Catholics Then, Muslims Now

[salvorhardin]

Last edited Tue Sep 18, 2012, 09:48 PM - Edit history (2)

As late as 1950, 240,000 Americans bought copies of “American Freedom and Catholic Power,” a New York Times best seller. Its author, Paul Blanshard, a former diplomat and editor at The Nation, made the case that Catholicism was an ideology of conquest, and that its traditions constituted a form of “medieval authoritarianism that has no rightful place in the democratic American environment.”

Catholics’ high birthrates and educational self-segregation led Mr. Blanshard and others — including scholars, legislators and journalists — to warn of a “Catholic plan for America.”

Many Americans shunned such views, but some liberals did not. Mr. Blanshard’s book was endorsed by the likes of John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, and respected scholars like Seymour Martin Lipset, Reinhold Niebuhr and Sidney Hook debated Catholics’ supposed propensity toward authoritarianism.

Then, as now, there seemed to be evidence supporting the charge. Majority-Catholic countries like Spain, Italy, Portugal and Austria, had fallen into fascism or extremism. Crime and educational failure were rife among the children of Catholic immigrants. In the years after World War I, Catholic radicals carried out a deadly wave of terrorist attacks in the United States.

Full oped: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/opinion/catholics-then-muslims-now.html

[progressoid]

1. Mmmm

Crunchy.

[salvorhardin]

2. Oh, I'm sure nobody will see a private agenda here

Surely, not on DU.

[pampango]

3. "In the years after World War I, Catholic radicals carried out a deadly wave of terrorist attacks

in the United States.

These days, the same dark accusations are being leveled at American Muslims, many of whom are recent immigrants. And many otherwise reasonable Americans have greeted Muslims with fear and suspicion — in part because they came at a bad time. Their emigration to the United States, like that of many Catholics before them, has coincided with turmoil in their native countries and violence from a few extremists in their midst.

In the years after 9/11, anti-Muslim rhetoric simmered on blogs, YouTube videos and a stream of inflammatory best sellers. But not until Barack Obama’s presidency was it allowed to erupt into prominent corners of mainstream politics. Mitt Romney, to his credit, has shunned notions of American Muslim disloyalty, but Republican political and media figures have tolerated or even advanced these hateful myths.

In reality, Muslim immigrants are a success story. They have high levels of educational attainment. Their birthrate is converging quickly with that of the general population. They are likely to ultimately make up less than 2 percent of the population, around the same share as Episcopalians and Jews.

The violent few among them are no more a product of Muslim values than 1920s anarchists were of Catholic values. Extremism is vanishingly rare among American Muslims, and loyalty to secular state institutions is high. The idea of a stealth takeover by Islamic believers is a delusion. So is the more moderate idea of a permanently alien and unassimilable “civilization” in America’s midst.

Very interesting.

It would be nice if the right stopped playing the 'fear of other' card - focused these days on Muslims, but that is not likely to happen. Fear is about all they have to peddle.

Thanks for posting, salvorhadin.

[salvorhardin]

4. It sort of ties in with this interview with historian Lewis L. Gould I shared yesterday too

Well, in may ways they have morphed into a kind of twenty-first century variant of their nineteenth-century opponents! ...there are many echoes of ideology ... of the Confederacy in the modern Republican Party.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021358899

[Cleita]

5. Back in the forties and fifties Catholics and Jews were considered pariah.

I went to public school for awhile. I was on a waiting list to go to parochial school, which was overcrowded at that time. I was the only Catholic in my grade. There was another girl who was the only Jewish kid in our class. Our classmates pretty much shunned us. All those Protestant Christian values at work there. We played together at recess. She was also my neighbor and lived about a block away so we got to be good friends. I finally got an opening in the parochial school and transferred out leaving my friend alone. Things got better for her once she went to Jr. High and Sr. High School. Then there were other Jewish kids for her to hang out with. But there was as much apartheid where religion was concerned as there was about race back then.

It's too bad we must treat the Muslims the same today.

[salvorhardin]

6. Morning kick