About a month ago, I brought your attention to the anti-Catholic hatred that animates much of “Christian nationalism.” These people claim to speak for all Christians, but they don’t. Indeed, when the time is right, they’ll turn on some of the Christians they are now calling allies.

I wrote that piece before picking up Arthur Goldwag’s latest, The Politics of Fear: The Peculiar Persistence of American Paranoia. In a chapter devoted to anti-Catholic hatred, Arthur makes the case that anti-Black racism isn’t America’s oldest animus. Anti-Catholicism is.

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“Many of those Puritans’ descendants still see the world much as their ancestors did, though their great enemy is no longer godless papists and savages but depraved liberalism, or at the conspiracist extreme, some differently titled ism that in practice looks and sounds an awful lot like Catholicism.”

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It arrived just before slaves did. “Many of those Puritans’ descendants still see the world much as their ancestors did, though their great enemy is no longer godless papists and savages but depraved liberalism, or at the conspiracist extreme, some differently titled ism that in practice looks and sounds an awful lot like Catholicism,” he wrote.

He takes it a step farther. By properly dating these strains of bigotry, Arthur shows us something that probably would be obvious if not for the assimilation of white Catholics. Beneath the whole of paranoid conspiracism is a familiar figure who is conspicuously Catholic.

It’s a sentence I wish I had written:

“The Christian blood that Jews were accused of mixing into their Passover matzos, the adrenochrome that Q believers say the elites extract from children, is the Eucharist defiled,” Arthur wrote.

The Politics of Fear is the long-awaited (long-awaited by me, anyway) follow-up to 2012’s The New Hate: Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right, a book written before the rise of Donald Trump but one that predicted him and everything he represents. I got in touch with Arthur to talk specifically about his chapter on anti-Catholic hatred in America. His latest is so rich, I hope he’ll give me more time soon.

JS: “The first slave ship didn’t arrive in Virginia until 1619, twelve years after Jamestown was founded. America’s oldest hatred, I would argue, was not anti-Black hatred, but anti-Catholic.” Can you flesh out that argument and what inspired you to make it? 

AG: I don’t mean to play down the importance of 1619, of anti-Black racism as an ingredient of the emergent American character, nor of the role of slavery in America’s emergent economy. Once slavery was established, the enslavers’ fear of the enslaved became a big thing – just read contemporary responses to Haiti’s revolution in the 1790s. 

The specter of vengeful slaves murdering white soldiers and raping white women was very real. But the anti-Catholicism of the Puritans was different. If slavery stemmed from powerful nations’ contempt for weaker peoples, anti-Catholicism came from a place of fear. 

Your neighbor, someone who looked and talked like you, might be secretly aligned with this world-dominating organization. The English were in this perpetual war with the Catholic power. At home, they worried that the breakaway Church of England was still too Catholic. They came to America, in large part, to be in a place where everyone would be compelled to worship as they did. Roger Williams was a renegade. Religious freedom, ecumenicism, the wall between church and state doesn’t come into people’s thinking until much later. 

The idea grabbed me not because I think anti-Catholicism is still widespread today, but because it’s so completely vanished outside of fundamentalist and evangelical circles, and it did so in my lifetime, though it left all sorts of traces. You see it through the lines in hate literature. As for what jumped out at me, I had read the Arthur Schlesinger Sr. quote about anti-Catholicism being “the deepest bias in the history of the American people” somewhere, maybe in Hofstadter.

The primary literature from the Know Nothings and later on the Agrarian populists that I read when I was writing The New Hate was horrifying. But I didn’t tease out the full implications until I started reading about Q for The Politics of Fear, and realized the role that blood libels have played in hate literature over the centuries.

JS: You say “many of those Puritans’ descendants still see the world much as their ancestors did, though their great enemy is no longer godless papists and savages but depraved liberalism, or at the conspiracist extreme, some differently titled ism that in practice looks and sounds an awful lot like Catholicism.” I figured there was a Jew somewhere beneath all the paranoia and fear. But you’re suggesting maybe there was a Catholic, too. Or more precisely, maybe the Catholic came first. 

AG: I came across a quote from Sarah Palin while writing The New Hate. It was about the former vice presidential candidate’s dismay on reading JFK’s famous Houston speech, in which he promised to make his political decisions “in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be in the national interest.” Why would he do that? she asked. 

“Instead of telling the country how his faith had enriched him,” she wrote, “he dismissed it as a private matter meaningful only to him. And rather than spelling out how faith groups had provided life-changing services and education to millions of Americans, he repeatedly objected to any government assistance to religious schools.” 

