D ICKSON D. B RUCE , J R . Lorette: Anti-Catholicism and Religious Freedom in Antebellum America From the colonial period through much of the twentieth century, anti- Catholicism has been a potent force in American social and political life. But at no time was it more potent than in the period between about 1825 and the late 1850s when, apart from the conflict over slavery, it was among the most divisive forces in American politics. Culminating, famously, with the great success of the American, or “Know Nothing” party in the mid-1850s, anti- Catholicism was a force to be reckoned with throughout the period. Antebellum anti-Catholicism is often popularly conflated with a concomitant growth in “nativism,” that is, with increasing anti-immigrant, especially anti-Irish sentiment during the era, and there is a measure of truth in the equation. But the conflation is also misleading. For one thing, anti- Catholic activity was far from continuous during the period, and some of the earliest outbursts of antebellum anti-Catholicism, from roughly the late 1820s to about 1840, predate the most significant waves of Irish immigration (Bennett 29; Moore 54). While they betrayed anxiety about foreign and immigrant “threats” to America, these early outbursts tended to represent reactions to what were perceived as increasing Catholic efforts in areas of outreach and education (Franchot 99-100). As a result, this early anti- Catholicism also tended to focus far more heavily on religious and political conflicts than on immigration as such, reflecting controversies that had at their heart questions of religious freedom and church-state relations. These early controversies provided a framework for anti-Catholic propaganda throughout the period and a context for understanding deeper themes of religious freedom in a difficult time. Anti-Catholic activity took various forms during this critical period of the 1820s and 1830s, from the founding of journals to the creation of political organizations to severe outbreaks of mob violence, most notably the burning of the Ursuline Convent and School in Charlestown, near Boston, in 1834. All of this activity was supplemented - and, some historians would argue, stimulated - by the emergence of a substantial body of literature, including fiction (occasionally represented as fact), that conveyed anti-Catholic ideas and anti-Catholic images to a very broad audience (Billington 68-76). And the audience was very broad indeed. The most notorious of these works, Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal, was, according to Frank Luther Mott, the 98 D ICKSON D. B RUCE , J R . best-selling book in America during the year of its publication, 1836 (306). It continued to sell well for most of the era, up to the time of the Civil War. But Monk’s work was, in many ways, anticipated by a no less influential book from a few years before, George Bourne’s 1833 novel Lorette: The History of Louise, Daughter of a Canadian Nun: Exhibiting the Interior of Female Convents. Described by literary historian David S. Reynolds as “the prototype” for most later anti-Catholic fiction - including Monk’s Awful Disclosures (181) - Bourne’s novel combined sensationalism with exposition with motifs of sentimentalism and evangelical piety to create a rich brew of anti-Catholic rhetoric, and a particularly revealing one as well. Bourne played a major role in the burgeoning anti-Catholicism of the late 1820s and early 1830s. Born in England in 1780 and moving to America in 1804, Bourne had lived variously in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Quebec before finally settling in New York City in 1829. In January, 1830, he became founding editor of one of the first anti-Catholic newspapers, The Protestant, and a leading figure in the anti-Catholic movement. He was active in the 1836 creation of the first national anti-Catholic organization, the American Society to Promote the Principles of the Protestant Reformation, and was a prolific publicist for the cause. In addition to Lorette, he had a hand in the creation of Monk’s Awful Disclosures, taking notes from her, perhaps contributing to its content (Billington 53, 96-97; Griffin 33). But Lorette achieved its own success. Though not the year’s best-seller - that honor belonged to John S.C. Abbott’s Christian advice manual, The Mother at Home - it was among those Mott considered the “runners up.” And, joining such other works as David Crockett’s Autobiography, Timothy Flint’s Daniel Boone, and Lydia Sigourney’s Letters to Young Ladies, it was the best-selling novel on the list (Mott 315, 318). But Bourne’s authorship of Lorette adds a dimension to the novel’s significance that is equally important to note. For all Bourne’s importance to the