Interview: John McGreevy

Liberty at the founding meant something different than it meant in 1840. What did it mean in 1840, religious liberty specifically?

"Liberty" ... in the 1840s and 1850s is the hot term, if you think about the various ways in which it is being talked about. Liberty for slaves is one big issue. Liberty for women: Should women have rights within marriage? That's another big issue. Liberty of contract: If you make a contract, are you allowed to break that contract? That's another big issue.

So religious freedom and religious liberty fit right into that discussion about what are the rights of autonomous individuals on the one hand or of religious communities on the other. And states -- by that I mean national governments -- are trying to sort that out in the 19th century and come to some sort of peace agreement on the relative rights and responsibilities of individuals and the relative rights and responsibilities of religious communities.

We have religious freedom written in the First Amendment, but were people really religiously free? What about Catholics?

In the early part of the United States, [Catholics] were a very small minority. And the Catholic migration, or you could even call it diaspora, of the 19th century really doesn't get going until the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, and then we see this massive Catholic migration. Most of those Catholics are not coming because they are worried about religious liberty per se. The ones from Ireland are coming because of the famine. The ones from Germany are coming because of political troubles, and sometimes there's religious persecution issues involved there as well, because there's a lot of religious conflict in Germany in the 1830s and 1840s. But most of the reason they're coming is economic as well.

When they get to the United States, Catholics have two reactions. And by Catholics I mean bishops and Jesuit priests, and then ordinary lay Catholics, too. The first reaction is: "This place is great because we get to do what we want, and religious liberty is going to allow us to. If we want to build a school, we can build a school. If we want to open a church, we can open a church. If we want to try and bring a group of nuns over from Germany to work here, we can do that."

The second reaction -- and it's a growing reaction in the 1830s, '40s and '50s -- is that these people don't mean what they say when they say, "We believe in religious liberty." What they really mean is, "We believe in religious liberty for certain kinds of religions." And by that, they don't mean Catholicism. So they believe in religious liberty as long as the church doesn't have any ties to a foreign state, like the Papal States [in Italy] in the 19th century. "We believe in religious liberty as long as people don't take vows of obedience," because that seemed somehow un-American. "We believe in religious liberty as long as you don't try and set up your own school system." ...

America fought the Revolution to fight tyranny, yet the Catholic Church saw tyranny?

Right. Many Protestant ... Americans in the early 19th century, if they looked to Europe and they thought of what are the tyrannical institutions in Europe, they would think of monarchies sometimes, ... and then they would think of Catholicism.

One thing I've thought has been underestimated in the historical literature is actually how powerful the memory of the Reformation is for both Catholics and Protestants in the 19th century. It happened 300 years before, 400 years before, but that is very powerful. And the association of Protestantism with liberty and freedom is really locked pretty tightly in a lot of Americans' minds. So they look to Europe, and they see Catholicism supporting some monarchical governments; they see Catholicism, in the name of the pope, expressing doubts about freedom of the press and hesitation about allowing any Protestant preachers in, for example, the Papal States. And they say: "There it is. It's tyrannical Rome."

Then they're even more shocked when they realize by the middle of the 19th century that Catholicism is growing. One of the ironies of this period is that at the end of the French Revolution, most people thought institutional Catholicism is more or less dead, because it was in total chaos. Most of the churches in France had been destroyed. The pope had been almost kidnapped. There was relatively little left of the institutional structure of the Catholic Church. By the mid-19th century, it's going through the greatest growth period in its modern history, and that surprised and scared people whose own narrative of history was that Catholicism was with the old days, the backward days, and Protestantism was part of progress and the future. ...

The people in America are looking forward, and they see certain things as looking backward. Is that a good reading of religion?

I think many Americans -- and this is not just Americans, actually; Europeans as well -- associated Protestantism not just with liberty but with progress, as part of the progress of the modern world toward democracy, capitalist economies, the individual as a voter, as a marriage partner, having a strong sense of autonomy. And the fact that Catholicism was growing, that it was growing in the United States -- which in particular was founded with a strong Protestant ethos, a sense of this being the last great hope, in some ways, for Protestantism, the Puritans and the Pilgrims having escaped from what they saw as either corrupted Protestant or Catholic regimes in Europe -- to have Catholicism growing in the United States seemed particularly threatening. And precisely, many people argued, because the United States was so open, was so welcoming, it was in danger, because that left us vulnerable to conniving, conspiratorial Catholics who had no illusions, in their view, about democracy or liberty and would be willing to use anything to try and change the structure of the society.

Would the regular Protestant man on the street feel a threat from Catholicism?

