Conspiracy theories tend to emerge in times of rapid cultural or demographic change; many of them reflect unease with that change, suggesting that it is not just the result of evolving values or newly emergent communities—the messy progression of democracy—but instead the work of a hidden network of nefarious actors whose ultimate goal is the destruction of America itself. And they often portray the American nuclear family, particularly its women and its children, as uniquely vulnerable and in need of protection.
In the late 1820s and ’30s, a sharp increase in immigration, mainly from Ireland and Germany, led to an explosion in anti-Catholic attitudes. Anti-Catholicism itself wasn’t new—it had been fundamental to the founding of American democracy: a model of political participation that wasn’t ruled by a divine authority. Catholics, Protestants feared, could not be trusted to participate in representative democracy, because rather than act as autonomous citizens making informed decisions, they’d vote as a bloc in accordance with the wishes of the pope. (This “philosophical” aspect of anti-Catholicism, which targeted not the individuals so much as the idea that people could be controlled by a religious authority not bound by American sovereignty, helps explain why it was so easily repackaged more recently against Muslim immigrants and the specter of Sharia law.)
“We make war upon no sect,” Senator Sam Houston of Texas said in an 1855 speech at a barbecue for the rabidly anti-immigrant Know Nothing party, while also asserting the need to resist “the political influence of Pope or Priest.” More fundamentally, he wondered, “Are not their doctrines opposed to republican institutions?” One only had to look at Mexico, Houston continued, where “priestcraft rules, and civil liberty is subordinate. There is no freedom where the Catholic Church predominates.” He favored a 21-year naturalization period for immigrants before they could gain the right to vote, which would, he argued, be enough time for them to shed their knee-jerk subservience to foreign religious leaders.
By the mid-19th century, the influx of Catholic immigrants had transformed a rather philosophical question about Catholicism into something more urgent and paranoid. Catholic was now becoming a rumor and a slur. Conspiracy theories proliferated, many framed around the threat of white Protestants being “enslaved” at the hands of the pope. These were a means of preserving a sense of white unity as the question of actual slavery continued to drive apart the country in the decades before the Civil War. Anti-Catholic conspiracists repeatedly used the fear of Catholic mind control to shift the discussion away from America’s divisions. Although white people disagreed on whether or not Black people should be enslaved, they could all agree that none of them wanted that fate for themselves.