anti-Catholic movement, his claim on the American historical memory has always rested more heavily on his role in that still more potent force in antebellum America, the fight against slavery. Bourne was an early and ardent enemy of slavery. Entering the Presbyterian ministry shortly after his arrival in America, Bourne became convinced by 1809 or 1810 that slavery - which he consistently referred to as “manstealing” (1 Tim. 1.10 [KJV]) - was incompatible with Christianity. By 1815 - the date is not entirely certain - he had begun to exclude slaveholders from his church in Lexington, Virginia. In 1815, he also attended the Presbyterian General Assembly in Philadelphia, where he denounced slaveholding and condemned slaveholders as sinners and hypocrites, urging their exclusion from the church at large (Christie and Dumond 15-25). Lorette: Anti-Catholicism and Religious Freedom in Antebellum America 99 Bourne lost his post in Virginia, but not his enthusiasm for the cause. In 1816, he published “The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable”, delineating slavery’s brutality and sinfulness and, as the title indicates, its inconsistency with Scripture. It was also one of the first American tracts to demand immediate emancipation, doing so in an era when even gradualism seemed radical. Some time in the next decade or so, it was to take its place among the most significant sources for William Lloyd Garrison’s conversion to immediatism. “The more we read it,” Garrison said, “the higher does our admiration of its author rise” (Mayer 69-70) and, with that admiration, an awareness that anything short of immediate emancipation represented a compromise with sin (Christie and Dumond 75, 78-79). Even as Bourne took on his labors as an anti-Catholic agitator, he maintained his commitment to abolitionism. The Protestant, though focused mainly on anti-Catholicism, contained its share of pieces denouncing the “generation of Man Stealers” who continued to hold their victims in bondage (1: 405). One of his most important works, Picture of Slavery in the United States of America (including a revision of The Book and Slavery) appeared in 1834, only a year after Lorette. In 1837, only a year after he had coached Maria Monk to best-sellerdom, he published his Slavery Illustrated in Its Effects Upon Woman and Domestic Society, a blistering denunciation of slaveholder sexual licentiousness. In the meantime, he had joined Garrison and others at the end of 1833 in creating the American Anti-Slavery Society, and was one of the original signers of its “Declaration of Sentiments.” Asserting that “every American citizen, who retains a human being in involuntary bondage” should be considered, according to the Bible, “a Man-Stealer,” the document showed evidence of Bourne’s influence, as well (in Bourne, Picture, 225, 227). His biographers, John W. Christie and Dwight L. Dumond, report that he was a frequent if often anonymous contributor to The Liberator, and even suggest that he wrote parts of Garrison’s Thoughts on African Colonization (1832), one of the abolitionist movement’s founding documents (84, 97-98). Donald Yacavone, in a sketch of Bourne for the American National Biography, has emphasized the connections between Bourne’s abolitionist and anti-Catholic efforts. Bourne treated both slavery and Catholicism as totalitarian institutions; he argued that both created and dehumanized innocent victims, and that both entailed, especially, the brutal sexual exploitation of women by those in power (3: 255; see also Franchot 102-103). These connections are important to recognize because, while not all prominent anti-Catholics shared Bourne’s radical abolitionism - and not all abolitionists his ardent anti-Catholicism - such links represent themes in antebellum anti-Catholicism going beyond nativist racial or ethnic bigotry, for all the nativist racial and ethnic bigotry to be found there. And, again, in Bourne’s 100 D ICKSON D. B RUCE , J R . case this is especially important to remember. As editor of The Protestant, Bourne focused almost exclusively on religious issues, avoiding nativism altogether, and Lorette, for its part, did nothing to connect anti-Catholicism to nativist fears, however much such fears helped define the context for his work. It is probably to the point that, in his anti-slavery writings, Bourne was a consistent advocate of racial equality and African-American citizenship, as well. But such connections also help to illuminate what seems to be one of the more paradoxical features of anti-Catholicism during the 1820s and 1830s, its relationship to ideas of religious liberty and to problems of church and state. Put briefly, Bourne and others presented their anti-Catholicism not as intolerance