Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835–1860. By W. Jason Wallace. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. 200 pp. $30.00.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)W. Jason Wallace deftly uses sermons, tracts, and religious journals from antebellum America to discover and track the ways that evangelicals and Catholics, North and South, wrestled over the ideas about liberty, republicanism, democracy, slavery, and America's place in God's design. He argues that northern evangelicals--at once fired up by revivalism, committed to social activism, and outraged by the post-Napoleon conservative movements in nineteenth-century Europe--constructed a national millennialist narrative that cast America as God's chosen people and northern evangelical churches as His instrument for providing the moral instruction, correction, and direction necessary to redeem the nation and realize its promise. That narrative cast slavery and Catholicism as twin evils threatening individual rights, the integrity of republican interests and identity, and, thus, America's moral and national progress. By likening slavery and Catholicism variously to barbarism, feudalism, and tyranny, the northern evangelicals made compromise with them impossible. In turn, Wallace shows, southern proslavery apologists and Catholics, despite their theological differences, found ground in defending slavery as an institution sanctioned by God and calling for a stable hierarchical society and a conservative Christian order. Although southern evangelicals and Catholics were never allies, they did join in castigating their northern evangelical critics as theologically unsound and dangerously political. The result of such debates and differences, Wallace concludes, was an irreparable distrust that magnified the sectional divide and undermined the American party system.Wallace carefully and copiously mines the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist denominational literature in making his case that northern evangelicals saw southern slavery and Catholicism as conjoined corruptions demanding moral and political action. He also appreciates the dilemma of American evangelicals who agreed that America's purpose and destiny was to be a Protestant nation but disagreed on scriptural interpretations as to the particular nature of society God demanded. Their common sense approach to the Bible, after all, invited many, and differing, readings. As Wallace also shows, southerners resented their northern evangelical counterparts as much for their arrogance and hubris in supposing that their millennialist interpretation alone mattered as for their theological and political barbs against slavery.Wallace also makes an important contribution in placing Catholic responses to northern evangelical criticism in context and in showing that, contrary to some scholarship on the church and slavery, Catholics did not avoid the issue. He is especially mindful of Catholic references to their own pre-Reformation history as the intellectual foundation of their insistent and persistent call for orthodoxy in belief and hierarchy in society. Therein, they argued, lay the security necessary to ensure liberty. The unsettling revolutions of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century did much to frame Catholic thinking about the need for stable institutions and an ordered, and thus orderly, society. Wallace exegetes the writings of John England and other southern prelates regarding accommodating Catholicism with republicanism and American institutions, especially the church's acceptance of slavery as divinely allowed but also its criticism of slave-trading and the neglect of Christian duty to the enslaved. …