Some did, some didn't. I wouldn't want to exaggerate that. After anti-slavery and the controversy over slavery, the controversy over Catholicism in the 1840s, 1850s was the hottest issue in the country. It was a very hot issue: dozens and dozens of pamphlets, hundreds of sermons, all kinds of newspaper editorials. So if you were to think about a modern-day contrast, it was a headline in the newspaper for about two or three decades, a very powerful headline in the newspaper. So does the average person feel that way? Not necessarily. I think if you look at people's correspondence [in] the 19th century, they're not talking about it that much. For some people, though, it's a voting issue; it's an absolute crisis.

How had America changed religiously since its founding? The implications?

At the founding -- if you take the very large step of bracketing African American Christians, because most of them are slaves -- it's mostly white Protestant Christians, overwhelmingly. And that's a diverse group. There are all kinds of Christian denominations at the founding. But they do have that in common.

You could argue that the big Catholic migrations of the 1840s and 1850s are the United States' first experience with a very serious diversity, beyond the racial diversity evident in slavery and the free black populations and with Native Americans. ...

And Catholics are leaning toward one particular political party, the Democrats. They have pronounced views on hot issues of the day, like whether or not bars should be closed on Sunday, whether or not there should be public funds directed to religious schools and other controversial issues. That creates a different dynamic, and it brings religion into politics in a new way.

Was the public school controversy a test of America's religious freedom?

I think it was a test of how the United States was going to define what religious liberty means, and we hadn't had that sort of test before. In all of the North Atlantic countries, one of the big achievements of the 19th century is some kind of public education system. All these new nations -- Germany, United States, Britain -- all decide, we need to have some kind of public education system.

Now, in the early 19th century, the education systems that did exist often came out of churches and [were] religious in origin. So the assumption was you should have religion as part of public education. But what do you do when the religious population, as in the United States, is so diverse, when there are so many different kinds of Protestants?

And the answer that Horace Mann and other educational reformers came up with was, OK, we take common texts, like the Bible and the Ten Commandments as they're in the King James Bible, common hymns that aren't divisive among Protestant Christians, and we can have both religion in the schools and a nonsectarian education. That compromise might have worked for a lot longer than it did if there hadn't been this massive Catholic migration that really put to the test what kind of religion can be tolerated within publicly funded institutions.

How powerful was the feeling among Catholics that America was not [what it said it was]? Is that what this school controversy was all about?

[Archbishop John] Hughes and other bishops and Jesuits who were founding schools genuinely felt that the public schools were not nonsectarian, they were not neutral; they were engines of converting Catholics into Protestants. And if they were to be true to their faith and true to their vows as priests, they had to somehow stop this. Catholics were generally poor, and they didn't have many resources. And they were eager -- their parents were eager, just like anybody else's parents -- to get their children education. And if these bishops and religious leaders didn't somehow provide either a Catholic alternative or change what was going on in the public schools, their fear was, they're going to lose a whole generation of young Catholics.

So they thought the fact that so many teachers in the public schools were ministers or former ministers, the fact that they were singing Protestant hymns, the fact that the textbooks in the public schools were virulently, quite virulently anti-Catholic, all of that made Hughes and the other Catholic leaders push on two fronts. One front is to say: "These public schools are not neutral, whatever you claim. They are really Protestant." Another front is to say: "You know what? If you'll just give us some state money, we'll run our own schools, and we'll teach reading and writing and arithmetic, and you can even come in and test our kids, and they're going to be doing OK. But then we can really inculcate them in our religious values." ...

An earlier generation of Catholics, I think, was willing to negotiate: "Maybe we can make these public schools better, and we could have certain hours set aside for Catholic teachings and Protestant teaching." This is true in Europe and the United States. By the 1840s, with Hughes, and the 1850s, a more combative Catholic attitude had developed: "Either we get religion out of the public schools entirely, or we get our own schools going." And they were already leaning toward "Let's get our own schools going," which was a really momentous decision.

By the end of the 19th century, and certainly into the 20th century, the Catholic school system in the United States is the world's largest private educational system, and it came out of this tense experiment really in religious diversity in the mid-19th century.

So you would describe Hughes as combative?

Yes, very combative. I don't think there's any controversy in saying that. These Catholic leaders in the 1840s and 1850s, they had a good argument to make, but they were sort of picking a fight. They wanted to make a stand on the question of making the public schools less sectarian, in their view, and opening the door that was their hope -- they were unsuccessful -- to getting public funding for religious schools. In the end, they decided to do the religious schools anyway, without public funding. And that was a very bold decision. It really affected a big chunk certainly of Catholic history, but just of American history, too.

Did all Catholics in America at this point agree with this?

