"The object we hope to accomplish is to convert all Pagan nations... There is no secrecy in this... Our mission [is] to convert the world—including the inhabitants of the United States—the people of the cities, and the people of the country... the Legislatures, the Senate, the Cabinet, the President, and all!"
Not an ISIS recruiting pamphlet, but the Catholic Archbishop of New York, John Hughes, in 1850. I'm taking to blogging bits and pieces from Battle Cry of Freedom when they strike me, and the fears of Catholic immigration in 19th Century America seem apposite right now considering similar fears regarding Muslims today. The basic trope is the same: condemned out their own mouth, they have admitted that theirs is a totalising ideology that will admit nothing less than utter domination of the earth's peoples, that their tendency to breed at a faster rate than the established population makes them an existential threat to that population's liberty (demographics being the mortal fear of all racists, since the only thing the primitive can definitely do better than us is breed), and that they can never be trusted as loyal citizens while their allegiance is given to a religious hierarchy far from our borders.
On more than one occasion while travelling America a local has helpfully told me that the UK is in danger of falling to the sway of sharia law by dint of demographics. Judging by the tone of the Mail and the Express, the sentiment is shared by many of my countrymen, although they are unlikely to tell you so with the breezy matter-of-factness common across the pond. I have already written about the fact that Islam is currently dominated by a profoundly anti-modern discourse (it is worth pointing out that Hughes' superior Pius IX believed it impossible "for the Roman pontiff to reconcile himself with and agree to progress, liberalism and modern civilisation") and I am under no illusions that this represents a problem in the short-term. But looking at the history of migration, it seems unlikely that future generations of Muslims will be any more of a threat to the modernity of Britain than Irish Catholics turned out to be to America.
We can be easily scared by anyone who claims they want to take over the world. It's a completely stupid claim to make, of course. History has shown that even the most successful conquerors and proselytisers have run into obstacles rather a long time before they hit the edge of the map; Genghis Khan's grandsons divided an empire between them, Napoleon found Russia a little too cold for his liking, and Muslims and Christians both found it surprisingly hard to make much headway converting each other en masse to the correct religion. For some reason, though, if you claim that world domination is your aim and you have funny clothes and an ancient religion to cite and a certain look in your eye and just enough followers to prove that you're not a raving hermit in the wilderness, people start to panic. The effect relies also on the suspicion that one's own civilisation is ripe for the pillage - Hughes, in his lecture entitled The Decline of Protestantism and its Causes, taunts Protestant culture as being weak, effete, stagnant - all the things conservatives fear is true about modern liberal Britain. Say what you like about Hughes, but he knew how to push his opponents' buttons as well as ISIS does.
The sly dog
I'm no historian of Catholic immigration to the US, but my assumption is that Catholicism did not have the feared effects on the US chiefly because Catholics themselves simply lacked the zeal required. Most people want to be left alone and make enough for themselves and their family, and attempting to convert large numbers of Protestants is just too much of a bother in the everyday run of things. Today Catholicism is the largest single denomination in the US, fulfilling the fears of the No-Nothings in the mid 19th Century, and has manifestly failed to do much to alter the character of the country. Unless we've all been taken for a ride and Pope Francis is about to command his 80 million servants to execute Order 66 whereupon all Protestants will be shot in the back with concealed laser rifles, we're laughing.
We easily forget that the modern British state is essentially founded on anti-Catholic prejudice. We imported a foreign monarchy (twice) rather than undergo even the threat of a Catholic on the throne, a fact which to me casts the House of Hanover-Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Windsor in a distinctly ugly light. We excluded Catholics from universities, positions of power and influence, from voting, we rioted in the streets when the newspapers told us they were up to no good. Today anti-Catholicism exists only in echoes, a folk memory we've never entirely come to terms with. You catch it in the occasional sniffy comment of the aristocracy about a cousin shamed by "fleeing to Rome", you get a whiff of it in the dark jokes about Catholic priests and child abuse, and certain old saws about large families and Catholic guilt that you feel really ought to be the preserve of people who actually from that community.
Once, eating lunch in hall as a student, jokes about the Catholic church were flying around when it became clear that we were greatly offending the sole Catholic amongst us. I immediately felt shamed by having joined in, but Catholics had seemed a legitimate target; wealthy and powerful as a church, a righteous target for liberals with their divorce and abortion restrictions, wearing stupid clothes and generally a symbol of the corrupt Old World. And yet, I couldn't help noticing that we were making these jokes in an institution that didn't let Catholics in for four centuries, that existed in one sense to bolster the power of the Anglican aristocracy and in which the jokes we were making were centuries-old echoes of those of our forebears. No one remembers what Fireworks Night is about, but like other Anti-Catholic feeling in this country, the embers of its meaning still glow somewhere in our consciousness.
Caricaturing Catholics as insufferably smug is a tired stereotype
That there existed Catholics who genuinely did want to convert us all should not be in doubt. Our existential fear of them needed at least some degree of foundation to make sense. But in the end they were so far from conquering and converting us that today it is difficult to see what so much of the fuss in our history is about. It seems a joke, which is why we joke about it. Our uneasy coexistence with 21st Century Islam is likely to be similar, and I have little doubt that a hundred years from now, children in an ever browner Britain will be slightly confused as to what the vaguely anti-Muslim jokes they are repeating actually mean, still less think anything malicious of them, or understand them as echoes of a more fearful time.
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