Protestants and Catholics

In addition to the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural heritage that they mapped onto the state, European immigrants brought with them Catholic and various Protestant Christian identities, and their heritage of Protestant/Catholic tensions from Europe’s reformations. As travelers today drive down the main streets of Greater Minnesota, they can still see on many a main street a single towering church spire seeming to preside over civic life: a Catholic church in this town; a Protestant one in that one. By 1900, 40% of the state population was Roman Catholic, a proportion that has remained roughly stable to the present day.

It is hard today to relate to just how significant were historical tensions between Protestants and Catholics. After treaties released Minnesota lands for settlement, the tensions migrated from missionary territory to that of settlement. Rome established the Diocese of St. Paul in 1850, naming a French-born priest, Joseph Cretin, as its first bishop. Concern about Catholic domination in “the West” stirred up fervor among Anglo Americans in the Northeast and Ohio River Valley to claim areas of settlement in Minnesota and elsewhere for Protestant Christianity, even inspiring ecumenical cooperation across denominational lines. In 1801, the Presbyterians and Congregationalists, alike inspired by Calvin’s theology, agreed to the “Plan of Union” in 1801, agreeing not to compete in newly settled towns. Many of the early Anglo-American towns along the Mississippi reflect this. Red Wing and Hastings have Presbyterian churches but no Congregationalist church; Northfield and Zumbrota have Congregationalist (UCC) churches but no Presbyterian church.

In what historians often call the “Protestant Establishment,” a network of interconnected interdenominational reform organizations served to promote Protestant control of American public life, and this was true no less in late nineteenth-century Minnesota. The Temperance movement offers a good example. Organizations like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and groups associated with the Templar movement (popular especially among Swedish-Americans) were suffused with a cultural Protestantism and often promoted in the churches. Importantly, not all Protestants were behind the movement; German Lutherans particularly liked their beer and its place in their heritage and community gatherings. But the Temperance movement like other culturally Protestant efforts to reform poverty, vice, hygiene, health, and education was often synchronized to the Protestant establishment’s effort to retain control over society and took particular aim at Roman Catholic immigrant groups and their cultural practices.

In this, Minnesota was little different from elsewhere in the U.S.: but Minnesota’s Roman Catholic leadership, especially under Archbishop of St. Paul John Ireland, who became a leader of the broader “Americanist” movement within Catholicism, gave a distinct flavor to Minnesota’s version of these tensions in broader American religious history.

Anti Catholicism in Minnesota

            A less implicit, more virulent, tradition of anti-Catholicism is also an important part of Minnesota’s religious history, crucial to understand in our own times because structurally it resembles the anti-Islamic sentiment of today. That anti-Catholicism could air so openly alongside claims to American religious freedom is baffling, but the argument against Catholicism was, for its proponents, utterly consistent with religious freedom. As with today’s appeals to Islam’s incompatibility with American democracy and religious freedom, it proceeds from a very particular logic. The logic of anti-catholic critique went something like this: Roman Catholics because they are part of a global tradition headquartered in Rome and led by a hierarchy of priests, are incompatible with democracy, and with the transparency, religious freedom, and independent thinking necessary to democracy. This critique was consonant, too, with nineteenth-century anti-Semitic tropes that Jews inevitably were stuck in dual loyalties.¹

            The religious hostilities of European reformations were still blazing hot in colonial North America. As with England, the U.S. committed constitutionally to formal religious freedom tolerance in its First Amendment, though many new states retained their established churches: Massachusetts held on until 1831. A rise in Catholic immigration in the 1840s fanned the burning embers of anticatholic sentiment, some of it feverishly conspiratorial, and often keyed to a sense of the unholy celibacy of the clergy. The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (1836) spouted sensational details of hidden sexual impropriety within a convent. Mobs burned down an Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Mass, in 1834 and other churches in Maine and throughout New England in the 1840s. The "Know-Nothing" political party rose to prominence in the 1850s in large part out of nativist and anticatholic fears. In the 1890s, an Iowan began a regionally popular secretive fraternal organization known as the American Protective Association committed to blocking any sharing of power with Catholics. A vigorous anticatholic press with names like The Menace churned out millions of copies of conspiracy theories through the 1920s. And the Ku Klux Klan enumerated Catholics as among the undesirables it terrorized.

