Catholics, Evangelical Protestants, and a Shift in Presidential Politics

Yesterday, as I read some of the news headlines on the interweb, I came across one that dealt with the endorsement that some evangelical voters gave to Rick Santorum.  It's not terribly surprising that evangelicals rejected Mitt Romney because of his Mormonism and his supposed liberal tendencies.  Of course, Romney may not know whether he's a conservative, liberal, or something totally different.  The evangelical voters considered Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Perry.  The very fact that they chose Santorum shows a significant shift in American Protestant politics over the past few decades. 

A major party has nominated a Roman Catholic for president three times.  Each time, it's been the Democrats that have done so.  The first Catholic to run for president was Al Smith of New York in 1928.  He lost to Herbert Hoover, and those who lived through the Depression blame Hoover for that debacle to this day, but that's another story.  Hoover won a landslide largely because a Republican was in office and the economy seemed to be booming.  However, there was also the frequent assertion that the Democrats were the party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion."  The 1920s was a period that saw the growth of the second Ku Klux Klan, and Catholics were one of the major groups that these nativists saw as damaging Americanism with their taking orders from Rome.  There was concern that a Smith presidency would subordinate itself to the pope, not the Constitution.

Fast-forward just over thirty years.  In 1960, another Catholic ran for president.  The concern over a president having more allegiance to the Vatican than the US was a big concern for many Protestants.  The candidate for president this time was John F. Kennedy.  A 2007 article in Baptist History & Heritage by Ricky Floyd Dobbs examined the concern that conservative Baptists had regarding a Catholic running for president, using the Texas Baptist Standard as a case study.  Kennedy won, and he is to date the only Catholic to become president.  While some Americans would view him as a liberal, and his presidency was shortened by an assassins' bullet, most people would not argue that Kennedy put the concerns of the Vatican above those of America.

In 2004, John Kerry ran for president against the incumbent George W. Bush.  His Catholicism was not the major issue, as the fear of terrorism seemed to be the overarching topic in this election.  That was a general election, however, and evangelicals have tended to web themselves to the Republican Party in the last few decades.  Most of the Republican candidates over time have been WASPs, with few women, minorities, and non-Protestants attempting a run.  This year, evangelicals chose between Santorum, Gingrich, and Perry.  Of the three, Perry would be the closest candidate to an evangelical.  However, he's come across as less-than-presidential in debates and other public appearances. That leaves Santorum and Gingrich, both Catholics, as the best hope for pro-life, anti-Mormon evangelicals.  While Romney's stand on abortion can be questioned, John Huntsman, another Mormon, seems to be solidly pro-life. 

All of this goes to show the major change in Protestant attitudes toward Catholicism.  Catholics are now considered more mainstream to evangelical voters.  Mormons are not.  Could this shift signal the election of a President Santorum?  Not likely, but the change over time is nonetheless interesting.

American Churches and Racism

Why are churches some of the most segregated places around in America today?  I've often wondered this, and I must say that it really, really bugs me.  Race is obviously a contentious issue in American history.  One need not look any farther than the relations between new seventeenth-century settlers and group that these Anglo-Americans drove out of their homeland (American Indians) and between the same Anglo-American settlers and a group (African slaves) that they brought across the Atlantic against their wills.  Some people would argue that racism is largely gone today.  Then a story like the following shows up in the news. Just recently, a Kentucky church voted to exclude interracial couples from membership.

Moves like this definitely show that racism is far from dead.  Would the interracial character of the relationship been a big deal to those that voted to exclude the couple if the non-white member had been a Christian from Turkey, Korea, or Brazil, rather than Africa?  The answer can't be known definitely, but it seems that black/white relationships seem to draw the biggest complaint.  Of course, this goes against Paul's writings about there being no distinctions in the body of Christ (see Galatians 3:28, which ironically, considering American history, put slaves and masters on the same level).

Racism and bigotry have been very common throughout American history.  A recent post on the Religion in American History blog talks about some of the recent directions in the historiography of the Ku Klux Klan.  This post was quite interesting.  I've also read a couple of interesting works lately on the topic of bigotry.  

One was Lynn Neal's article in the June 2009 issue of Church History, "Christianizing the Klan." This article showed how KKK sympathizers used images in their literature that depicted the Klan in Christian and 100% American terms against Catholics, Jews, unions, etc. A good recent work on anti-Catholic journalism in the Progressive Era is Justin Nordstrom's Danger on the Doorstep. The anti-Catholic publication, The Menace, had the second-highest subscription rate in America for a time. All of this tied to the idea of 100% Americanism, which the KKK endorsed. I was also doing some research recently on a totally unrelated subject, and a minister's autobiography (Albert F. Gray) told of a service that he attended (I believe it was Washington State) in which some men in robes came in, presented an American flag, and left. Although the book did not identify said men, I assume that it was some Klansmen given the time period and this practice. (I posted the previous paragraph as a comment on the American religion blog post noted above).

This 100% Americanism has shown up in much of my research on Grand Forks, North Dakota, religious history.  A Baptist church, which I've mentioned in a couple of conference papers that I've posted here, definitely believed in American exceptionalism and thought that the rest of the world should become English-speaking American-style democrats against WWI-era German autocrats.  A Lutheran church in town that I've studied transferred to English-speaking services around the same time that there were moves for 100% Americanism.  While I can see the desire for people to speak the same language as others, because it's difficult to communicate without speaking the same language, I don't think that a proper understanding of Christianity allows for the blatant racism that many in American history have fostered (and apparently continue to foster) in their churches.  I would personally argue that it makes the church as a whole look bad to society.  However, it's just a reflection of the view of people who vote this way in church meetings.

Theodore Roosevelt and Catholicism

I've mentioned my summer gig working for the Theodore Roosevelt Center's online library that is getting set to launch in the relatively near future.  My main job was reading digital documents and then categorizing it according to subject matter.  Some of the documents related to my interest in American Christianity.

I've recently written about the Progressive and World War I eras, and one of the things that I find pretty interesting about that period is nativist sentiment.  Nativism is basically an anti-immigrant stance.  During much of US history, this anti-immigrant stance included anti-Catholicism.  Some people were quite vocal about their fear of a popish conspiracy to take over America.  He is a link to a blog post that I sent to the TRC's blog with information on how Theodore Roosevelt was a bit more congenial with Catholics than some people would have liked for him to be.  This is just a small example of some of the things that I have found.  I actually included the document from Addison Thomas in a paper that I'm scheduled to present in Mankato, MN next month.  I'll post the paper here after I read it.