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.
