U.S. history does not bear out the idea that Catholicism maps easily onto post-liberal traditionalism or that Protestantism is analogous with libertarianism.
Our history does not bear out the idea that the Catholic tradition maps easily on to postliberal traditionalism and that Protestantism is analogous with libertarianism.
I ntellectual debates on the right over the place of illiberal policy in the conservative political coalition have recently taken on a religious tone as Catholics and Protestants both stake out the limits of their traditions regarding liberalism’s influence. Andrew Walker, a professor at the flagship seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention, noted that while he criticized the direction recently taken by liberal democracy, he was not a post-liberal. Patrick Deneen, a professor at Notre Dame, argued that it was “Catholic post-liberals who are reminding Protestants of the existence in America of state establishments, Sabbath laws, obscenity laws, and the like.” The Protestant response, according to Deneen, was “to appeal to a fictionalized American founding in which we have always been Millians.”
The idea that the Catholic tradition maps easily on to post-liberal traditionalism and that Protestantism — hardly a unified religious or sociopolitical definer — is analogous with libertarianism is a popular trope but one that does not bear out in the history of the United States. Deneen’s engagement with Walker appears to be not necessarily an engagement with Protestant practice per se — Anglicans, Lutherans, and Presbyterians all have a history in Britain, Europe, and even the United States of supporting state establishments, sabbath laws, obscenity laws, etc. — but instead with Evangelicals. Evangelical Protestants in the United States largely reflect Baptist social and political commitments. Although they exercise an outsized place in political discourse through their electoral activism, their beliefs do not and did not ever displace other historic Protestant intellectual, civil, and social commitments. Indeed, the United States’ history has illustrated that Protestants and Catholics alike have at times supported illiberal politics and fought illiberal politics. The American story is one of liberal Catholics and conservative Catholics, and liberal Protestants and conservative Protestants.
Anti-Catholic rhetoric throughout the history of the United States had a history of appealing to fears that Catholics might be vehicles of illiberalism, but in the early republic prominent Americans worried that certain groups of Protestants also were a threat to a liberal political order. When Thomas Jefferson tried to make a known agnostic, Thomas Cooper, an inaugural professor at the University of Virginia, Presbyterians in the state began an eventually successful public campaign to block Cooper’s appointment. Jefferson believed the Presbyterians’ crusade was an illiberal assault on religious disestablishment. He called their ministers “priests of the different religious sects” who dreaded the “advance of science as witches do the approach of day-light; and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversion of the duperies on which they live.” In this near-medieval obscurantism, Jefferson moaned, “Presbyterian clergy take the lead. The tocsin is sounded in all their pulpits.” Jefferson believed that Protestants were capable of illiberal thought and practice. His defense of religious liberty and of the nascent liberal order stirred not only his own citizens but also peoples in Europe enduring state religious establishments.
As the 19th century progressed, Irish Catholics saw the United States as a haven for economic and religious liberty that would free them from what they perceived as an oppressive Protestant regime. Great Britain’s Protestant rule over Ireland certainly qualified as illiberal, and Roman Catholics who could flee did so not to Europe but to the United States. John Hughes, a native Irishman and archbishop of New York, celebrated the American order’s commitment to full-throated religious liberty and disestablishment because he knew that it protected Catholics from Protestant illiberalism in the United Kingdom. Hughes declared that he was “an American by choice, not by chance.” He told his flock that he was born “under the scourge of Protestant persecution, of which my fathers in common with our Catholic countrymen have been the victim for ages.” He fully knew and appreciated “the value of that civil and religious liberty which our happy government secures for all.”
Hughes went further than many Protestants in the era on matters of religious liberty. Most Protestants in the 19th and early 20th centuries agreed that public schooling should be mandatory and should include religious education. Hughes led the charge against public schools precisely because he worried about the state teaching religion if only in the name of civil catechesis. Protestant nationalists, Hughes noted, “accuse us of acting with interested motives in this matter. They say that we want a portion of the school fund for sectarian purposes, to apply it to the support and advancement of our religion.” He rejected the charge that Catholics were stonewalling public schooling for sectarian purposes. He based his argument on a commitment to keeping government out of religion. There was, the archbishop declared, “no such thing as a predominant religion, and the small minority is entitled to the same protection as the greatest majority.” No denomination in the United States, “whether numerous or not,” had the right to “impose its religious views on a minority at the common expense of that minority and itself.”
Roman Catholics in John Hughes’s era and after it have emphasized their commitment to liberal freedoms inherent in the American order. In a speech at the University of Notre Dame in the summer of 2021, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Hughes’s successor as archbishop of New York, noted that 144 years ago James Cardinal Gibbons, the archbishop of the premier American see, Baltimore, raised “eyebrows and snickers and criticism in Rome” when he declared to his fellow prelates that as a citizen of the United States, he proclaimed “with a deep sense of pride and gratitude, and in this great capital of Christendom,” that he belonged “to a country where the government holds over us the aegis of protection without ever interfering in the legitimate exercise of our sublime mission as ministers of the Gospel.” Dolan, like Gibbon and Hughes before him, articulated a robust defense of the United States’ liberal religious order. As much as Catholics did not forget liberal freedoms, modern Protestants have also not forgotten their tradition’s practice of passing and enforcing sabbath laws, obscenity laws, and state establishments. Overwhelmingly Protestant southern states and Dutch Reformed areas of the Midwest and Northeast still have blue laws enforcing certain commercial restrictions on Sunday.
Debates over the extent of religious liberty in the United States should not be beyond the pale of discourse in the United States. Deneen rightly is concerned about certain libertarian articulations’ impact on religious liberty and about the maintenance of ordered liberty in the United States. And Walker’s defense of the liberal order and constitutional disestablishmentarianism does not mean that Southern Baptists do not affirm historic standards of Christian decency in the civil, social, and political realms. Increasingly, conservative Catholics, Baptists, and other Protestants must strengthen constitutional commitments to preserving and also protecting religious liberty if they are to maintain freedom of religion in an era of increasing progressive overreach.