No, there was argument among Catholics. Is it too expensive to set up our own parochial school system? Think of the investment that's going to take. Who's going to teach? And of course the answer to that was, religious women were going to be the teachers, and they weren't going to be paid salaries. So that was an argument within Catholicism. ... By the end of the 19th century, most of the religious leadership is strongly on the side of no, let's run our own religious schools system. ...

What were Hughes and others taking a stand against?

I think they perceive themselves as taking a stand against a too conciliatory attitude among some of their predecessors on working with Protestants and what they saw as an increasingly aggressive and hostile Protestantism, just as many Protestants saw an increasingly aggressive and, if not hostile, ambitious Catholicism.

How did America see itself in 1820?

In 1820 the vast majority of Americans still see this as a Protestant country, even if it doesn't say that in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. At the level of the ordinary person, that's what they imagine the country to be. And that's why the big migrations later come as such a shock. They think of themselves as a religious country, God-fearing -- big debate about whether or not you should be able to deliver the mail on Sunday and whether or not you should be able to close bars on Sunday -- but they don't see themselves as anything but a Protestant nation.

It doesn't seem like Catholicism fits into that view at all.

It was an absolutely rational view in 1820, when there were so few Catholics in the country. I think we're talking really below 2 percent of the population. And Jews are a very small percentage of the population as well. One of the issues that occurs in the late 19th century is the migration of Jews, too, and another dimension of religious pluralism.

So in the 1830s, what changed ... in how Catholicism fit in? I'm thinking of the [1834 Ursuline] Convent burning [in Charlestown, Mass.]

… You could view that as a couple things -- one, as a sort of enduring anti-Catholicism that's particularly strong in the most religious segments of American culture, and there's an increasingly anti-Catholic dimension to evangelical Protestantism at that time.

But I view that as a more isolated event than I view the wave of anti-Catholic orators and speeches and conflicts, including the burning of churches and the formation of anti-Catholic political party of the 1840s and 1850s. By that time, on both continents, Europe and the United States, you have what can only be described as a massive popular movement of anti-Catholicism. The burning of the convent might have been a kind of warning bell, but the real movement takes off a little bit later than that.

So in the 1840s, is it brave for Hughes to stand up against --

Yes, I think it is brave and, depending on your view, foolhardy or courageous or belligerent. But brave is fair. He had no fear. As far as we can tell, he was very tough-minded. And again, I think he saw part of his job as rallying Catholics to a stronger sense of their own identity: Do not let yourself be seduced by, turned away from the faith of your ancestors and the faith that you've inherited. And do not let the public schools be the agent of that seduction.

How did Protestants view Hughes?

I think they saw him as a very threatening figure. After the school fight, there was a little bit of a period of an interregnum, where I believe he actually addressed Congress. ... That suggests that temperatures had cooled a little bit, so that he was invited to do that and he was allowed to do that.

But by the 1850s he's making very strong statements, and at one point Hughes gives a fairly famous talk about the goal of Catholicism is to convert the United States and to make this a majority Catholic country. That's a shocking statement -- and Hughes knew that -- to make in the United States in the 1850s. So he liked taking a provocative stand. And he saw building Catholic schools and building Catholic institutions as a way of building a Catholic culture in this country and pride in Catholicism as a religion that's not of the past but of the future.

When Hughes challenges the schools in 1842, he seems to embody all that people had feared about Catholics.

Right. Here is this unelected bishop, appointed by the pope in Rome, telling thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of our fellow citizens how they should vote in what became a political contest, or certainly how they should think about a hot political issue. That was the fear of many Protestants: We're going to have bishops interfering in our politics.

Now, of course religious liberty might say to us that everyone has the right to think what they want and everybody has the right to tell people how they think they should vote. But Protestants looked at Catholicism and saw -- they thought, at least -- that Catholics are more or less like sheep; they're going to do exactly what they're told, and if we have people like Hughes telling Catholics what to do, we're in trouble in a republican society that depends upon the autonomy of each individual and that individual's ability to vote on his or her own.

And Hughes saw himself as a leader of this flock?

No question. He wanted to be a leader. I think he never had a day of doubt that he should be in charge. And he thought of himself as the leading Catholic in the United States, the most visible.

He says, "If I didn't go past the edge, ... I went at least to the edge of it." That's the only admission he ever makes about that being a little bit political.

The bishops of that time were very self-conscious. The [Catholic] bishops often used to congratulate themselves: We didn't divide during the Civil War. Now we, looking back, might think, wow, is that such a thing to be proud of? You didn't stand up strongly united for the abolition of slavery, for example, in 1861. But they were very conscious of not being political; that is, not being affiliated with political parties.

That said, Hughes of course knew what he was doing had pol