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What hit me was that she didn’t have the faintest idea of what JFK was responding to. She assumed that Kennedy had gone to the other side, that he had forsaken his faith for the people who wanted to take prayer and Bibles out of schools. She was actually born a Catholic, but raised in the Assemblies of God. And like so many fundamentalist Protestants, she believes that she and her co-religionists are being persecuted by the secular establishment. She had no idea what religious persecution really looks like, or the forms it took in the United States. I’ve learned a lot from your writings how the aggrieved persecution fantasies of Christian nationalists reflect their anger that they’re not able to exercise as much power as they want to.

Anti-papism never disappeared. 

The fear that animated it shifted to different objects over time: international Communism, One World Globalism, the Elders of Zion, Shariah, the Council on Foreign Relations, newer Vaticans. 

JS: You say: “The Christian blood that Jews were accused of mixing into their Passover matzos, the adrenochrome that Q believers say the elites extract from children, is the Eucharist defiled.” I have said anti-Catholic hatred is still alive, but what you’re suggesting is vaster and scarier.  

AG: You read John Quincy Adams anti-Mason rants from the 1830s and he can’t stop talking about their secret rites and blood oaths – he might as well have been talking about the Jesuits. 

One of the big books I read as a teenager was Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer, which is his fictionalized account of the Beilis blood libel trial in Kiev in 1913. I reread it not long after I wrote the chapter on anti-Catholicism. I realize how long I’ve been thinking about this issue. 

The idea that Jews, who have such an abhorrence of eating blood that they salt all their meat, would have blood ceremonies was just ridiculous. But Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians do have a blood ceremony, and Protestants have a symbolic one – so why wouldn’t they say their enemies pervert it? 

That’s exactly what Catholic witch-hunters imagined Satan worshipers doing. Hate literature is propaganda – it’s designed to rouse emotions. It’s also a way to deflect the weirdness that you might feel about partaking of blood yourself, by attributing it to your enemy.

JS: At one point in this chapter, you say Black people themselves “weren’t so much the objects of conspiracist thinking as their non-Black allies in the Abolition and the civil rights movements were.” That has all kinds of implications for liberal white allies, democratic politics and the progressive push for a more just and equitable society. 

AG: There’s a paradox at the heart of white supremacism. If you believe that Black people are innately inferior to you, why aren’t you dominating them? Why are they winning? Their answer was because of race traitors and more so because of a perfidious race, the Jews. 

As the American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell put it in his book White Power in 1967, “The Negro masses are biologically inferior and easily manipulated. But the Jews can’t as easily manipulate White men, so they are doing everything possible to destroy the idea that there is any such thing as ‘race,’ with the intention of breeding the White man (especially the Nordic) out of existence.” 

Rockwell goes on to essentially paraphrase The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, except instead of the laboring classes and the Masons, the Jews are weaponizing Black people: “To destroy the hated Whites and thus advance their violent world revolution, the Jews promote the endless breeding, arming, and organizing of the colored world. They move hordes of Blacks into urban areas, forcing them into competition with Whites, and then, when the Blacks fail, the Jews convince them that they are being ‘oppressed’. … As a result of this Jewish promotion of colored breeding, the colored birth rate is skyrocketing.” 

It’s not that different from the Great Replacement Theory, or the idea that Jewish billionaire George Soros is funding immigrant caravans to build the ranks of the Democratic Party. You don’t have to dig up old American Nazi tracts for that. You can just turn on Fox News.

JS: Paranoid conspiracism is often associated with uneducated white people. But in your discussion of Henry Ford, you tie in elites. He blamed Jews for ruining “a wholesome way of life that he remembered,” but he should have blamed himself and the “ruthlessness of the capitalism that he practiced.” We see the same or similar pattern by today’s elites, no?

AG: It’s tempting to say that Ford was sui generis, in that he was both so successful and prominent, and such a programmatic hater of Jews. But in our own day, the richest man in the world, who owes a lot of his wealth to a revolutionary new car, buys one of the world’s biggest social media platforms and uses it to amplify some really noxious rightwing politics, including some programmatic antisemites. 

An entire political party has thrown its lot in with a billionaire real estate crook who spouts a lot of xenophobic and racist garbage (Donald Trump’s hatreds are more visceral and less programmatic than Ford’s, but they are at the heart of his political brand). 

Just a few days ago, he raised tens of millions of dollars at a single event, a $250,000-a-plate dinner at Mar-a-Lago, “co-chaired by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah; oil tycoon Harold Hamm; hotelier and space entrepreneur Robert Bigelow; and casino mogul Steve Wynn,” according to CNN. 

Dave Troy has written some really disturbing pieces about far right conspiracies – not conspiracy theories, but real ones – for example in “Paranoia on Parade” in The Washington Spectator. I used to wonder whether those elites believed the theories or were using them to manipulate unsophisticated voters into electing people who’d help them avoid regulation and taxes. I suppose it’s an open question – I can’t see into people’s hearts, after all. But it hardly matters, does it?