The scholarly community suffered a great loss when Jon Gjerde died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 2008 at the age of 55. When reading his book, scholars-of-a-certain-age who are familiar with the field will probably be reminded of the unexpected death of Gjerde's colleague at Berkeley, Jenny Franchot, who died ten years before him at the age of 45. Franchot's book, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), figures prominently in Gjerde's understanding of how Catholicism influenced the American cultural landscape in the nineteenth century. It is a great misfortune to have lost both scholars—and at such young ages.
Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America was not finished at the time of Gjerde's death, and his former colleague, S. Deborah Kang, tells us that Gjerde planned to include an epilogue that would have considered Protestant-Catholic relations after the Civil War. The fact that such an epilogue could not be included is unfortunate, but the book's final chapter, which considers the “clear differentiation between Protestants and Catholics . . . with regard to economic change,” is a nice way to end the story of Catholics and Protestants as the nation stands ready to abandon race-based slavery in favor of a universal free market in labor (222). Scholars owe a debt of gratitude to Kang, for it was through her efforts that Gjerde's book was edited and published posthumously.
The theme of the book is that Catholics and Protestants in the United States each faced their own, religiously grounded “conundrum,” and that as they attempted to resolve the conflicts at the core of their particular conundrum, religious leaders ended up influencing the country's cultural understanding of the economy, the family, education, and the western frontier.
In each case, the conundrum existed because Catholics and Protestants lived in a country that was religiously pluralist; they benefited from that religious pluralism and, because of that, they wanted it to continue. For Catholics, though, Catholicism was the One, True Faith. All other approaches to God, even the ones that were Christian, were simply wrong. Catholics therefore “advocated what at heart was an impossibility,” Gjerde tells us. They wanted “a pluralist society and the supremacy of their faith” (88). Catholic leaders celebrated the First Amendment—and even embraced the rights-based language of their Protestant countrymen—at the same time that they proclaimed that “we are here to Catholicize the country.” They insisted, as New York's Archbishop John Hughes did, that Catholic immigrants were “god's chosen instruments . . . to make [the United States] morally, intellectually, spiritually great” (89).
For Protestants, the issue was that they believed Catholicism was a threat to democracy. Their respect for religious liberty made them “unwilling to restrict a Catholic's right to belief,” and yet they were convinced that “Romanism was poised to arrest the extension of religious and civil liberty and thereby impede the coming of the millennium” (116). The solution that Protestant leaders such as Lyman Beecher and Horace Bushnell came up with was not the repeal of the First Amendment—or even the re-establishment of Protestantism on the state level (though Beecher did lament disestablishment for years after it was accomplished in New England)—but conversion. In this respect, Protestant leaders had more in common with Catholic leaders than any of them was willing to recognize.
The urge to convert others while protecting one's own from conversion deeply influenced Catholic and Protestant understandings of America's political and cultural development. Catholic celibacy, for instance, was pointed to as antithetical to “the developing norms about the conjugal family.” Protestant leaders condemned the Catholic emphasis on celibacy, claiming that it encouraged women to adopt “fabricated visions amid self-inflicted misery,” rather that motherhood, because “marriage . . . made a woman unfit for sainthood” (199). Catholics, in turn, claimed that the individualistic and atomized nature of Protestant families led unavoidably to “fanaticism” among men and “materialism and self-indulgence” among women and children. Catholic leaders insisted that “the solidity of Church doctrine, in contrast to the Protestant penchant for moving freely from religious affiliation to religious affiliation . . . provided a structure that was not detrimental to society” (207–209).
Experts in the area of Catholic or anti-Catholic history will not find much that is surprising in Gjerde's book—aside from his extraordinarily extensive familiarity with nearly all of the primary and secondary source material that is out there on the subject of Protest-Catholic relations in nineteenth-century America. Not bad for a man whose previous books were on Scandinavians in the Midwest. Gjerde's command of the literature is truly exhaustive—and because of that, Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America should probably become a part of the comprehensive exam reading list for every graduate student focusing on American religious history.
The book would also probably be a fine one to use in an upper-level undergraduate course on Protestant-Catholic history. Gjerde's writing style is fluid, engaging, and accessible—a rarity in academia and one more reminder of how unfortunate it is that the historical profession lost him so soon.
