How America's Rich Legacy of Fear and Hatred Fuels the Conspiracy Theories of Today (safe haven)

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https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/how-americas-rich-legacy-of-fear-and-hatred-fuels-the-conspiracy-theories-of-today

Among the fiercest of America’s old hatreds, I would argue, is the hatred of Catholics. The first colonists brought it with them from England.

A recent archaeological find sheds new light on this. In 2013, the remains of four men were discovered at the site of a chapel in Jamestown. One of them, Captain Gabriel Archer, had been buried with a silver box that a CT scan showed contained bone fragments and a lead ampulla. It was almost certainly a Catholic reliquary, and it was, in the words of The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance, “a bombshell,” potential “proof of an underground community of Catholics.” They would have had to have been secret because Catholic worship had been banned in England since 1559, when Queen Elizabeth issued the Act of Uniformity.

The English Protestants who colonized the New World feared hunger, illness, and childbirth, which killed one out of eight expectant mothers and a third of their children who were born alive by their fifth birthdays. They feared the raw wilderness and its indigenous inhabitants, who they knew were servants of the Devil, and the witches and other minions of Satan that dwelled among them, disguised as their wives, children, neighbors, servants, and enslaved people. They feared their own sinful natures and Antinomianism or “Free Grace” Protestantism, the radical doctrine that once they were saved, Christians were no longer bound by the moral law, a philosophy, they believed, that could not but lead to licentiousness and attacks on property and the political order. Most of all, they feared Catholicism, which they had been at war with since the time of Henry VIII. The Catholic French had forged alliances with native tribes in the north and west. The Catholic Spaniards controlled the south. The threat of internal subversion was real as well; the Gunpowder Plot conspirators had been executed less than a year before the Jamestown settlers departed England.

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 conspiracy theorist extreme, some differently titled ism that in practice looks and sounds an awful lot like Catholicism. Illuminism perhaps, or “cultural Marxism.” Or Zionism, the philosophy, they believe, of an ancient, fabulously wealthy elite whose power transcends national boundaries and whose leaders invisibly bend the world to their wills using the power of propaganda and finance. The Davidic superstate of the Protocols is a fantasy, but the Vatican was and is very real. (“You know, I am not antisemitic, and I am not anti-Black; that’s a complete misunderstanding of what I am,” Tucker Carlson recently, reportedly, said. “I am anti-Catholic.”)