Okay. I grew up in the Southern Baptist church. No emphasis on denominational bashing. So where did it begin?
Now, let’s use Thea’s* line in this thread here just as an example…
Speaking about the LB series.
Where did this start? Did I miss a meeting or something? 
*[sub]I have nothing against Thea, it just was her(his?) comment that made me wonder, so I used it as an example. No harm meant to Thea.[/sub]
Actually, Zero, it’s there, under the surface. You probably wouldn’t notice it unless you went to a hard-core fundamentalist church.
There are very few who will say it out loud, but the ones who will won’t shut up about it. There are a few really vicious anti-Catholic websites out there. Punch “Catholicism” into the search engine of your choice, and you’d be amazed…
Also, hunt up Jack Chick’s website. Scary…
In the LB series, the Pope is depicted as the head of the Antichrist’s One World Religion. The implications are clear.
I’ve had fundies shove tracts into my face, and told them, I don’t need this I’m Catholic, and they start in about Mary, the Saints, works-based salvation, plainly showing that they don’t have the slightest idea about what Catholics actually believe about these things. (We do believe in salvation by grace, through faith, but we have a different take on what “grace” means, and believe that good works are a necessary part of salvation, but we don’t believe that they will get you into heaven apart from faith in Christ. See the epistle of James.)
They also have this idea that Catholics being “allowed” to read the Bible is a recent development in history, when in fact the Church has throughout history encouraged the study of Scripture.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
Where did this (i.e., Catholic-bashing by Protestants) start? About 1517 or so[sup]1[/sup].
[sup]1[/sup]Not that Luther started out with quite this much vehemence; that developed over time.
Chick is one of the ones that mystified me. I’ve read his stuff over the years, and some of it is concise. The rest is… strange. Even I find some of it hard to swallow.
Martin Luther: As I understand, the Pope and him didn’t get along to well after Oct 31, 1517 and his 95 theses. I wonder if he meant to stir up that much trouble or if it was something that got picked up and put into the belief system as it grew and went along.
Yeah… would it be natural backlash against the church for the power it had in early european development? Picking Kings and Emperors, demanding taxes and the like? Inquisitions?
OK, I really had to think about posting this, because I tend to stay out of posts involving religion or politics, or anything in The Pit. But here it goes…
I’m Catholic. I spent most of my life living up North. Five years ago I moved to Alabama, the buckle of the Bible Belt. Naturally, there are a lot of Southern Baptists here. Since I grew up in NYC, I knew people of all kinds, and made my observations based on what kind of person you were, and not your religion, or social status, or anything else.
First off, I like where I live now. Sure, there are the jokes about my redneck friends, and I hear the Yankee jokes, too. We all laugh. Until it comes to religion. Now, I may be Catholic, but I’m a weddings and funerals Catholic. However, many (not all) people I know who are Baptist are extremely serious about their religion, and are very intolerant of others. And I live in the Huntsville area, which tends to be more progressive due to the large number of out-of-staters here. They actually have five Catholic churches.
I have had it told to me on a number of occasions that being Catholic was “as bad as being Jewish.”
My friend’s mother is still upset that her Baptist son married “one of those Catholics”.
I am told that the Catholic church is a money-grabbing organization. This from people who are encouraged to tithe up to 10% of their annual income.
WTF is that all about???
Granted, intolerance exists everywhere, but in the context of this thread, I would have to agree that there are some Baptists who are very anti-Catholic.
I don’t get it. At my church, I’ve never heard the slightest hint of anti-Catholicism, nor at the two churches I went to previous to that.
Oh, wait a moment… Yeah, I guess that could explain it.
My (Bronx Catholic) family vacations one week a year in Pennsylvania Dutch country; that’s were the Amish and Mennonites are concentrated in PA, along with many other fundie denominations.
The first Chick tracts I ever saw in my life were being sold by a smiling, petite Mennonite woman, alongside the shoo-fly pies and cute knitted “Dutch” hex signs. My equally innocent Mom called her on it, and the lady stopped smiling and said, “Well, some people (meaning us) just don’t know when they’re being fooled.”
I was too young to be told this then, but my Dad later told me that the owner of the cabins, a Church of God member, privately asked him if it was true that Catholic priests had the duty to deflower all the girls at Confirmation (which we have around 13 or so). I saw myself him asking my Mom if Catholics were Christians. A friend of ours who comes down to stay some weeks is Latino and a priest, neither of which is glaringly obvious when he’s in civvies, and has asked us not to tell anyone down there either fact.
I don’t mean to pick on the Plain people and PA in particular, of course, only that the contrast is so stark. All that beautiful land, those pious, hard-working, peaceful people, and such ugly beliefs under the surface.
One of my brother’s bigger surprises after moving to Texas from the Bronx was passing by a sign outside a Baptist church that had this subject for the sermon of the day:
“Why Catholics Aren’t Christian.”
Talk about a head-turning sign.
Anti-catholicism is a constant if low-level theme in American history. You have to remember that there was a lot of controversy over JFK and his being Catholic, and that was only a generation ago.
A lot of the anti-Catholic sentiment is a carry-over from the religious and political wars that wracked Great Britain during the 17th and 18th centuries. Since what became the U.S. was settled by Britons, they brought their hatreds over with them. Later, as Great Britain slowly began to heal those wounds (although they are not all healed, today), the U.S. got left out of the process (having declared its independence, and all).
