Overview

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Catholicism was often presented in the U.S. not only as a threat to Protestantism but also as an enemy of democracy. Focusing on literary and cultural representations of Catholics as a political force, Elizabeth Fenton argues that the U.S. perception of religious freedom grew partly, and paradoxically, out of a sometimes virulent but often genteel anti-Catholicism. Depictions of Catholicism's imagined intolerance and cruelty allowed writers time and again to depict their nation as tolerant and free. As Religious Liberties shows, anti-Catholic sentiment particularly shaped U.S. conceptions of pluralism and its relationship to issues as diverse as religious privacy, territorial expansion, female citizenship, political representation, chattel slavery, and governmental partisanship.Drawing on a wide range of materials--from the Federalist Papers to antebellum biographies of Toussaint Louverture; from nativist treatises to Margaret Fuller's journalism; from convent exposés to novels by Catharine Sedgwick, Augusta J. Evans, Nathanial Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain--Fenton's study excavates the influence of anti-Catholic sentiment on both the liberal tradition and early U.S. culture more generally. In concert, these texts suggest how the prejudice against Catholicism facilitated an alignment of U.S. nationalism with Protestantism, thus ensuring the mutual dependence, rather than the putative ""separation"" of church and state.

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9780195384093

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Reviews

<br> Religious Liberties is an imaginative investigation of anti-Catholicism's centrality to American political culture. The reading of literary texts is especially illuminating, as is Fenton's sweep across the entire nineteenth century. --John T. McGreevy, University of Notre Dame<p><br> In her study of how anti-Catholic rhetoric helped shape U.S. liberal democracy in its early years, Fenton explores the manifold paradoxes inherent in Protestant denunciations of the 'tyrannical' Catholic even as the emerging republic viewed itself as capable of absorbing all differences into an ideal of national unity. Clearly argued and engagingly written, Fenton's study provides a much-needed resource on this surprisingly neglected area so important to the formation of American culture. --Mary R. Reichardt, University of St. Thomas<p><br> Religious Liberties is beautifully conceived and tightly wrought. In three shrewdly organized sections, Fenton establishes the centrality of anti-Catholicism to

Author Information

Elizabeth Fenton is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Vermont.

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