            But a more insidious and supposedly more “respectable” anticatholic argument feigned not to be based in religious bigotry but clothed itself in concern for democratic institutions. Our Country, an exceedingly popular book published in 1885 by the Rev. Josiah Strong, a Congregationalist whose other writings placed him on the religious left of the social gospel, identified “Romanism” as among the enumerated perils facing “Our Country” at a crisis moment (others included Immigration, Mormonism, Intemperance, Socialism, and Wealth, the latter two referring to urban concentrations of wealth and poverty. The critique of Romanism was not so much theological -- that it was a false religion, but a political one – that Catholics necessarily took their cues from Rome, not America, marching in lockstep with what the Pope and the secretive, hierarchical, priestly authority with global designs. “There is an irreconcilable difference between papal principles and the fundamental principles of our free institutions.”²

“If alive,’ Strong warned, Roman Catholicism “must necessarily be aggressive.” There is ere long toe a State religion in this country, and that State religion is to be Roman Catholic.”³

The threat was to American democracy, which for Strong fused with Protestantism, Anglo Saxon identity, and to such American constitutional commitments as, ironically, religious liberty.

Strong’s point presaged the rhetoric of anti-Islamic critics who today fancy themselves far from bigoted: Islam, like late nineteenth-century Catholicism, is inherently anti-democratic and incompatible with full citizenship because global religious allegiances trump national civic ones. This is the logic of the contradiction/paradox: presumed allegiance to religious liberty could thus underlie a 2010 ballot initiative to amend Oklahoma’s constitution to ban Shari’a law, or the 22 states since that have considered bills to ban Shari’a. It is also what gives ideological cover for Trump’s Muslim ban, challenged on religious freedom grounds. Strong assumed, first, that all Catholics were pretty much the same, which is a big mistake. Aside from the fact that not all Catholics can be known from pronouncements in Rome, Strong failed to reckon with how global Catholicism was in the midst of a debate about the future of the church in the modern world, something that became known as the “Americanist Controversy” because of voices like Archbishop of St. Paul John Ireland. In Our Country, Strong makes it look like he did his homework: he cites Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors, and the 1864 document that warned the Church of accommodating to an enumerated list of propositions keyed to modern political liberalism, including especially religious liberty. And he selectively quoted other church authorities in an age of rising nationalism that called on the faithful to be “Catholics first and citizens next.”

Parochial Schools and the Blaine Amendment in Minnesota

            The namesake of the Twin Cities suburb of Blaine maps American anticatholic sentiment unaware of the Minnesota landscape. When Blaine was recognized as a Township in 1877, a Maine native, Moses Ripley, was elected as chair of the Board of Supervisors, and Ripley persuaded them to name the town after James G. Blaine, a prominent Maine Congressman between 1862 and 1881 who made a name for himself among anticatholics as a critic of parochial schools.⁴ Two years before Ripley suggested the name, Congressman Blaine had introduced a Constitutional amendment that would have prohibited “religious sects” from receiving federal funds. At this time, the phrase “religious sects” was a well-known code for “Catholic.” Blaine’s amendment passed in the House but failed by a small margin in the Senate.⁵

In 2017, Minnesota Republicans tried to pass a school voucher law that would allow low-income families to send their children to a “school of their choice,” including private or religious schools. Opponents argued against it using the state’s Blaine Amendment and by saying that vouchers would inevitably deplete funds from public schools and divert them instead to religious private schools.⁶ Animated by the same anticatholic sentiments voiced by Josiah Strong, Blaine’s constitutional amendment, though unsuccessful at the national level, caught on in state legislature. These efforts, like Ripley’s new township, took on the colloquial name of Blaine Amendments. By 1890, 29 states had their own “Blaine Amendments” prohibiting public funds for parochial schools. Now, 37 states have similar amendments restricting the use of state funds for religious sects. Minnesota is one of these states.⁷

Two recent U.S. Supreme Court cases have eroded the reach of state Blaine Amendments. In 2017, Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer raised questions about the constitutionality of the Blaine Amendments, but the Supreme Court did not strike down state’s amendments. In 2020, the Court all but eviscerated Montana’s Blaine Amendment provisions in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (MT).