Catholicity, Waspery, and American Heritage

As we approach the 250th anniversary of US Independence, Mr Coulombe examines the underpinnings of the country's Civil Religion.

From Catholicism.org

By Charles Coulombe, STM, KCSS

The star spangled banner bring hither,
O’er Columbia’s true sons let it wave;
May the wreaths they have won never wither,
Nor its stars cease to shine on the brave.
May thy service united ne’er sever,
But hold to the colors so true;
The Army and Navy forever,
Three cheers for the red, white, and blue!
Three cheers for the red, white, and blue!
The Army and Navy forever,
Three cheers for the red, white, and blue.

We are very used — especially in the beginning of the 250th celebration of our declaration of independence — to looking at July 4th as Independence Day. But it might be argued that it should really be September 3, the date in 1783 when the British, Americans, French, Spanish, and Dutch signed the Treaty of Paris ending the conflict; then again, it might be April 9, the day in 1784 when George III ratified the treaty and absolved his American subjects of their obedience to him.

What is certain is that Catholics — that is, American Catholics, the rebel victory being dependent upon the intervention of Catholic France and Spain, little though they got out of it — played a very small part on both sides in the events of the revolution, although key in very particular locations. Charles Carroll of Carrollton signed the Declaration, and his cousin Fr. John Carroll went with Benjamin Franklin to Canada in a failed attempt to try to seduce the Catholic inhabitants to the revolution — all he got for his pains was a local excommunication. But given that there were only 25,000 Catholics in the Thirteen Colonies at the outbreak of the war, out of about 2.5 million. Four times that number had to leave as Loyalists when the war ended.

Since part of the American Catholic ethos was to go along rather than try to evangelise, our subsequent explosion in numbers was due to huge immigration, and, up until the 1960s, large families. So to-day, when Protestant Triumphalists claim the United States and their republican institutions to be a Protestant achievement, they are quite correct — for all that, Catholics were in the physical space longer. But while that is true, as with anything else, we have to define our terms.

The first is Protestant. In Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and the four lower counties of New York, the Church of England was the Established Church; in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut it was the Congregational. Rhode Island was primarily Baptist, New York and New Jersey had a great many Dutch Reformed, while Pennsylvania and Delaware were dominated by the Quakers. There were French Huguenots here and there, and the Baptists were spreading; Presbyterians from Scotland were influential in many colonies, although Presbyterianism was the Established Church in none — and there were German and Swedish Lutherans and German Reformed. On top of this basic diversity came the Enlightenment, Freemasonry, and Deism, from which mix Unitarianism would emerge immediately after the revolution ended — Doctrinal diversity ultimately was the end of doctrine.

Before the revolution, the two things holding these peoples together were the image of the King and a moral consensus — all religious groups generally held the same things to be right and wrong. But the overthrow of the Monarchy meant that there had to be a substitute focus for that unity without which a state cannot function. After the Constitution was adopted and the Federal institutions were up and running, a national cultus was created to replace the King; public education was tooled to reflect that faith, and as we have seen earlier, such men as Noah Webster quite consciously did the job. The nine colonial universities — Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, Columbia, Princeton, Rutgers, Pennsylvania, and William and Mary — each became temples of this national religion, as did the public schools.

This religion of American Heritage offered a grab-bag of features from its various contributing faiths: its rituals were borrowed from Anglicanism and/or Masonry; Calvinism’s accommodated Old-Testament view of being the “Chosen People” became, in a secularised sense, American Exceptionalism; from Unitarianism and Masonry came the idea of “Conduct over Creed” — it doesn’t matter what one believes, so long as one is “nice;” from Deism and Transcendentalism came the idea that man is naturally good and corrupted by his institutions — thus a return to nature can help one improve through one’s own efforts; from them all came a glorification of American history, which became a sort of “Salvation” — in which “Freedom” and/ or “Liberty” (more or less undefined) became what Salvation was in Catholicism. There were and are holy relics: original copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; the Liberty Bell; and the Flag — both its oldest examples in various museums and every current copy, surrounded as it is with its own etiquette, and finding its place in almost every American church of whatever denomination.

Indeed, many of these numbered actual holy places in the civil religion among their congregations — usually because of historical connections with certain events or persons, but sometimes purpose built. Among these were the Episcopal National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.; Massachusetts’ King’s Chapel, Old North Church, and the Church of the Presidents; New York’s Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel; Pennsylvania’s Christ Church, Philadelphia and the George Washington Memorial Church in Valley Forge; Virginia’s St. John’s Church, Richmond, and Bruton Parish, Williamsburg; North Carolina’s Christ Church, New Bern; South Carolina’s St. Philip’s and Old Huguenot Churches; and Georgia’s Christ Church, Savannah.

