversion but rather the result of pressure devised by institutions of the state, a topic to which we will next turn.

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