Anti-Catholicism in the United States

Anti-Catholicism in United States is historically deeply rooted in the anti-Catholic attitudes of Protestants in Great Britain and Germany after the Reformation. Immigrants brought that hostility with them to the American colonies. Two types of anti-Catholic rhetoric existed in colonial society and continued into the following centuries. The first, derived from the theological heritage of the Protestant Reformation and the religious wars of the sixteenth century, consisted of the Biblical Anti-Christ and the Whore of Babylon variety and dominated anti-Catholic thought until the late seventeenth century. The second type was a secular variety which derived in part from xenophobic and ethnocentric Nativist sentiments and distrust towards increasing waves of Catholic immigrants, particularly from Ireland and non-Northwestern European countries such as Italy, and often focused on the alleged intrigues of Catholic states or Catholic peoples against the majority Protestant United States.

Historians have studied the motivations for anti-Catholicism. Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. characterized prejudice against the Catholics as "the deepest bias in the history of the American people." Conservative writer Peter Viereck once commented that (in 1960) "Catholic baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals." Historian John Higham described anti-Catholicism as "the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history".

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