The National Faith also had a huge influence on the new religions that mushroomed out of the United States — most notably the Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Worldwide Church of God, and even the flag-ignoring Jehovah’s Witnesses. In one way or another, they each claim an extra-Biblical providential role for the land of their birth in World history.

As the 19th century wore on, the role of the expanding number of Hereditary Societies, Veteran’s associations, and Fraternal Societies (in imitation of the Freemasons but without their questionable connections — Elks, Moose, Eagles, etc.) in guarding “Americanism” became ever greater: The Society of the Cincinnati, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Colonial Dames, and on and on in greater proliferation took a lead in determining national identity. This came to a head with the Centennial of 1876, only a little while after the close of the Civil War. From it spread the Colonial Revival, at once a style of architecture and a movement.

The massive Catholic immigration after the War Between the States might have played their part in altering the nature of the country, had they been missionary-minded. Fortunately for the status quo, most of the hierarchy had been uninterested in that since the days of John Carroll; the emergence of the Americanist heresy helped make the assimilation of the Catholic element in all essentials much easier. Our fathers for the most part added the National religion to our own. Our participation in the two world wars to all intents and purposes sealed our agreement, as the role of both the Bishops’ Conference and the Knights of Columbus would show. Perhaps the most poignant sign of this was the cultus of the “Four Chaplains” — two protestant ministers, one rabbi, and a Catholic priest aboard the USS Dorchester. The reverend gentlemen gave their life preservers to sailors who had none, and were last seen as they went down praying and saying hymns together.

A far greater danger to the WASP control of the United States had already arisen; ironically, it was intended as part of the eugenics movement, and was intended to reduce the numbers of non-WASPS in the country. But Theodore Roosevelt, a WASP if there was one, saw not only birth control’s inherent indecency but the threat it posed to his own people in particular. Responding in 1906 to the letter of an Episcopal priest advocating the practise, TR replied: “I entirely agree with you that I should be very sure of my ground before giving public utterance to my opinions. As to the subject to which you refer, I am absolutely sure; and as you are a minister of the Gospel I think I ought to say to you that I am so sure of it that I feel that no man who is both intelligent and decent can differ with me. I mean this literally. It is not a debatable subject. I enclose you a copy of my address to the Mother’s Congress. What I have said there is such plain common-sense truth that it is not open to question. Men may differ about the tariff, or about currency, or about expansion; but the man who questions the attitude I take in this matter is, I firmly believe, either lacking in intelligence or else lacking in character. The attitude you seem tentatively inclined to favor is one of astounding folly as well as of astounding immorality. To advocate artificially keeping families small, with its inevitable attendants of pre-natal infanticide, of abortion, with its pandering to self-indulgence, its shirking of duties, and its enervation of character, is quite as immoral as to advocate theft or prostitution, and is even more hurtful in its folly, from the standpoint of the ultimate welfare of the race and the nation… I am a very busy man, as you say, but I have taken the time to write you because I think from your letter that you, a minister of the Gospel, are in imminent danger of adopting a position both vicious and foolish — a position which would make your influence baleful to the state, and a deep discredit to the church. To me the most horrifying part of this movement is to find nominally religious journals like the Independent containing articles by women and clergymen, apologizing for and defending a theory of conduct which, if adopted, would mean the speedy collapse of this republic and of western civilization. The action of the Independent in this matter was a scandalous offense against good morals, and a cause of shame to men of real religious feeling. When any nation gets sunk in such ignoble selfishness, such mere desire for ease and self-indulgence as is implied in the course which you seem prepared to advocate, it is time for that nation to make way for some other nation, which possesses the elementary decencies and manly virtues. Character counts more than intellect; and character, in any true sense, is wholly wanting in people who practice such a course of conduct.”

Unfortunately, TR’s words were as ignored by his co-religionists as Catholics would ignore Paul VI 62 years later, with similar results. The WASP and post-Catholic populations together is shrinking; the attempts to bring in immigrants to replace the native-born, while Woke elements have taken over most of the WASP-founded institutions, and are busy destroying them. This is the situation bemoaned by those for whom “our Christian republic’s” restoration seems to be so very important.

What they do not and cannot realise is that in a very real sense it was doomed from the beginning. Such an inherently unstable mix could manage for a long time so long as the moral consensus which underpinned everything survived. But it shattered in the 1960s. Moreover, how many would-be Protestant defenders of the Christian republic maintain the contraceptive mentality that sealed its doom in the first place?

What then remains for Catholic Americans to do? Well, apart from participating in whatever preservative efforts are underway in our own areas, we must focus on evangelising. This is true in the workplace; it is true in whatever volunteer work we do at the local historical society or friends of the local library or whatever. Especially, must we learn about the Church’s social teaching, and the Kingship of Christ. For two and a half centuries we Catholic in America have given our Country our blood and treasure, but withheld our Pearl of Great Price — the Catholic Faith. That must end, if the country is to see 300.