American Catholics in the Protestant Imagination: Rethinking the Academic Study of Religion. By Michael P. Carroll. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. xx, 219 pp. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8018-8683-6.)

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In this ambitious and provocative book, Michael P. Carroll assesses a number of the “standard stories” about American Catholicism and finds them lacking in empirical support (p. xvi). He posits that the persistence of those standard stories despite their historical flimsiness suggests the continuing hegemony of the “Protestant imagination” in the academic study of religion (p. ix). For example, Carroll wonders why the scholarly study of “Irish” has typically equaled “Catholic,” when the majority of contemporary Americans who identify as Irish (or Scotch-Irish) are Protestant. He thinks that the story of the Irish and Scotch-Irish contribution to evangelical Protestantism is an equally valuable, but badly neglected story. He also modifies the usual notion that the famine Irish were serious Catholics prior to departing from Ireland. Instead, Carroll argues that conditions in America made the famine Irish good Catholics. He points to the fact that so many Irish women immigrants became domestic servants, where they were expected to accept intense social disciplining and control. Those values were promoted heavily by the Romanizers of the mid-nineteenth-century American Catholic Church.