“The Fanciful Alliance of Church and State”: Transatlantic Influences on the American-Catholic Religious Freedom Discourse

My paper examines Catholic efforts to gain equal civil and religious rights in the United States and suggests three ways in which transatlantic connections influenced American church-state relations.

First, it explores the intellectual debt that American Catholics owed to their English and Irish ancestors who wrote treatises on religious freedom. As they petitioned for religious liberty in the Early Republic, American Catholics drew from the works of Catholic reformers such as Richard Challoner, John Curry, and John O’Conor.

Second, my paper examines the enduring literary connections that dozens of Catholics formed toward the end of the eighteenth century. Advocates of Catholic rights such as John Carroll exchanged ideas on how to advance notions of toleration with a host of associates across the Atlantic. He wrote to and received letters from Joseph Berington, Arthur O’Leary, and Charles Plowden about how they might promote and articulate their cause in ways that resonated with Protestant majorities.

Third, some of the most vocal advocates of religious liberty in America migrated to the United States after fighting the same battle across the Atlantic. Mathew Carey and John England, for example, participated in the Catholic Emancipation movement in Ireland before they migrated to the United States. Once they arrived in America, both men wrote voluminously about the disabilities that Catholics continued to face.

My paper encourages scholars to reconsider the Protestant-Deist dichotomy that dominates religious freedom historiography and challenges scholars to look beyond the borders of the United States when exploring this subject. The networks that I trace demonstrate how the Atlantic World shaped even the most quintessentially national narrative and included heretofore overlooked religious minorities. American Catholics used their experiences at home and abroad to transform the country, broaden conceptions of toleration, and contribute to the expansion of a pluralist society.