It is hard for us to appreciate, writes George McKenna in his fine new book, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (Yale), just how alien Catholicism appeared to most Americans from the seventeenth through the early twentieth century.(While We're At It)(The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism)(Book review)

First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, April, 2008 by Neuhaus, Richard John

It is hard for us to appreciate, writes George McKenna in his fine new book, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (Yale), just how alien Catholicism appeared to most Americans from the seventeenth through the early twentieth century. "Anti-Catholicism was not an adventitious element in American patriotic rhetoric, a prejudice that sometimes got attached to it, like racial prejudice or anti-Semitism (both of which actually contradict it), but a foundational premise in the American narrative handed down by the Puritans....

Historically, American patriotism and American anti-Catholicism are joined at the root." After all, the Puritan "errand into the wilderness" was an errand undertaken to escape the tentacles of popery, which was identified with the...

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