Reviewed by: The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire by Katherine D. Moran Leslie Woodcock Tentler The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire. By Katherine D. Moran. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2020. Pp. xiv, 330. $48.95. ISBN: 9781501748813.) Jacques Marquette, a seventeenth-century Jesuit, loomed incongruously large in my non-Catholic childhood. I learned to swim at Pere Marquette beach on the southeastern shores of Lake Michigan; the priest-explorer also featured prominently in what passed for history instruction at my Grand Rapids public school. I remember the pride those lessons engendered—pride that one of our own, geographically speaking, could be claimed as an American Founding Father; pride too in Marquette’s French origins, redolent to my childhood self of sophistication and glamor. But although I was certainly aware that Marquette was a Catholic, I never wondered at his being so lionized in what was then a stronghold of Dutch Reformed Protestantism. That surfaced as a puzzle only many years later. Given my personal history, I was primed to appreciate Katherine Moran’s The Imperial Church, the first section of which centers on the secular cult of Jacques Marquette. The commemorative culture surrounding Marquette, peculiar to the upper Midwest, emerged in the 1870s and resulted by the early twentieth century in a plethora of statues and place names, along with the occasional civic pageant, [End Page 611] honoring the hitherto obscure Jesuit. Marquette was claimed by that commemorative culture as a co-founder of the American nation, “naturalizing, after the fact, the imperial nation’s expansion into formerly French and Native American territory” (p. 18). Pride in their booming region was a powerful motivator for the priest’s admirers, many of whom were Protestants. For some he also served, however incongruously, to legitimize the region’s explosive industrial growth, even as the priest’s undoubted anti-materialism spoke to the need for a less rapacious mode of industrial relations. Many such advocates of a more paternalistic capitalism also saw in Marquette, who was famously open to the region’s Indian cultures, a powerful endorsement of the nation’s assimilative capacities. But notwithstanding the priest’s own example, it was assimilation to a white Christian norm that his admirers had in mind. Moran turns next to Junípero Serra, the eighteenth century Franciscan founder of California’s Indian missions, who—like Jacques Marquette—was reimagined as a Founding Father and a bearer of white Christian civilization. Serra’s secular cult, underway by the 1880s and largely confined to California, was more vigorously commercial than that of Marquette: many of its mostly-Protestant promoters hoped to stimulate tourism and the state’s nascent hospitality industry. The cult had its mildly progressive side, presenting Serra as a model paternalistic employer—unlike the itinerant Marquette, Serra presided over a chain of missions where Indian neophytes lived and worked—and embracing an assimilationist ideal that rejected anti-Catholicism. Some of Serra’s admirers condemned the violence that early Anglo arrivals in California had wreaked on what remained of the local Indian population. But as in the case of Marquette, the assimilationist ideal that Serra allegedly embodied made no room for those unwilling or unable to conform to a white, Christian norm—or indeed for those who would challenge the racialized hierarchy of California’s emerging agro-industrial economy. The third and final section of Moran’s book, which deals with American occupation of the Philippines, presents a more complicated narrative, impossible to summarize here. It too involves Catholic priests, both Spanish and American, and serves to “naturalize” American expansion, now in an overseas mode, and affirm a vision of the nation as heir to an earlier wave of mostly Catholic imperial “civilizers.” Like the rest of this formidably intelligent book, these chapters are deftly argued and grounded in thorough research. But in this section especially, one would like to learn more about how this logic—the American war in the Philippines, not wholly popular back home, was unfolding in the present rather than the distant past—was received by a diverse national audience. This is less a criticism, however, than a tribute to Moran’s fine...
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