“What Would Become of Us?” The Development of American Catholic Church-State Theory in Nineteenth-Century America

The standard historical narrative of religious liberty in the United States recounts a seemingly inexorable movement towards Thomas Jefferson’s vision of the First Amendment as “building a wall of separation between Church and State.” Classic legal histories by Perry Miller and Leo Pfeffer, and more recent work by Stuart Banner, H. Frank Way, and Steven Green recount this narrative while Philip Hamburger has tried to revise it by identifying separation as an anti-Catholic effort. Neither approach acknowledges the lively competition liberal church-state theory faced in the 19^th Century from an evangelical theory which sacralized religious liberty guarantees by equated the Reformation with the American Founding; a dissenting Protestant theory which held that the unholy state could not serve God; and an American Catholic theory that supported disestablishment in tacit defiance of the pope. As Bishop John Baptist Purcell of Cincinnati asked a colleague in 1834 in reference to Pope Gregory’s 1832 encyclical Mirari Vos, “if we were deprived of liberty of conscience, if the Presbyterians contended, as that document does, for the union of Church and State, even by false application of a sound principle, what would become of us?” Irish immigrant clergy remembered the oppressions of Anglican establishment and recognized their status as a beleaguered minority. Alexis De Tocqueville testified that every American priest he spoke to in the 1830s attributed “the peaceful dominion of religion in their country mainly to the separation of church and state.” Catholics offered a history that countered evangelical theory by identifying the colony of Maryland, not New England, as the cradle of religious liberty. The development of American Catholic theory requires us to appreciate how various religious traditions drew upon historical myths to sway popular opinion and shape law in 19^th-Century America.