LIBERTY UNIVERSITY
DEFINED BY WHAT WE ARE NOT:
THE ROLE OF ANTI-CATHOLICISM IN THE FORMATION
OF EARLY AMERICAN IDENTITY
A THESIS SUBMITTED TO
THE FACULTY OF THE HISTORY DEPARTMENT
IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF HISTORY
BY
BRANDI H. MARCHANT
LYNCHBURG, VIRGINIA
APRIL 2012
Consistent with Puritan piety that considered holidays to be Catholic perversions, many American Protestants refused to celebrate Christmas as late as the nineteenth century.
3 Lamenting the small number of New York City churches open on December 25, 1840, George Templeton Strong criticized “the Papaphobic dissenters” for refusing to celebrate what
they considered “a relic of popery.”
4 Perhaps most striking to the modern American would be the Protestant aversion to using the cross as a Christian symbol. Anti-Catholic rioting that tore through Philadelphia in May 1844 provided a striking example of opposition to the cross as a fundamentally Catholic symbol. As flames engulfed the St. Augustine Catholic Church, rioters outside expressed great satisfaction as the fire finally destroyed the cross atop the church. While all Protestants certainly did not share in this kind of anti-Catholic violence, most denominations carried on the Reformation tradition of repudiating vestiges of Catholicism. For many, this entailed a rejection of all ornamentation, including such things church decoration and vestments as well as crosses.
5
3 Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 39.
4 George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong: Young Man in New York, 1835-1849,
ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1952), 154.
5 Ryan K. Smith, Gothic Arches, Latin Crosses: Anti-Catholicism and American Church Designs in the
Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 1-2, 6. Smith presents a
compelling argument that the popularity of Gothic design in Protestant religious spaces during the mid-nineteenth
century emerged as a response to the profound growth of the American Catholic Church. By assimilating many of
the material aspects of Catholicism, such as architecture, symbolism, and decoration, into their own Protestant
worship, they sought to utilize effective features of Catholicism, while undermining its influence
