As a result of immigration from Ireland, the Catholic population surged from 663,000 in 1841 to 3.1 million in 1860, from 4.6 percent of the population to 11.5 percent. Foreign-born people made up more than 45 percent of the populations of New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Detroit. While early Catholic immigrants tended to be skilled workers, later arrivals were mostly poor and uneducated, many driven from Ireland by the potato famine between 1845 and 1852. Preachers,…

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When false rumors spread in the 1830s that Catholic priests had imprisoned a young woman in a Boston convent, a mob came and burned down the building. When false rumors spread during World War II that Jehovah’s Witnesses were plotting with the Nazis, Witnesses were beaten and castrated. When false rumors spread in 1838 that Mormons were plotting to take Missourians’ land, they were massacred. So when the accurate news was reported in the days and weeks after September 11,…

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African spirituality and Islam are purged, creating a “spiritual holocaust.” Discussions of religious liberty before the Civil War rarely consider the status of African Americans for an understandable but perverse reason: their subjugation was so thorough that the loss of their religious freedom seemed to be the least of their problems. But if anything, depriving them of their faith as they tried to endure slavery was especially cruel. While Americans have held up religious liberty as sacred, we have repeatedly…

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A major attack on religious freedom is launched against American Muslims, accelerated by a new kind of media and a new kind of leader. Excerpted from Sacred Liberty Earlier in American history, those who wanted to suppress a particular religion had to confront a challenging question: Doesn’t doing that violate the First Amendment? They often gave a brazen response: no, it doesn’t, because the despised minority faith in question wasn’t really a religion, at least not in an appropriate way….

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Responding to the passage of the Alabama anti-abortion law, Democratic presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand made a religious freedom argument. “One of the tenets of our democracy is that we have a separation of church and state, and under no circumstances are we supposed to be imposing our faith on other people,” she said. “And I think this is an example of that effort.” There may be many problems with the Alabama law banning abortion but violating separation of church and…

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Thousands of Americans protested for religious freedom — and some gave their lives. Here are a few that we know about. These descriptions are excerpted from Sacred Liberty Mary Dyer By modern standards, Dyer was no groovy freethinker. Like many of the other Puritans who came to America seeking religious sustenance, she was a serious Bible-following Christian (how else to explain her naming her son Mahershalalhashbaz, after a line in Isaiah 8:1?). But at twenty-five, she fell in with a…

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The hostility toward Mormons in the second half of the 19th century was intense, and often focused on polygamy. The small type on the sword and rifle indicate “The Only Sure Way” that Uncle Sam can rid us of the “mormon vermin.” The small type says, “Heroic Measures” and “Extermination.” This one is hard to get one’s head around. Mormons were consider, well, not white. This was partly because they embraced polygamy, which was viewed as Asiatic or African. In…

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Look closely: those crocodiles coming ashore to eat the children are actually Catholic Bishops!  The boy standing bravely on the beach has a Holy Bible sticking out of his coat. A gutted building behind them is labelled Public Schools.  What’s this all about? In the 1870s, when this Thomas Nast cartoon was published, Protestants were aggressively casting Catholics as anti-Bible.  The reason: the Catholics resisted having their kids forced to read the King James version of the Bible (instead of…

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