Following that bad start, the majority of the non-British immigrants who landed–and faced the standard xenophobia that immigrants tend to receive–were Catholic, adding Catholicism to the catalogue of “problems” that the immigrants were “inflicting” on the country. In the Northeast and the Great Lakes, where the vast majority of immigrants landed, these attitudes were slowly pushed aside by the assimilation of the Catholic immigrants. In the far west, the Catholics were as liable to have arrived along with the non-Catholics, and the xenophobic attitudes did not develop as strongly (aside from places such as the Colorado coal mining communities which “suffered” a large influx of Italian immigrants). In the deep South, where immigration was not a strong factor in populating the region, the anti-Catholic/xenophobic traditions remained stronger (witness the Ku Klux Klan).
This is not to say that such bigotry was a purely Southern phenomenon. My Grandfather-in-law (raised in Indiana, spent most of his life in Michigan) spent his last 49 years angry that his daughter had married a Catholic and converted to that faith. I worked with a woman in Cleveland who was quite vocal that the 80% of the women with whom she worked that were Catholic were damned. (I would really like to look her up and see if she abandoned her Southern Baptist church when the SB’s announced a few years ago that they could live without condemning Catholics.) Both of the churches that I attended as a boy in Michigan (with a strong Catholic population) were built on land purchased through “neutral” intermediaries in the 1920s and 1930s, because no one in the extended suburbs of Detroit would knowingly sell land to the Catholic church.
Catholics and Protestants are quite capable of hating each other “on principle,” but I suspect that most of the issues in the U.S. are carry-overs from the period of large-scale immigration.
I’ve lived in Texas for quite a few years, and I don’t know how many times I’ve gotten steamed when I’ve heard someone say “So and so isn’t Catholic, he’s Christian…” It’s not necessarily said hatefully, but I hear it all the time. I’m not saying everyone in Texas thinks that way, but for many people Protestant = Christian.
FWIW, my ex-boss is Catholic, and very fundamental about it. He would always go on about how persecuted Catholics are, which got me, the Jew, into full “well, what about the Inquisition?” mode, but, I digress.
:rolleyes:
Saint Zero, you must have also missed the controversy over the appointment of the House Chaplain earlier this year - see Salon’s article about it. (I believe a Catholic was appointed eventually, BTW.) Bob Jones University’s web page also has a few charming editorials about Catholicism.
It seems to me that anti-Catholicism is most common in areas of the country where members of a single church “own” a town (i.e., are the clear majority of the population, have lived there longest, are the owners of land and businesses, etc.) The most likely places to find such a thing are small towns in the South where nearly all the people are Southern Baptist, and even being Methodist or Episcopalian is a little strange. I can’t think of anywhere else where this is true, except perhaps Mormons in certain parts of the West. Do Lutherans dominate the Upper Midwest enough to make this the case? If so, does anyone know of similar Mormon or Lutheran hostility to other churches?
It seems to me that there really aren’t areas in the U.S. that Catholics or Jews dominate in the same way. Oh, there may be Catholic or Jewish neighborhoods, but they’re right next to neighborhoods of other sorts. I don’t know of any place in the U.S. where you can find Methodist or Presbyterian or Episcopalian towns.
Funny story…
(note-southern louisiana is largely french catholic)
I have a black co-worker who moved here (Louisiana) from Philly. She came to work one one day shaking with fear. I asked her what was wrong, and she stated that living here in the south was so scary. So the I asked her what about it was scary. She said all the racism, and that on her was to work she passed by a large KKK rally.
This seemed very strange so I asked her more questions about what she saw. It turns out it was a Knights of Colombus meeting!!!
She was also suprised to find out that there a large numbers of black Catholics here. If fact our new Bishop is black.
Or for a far more reasoned and thought provoking :rolleyes: Chick tract on Catholicism, try
The DEATH Cookie.
Fenris
Checking in from Minnesota. Also, I’m Catholic, FWIW.
Minnesota, as stereotyped, is heavily Scandinavian Lutheran, but I have never seen anti-Catholic sentiment up here like I’ve seen elsewhere in the country. The only ‘unusual’ messages I see on signs outside churches are unusually creative ones, like “CH__CH. What’s missing? YOU ARE”
I guess it’s just too cold to think about sending other people to hellfire when you’d like a little bit of it yourself.
Well, it’s true, right?
We CAtholics are the anti-Christ. We worship Mary, and we all have to blow the priests, don’t we? And we have to pay lots and lots and lots of money to the church. 
I mean, you got your copy of the Secrets of the Vatican when you were baptized, didn’t you, fellow Idol Worshippers?
It’s strange to see in this day and age, the misconceptions about Catholithism. One that cracks me up is people who say Catholics are anti-abortion, but pro-death penalty. THAT is bull right there. The Roman Catholic church condemns the death penalty as well, believe it or not. And no, not all priests are child molestors. (And the ones that are, well, let me tell you-I would be the first to speak out against them!)
I’m not anti-catholic. I was raised and confirmed in the catholic church, though now I am agnostic. Lets not get carried away with praise for Catholocism by saying they encouraged study on scripture. They did when it came to their scholars, not with the masses until well after the invention of the printing press. Much of this likely had to do with all the crazy stuff in the Bible which would be literally interpreted by future fundie nuts. Translating the bible out of latin into common languages was illegal in most “christian” states before the Protestant reformation. Back then, they wanted you to believe what they said without personal research.
It was a mistake. The Catholic church has likely apologized for it. But it did happen.
[QUOTE]
Originally posted by cooldude *
**
[QUOTEThey did when it came to their scholars, not with the masses until well after the invention of the printing press. Much of this likely had to do with all the crazy stuff in the Bible which would be literally interpreted by future fundie nuts*[/QUOTE]
And more of it likely had to do with what you stated. Without a printing press, it was too expensive to make a lot of books. The idea of “Everybody should have a bible” wasn’t really practical.
IIRC, there were some Catholic vernacular translations in the middle ages.