of religious differences but, rather, as a defense of American religious freedom against an authoritarian Catholic onslaught. Lorette is an important dramatic statement of what they believed this meant. As a novel, Lorette is loosely structured, draws on an array of formal sources, and moves, often awkwardly, from narrative to polemic, and back again. Parts of the novel are told from the perspective of a third-person narrator; parts in the form of a “memoir” left by the story’s main character, Louise, after her death. There are elements of the gothic (though nothing like those in Monk’s Awful Disclosures), of the captivity narrative, and, notable given Bourne’s abolitionism, of the fugitive slave narrative (Griffin 31). The connections with the slave narrative are particularly striking. Lorette’s protagonist Louise, for example, makes much of not knowing her parentage or her exact birth date. Seeking to escape the clutches of the Church, she must live as a fugitive in the wilderness, constantly threatened with betrayal. Detailing episodes of sexual exploitation, Bourne portrays confrontations between Louise and lascivious priests that clearly anticipate Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 accounts of her confrontations with lascivious slaveholders in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Franchot 154-55). Because the novel is not well known today, a brief synopsis may be useful. Set in Canada, the novel begins with an encounter near the Indian village of Lorette between two young men, Diganu and Chretien, and Louise, whom they find insensible. She has a small cross “punctured” on the top of her forehead, marked with the letter M; Diganu has a similar cross, marked with a D. Though she is vague about where she has come from, she begs them to shelter her, which they agree to do. When, however, she finds that they have furnished her room with a crucifix and other Catholic paraphernalia, she removes everything, burning “the Mass-book, the Images and the rosary.” The young men had also supplied her with holy water, which she “cast into the street.” She tells the astonished Diganu and Chretien, “if you knew as much as I do of the Priests and their pretended religion, you would do the same” (21). Lorette: Anti-Catholicism and Religious Freedom in Antebellum America 101 Louise remains with Diganu and Chretien for several months. During this time, the principals engage in several debates on Catholicism and, especially, on the authority of the priests. In addition, Louise and Diganu soon fall in love, Diganu ultimately proposing marriage. At the same time, Louise becomes increasingly subject to a scheme, guided by a wily Jesuit, to steal her away. She is, readers learn, a novice who has fled from the convent at “Point aux Trembles,” and the Church wants her back. At this point, Bourne interrupts his story to let Louise provide a brief narrative of her life. Ignorant of parents, birthplace, and age, and knowing herself only as Louise, she says, she was raised by nuns at Point aux Trembles and Quebec. And she had found life in the convent increasingly repellent. Initially, this was due to the influence of an old nun, Marguerite, who recounted her own miseries to the young Louise, telling a tale of sexual terrorism, of young women held in physical and psychological bondage, of priests who used their power and authority to force nuns to submit to lives of licentious exploitation. But soon, Louise relates, she was to learn for herself the truth of Marguerite’s tale. With the connivance of the Mother Superior, she was brought to a priest who had taken an interest in her. The priest did everything he could to “extirpate” her “delicacy” (58), which she resisted. Still, he persisted, tormenting her “with his wicked proposals and forced caresses. He adduced,” she said, “all the varied deceptions which Marguerite had detailed. He boasted of the authority of his Church, the blessedness of his absolution, the comfort of enjoying a Priest’s favor, and the satisfaction of a Nun’s life, with its glorious reward” (62). When such blandishments failed, he threatened to take her by force, imprisoning her, plotting her ruin. Through a combination of luck and determination, she was able to escape, making her way blindly to Lorette. Her escape is to be temporary. Diganu and Louise make their way to be married, but the plot against them is in motion. At the church, they are met by two priests who seize her, separating her forcibly from Diganu. The priests declare that Diganu and Louise are brother and sister - the crosses on their foreheads tell the tale! Diganu is distraught and now, for himself, begins to question the authority of the priests and the Church, confronting the Bishop in an effort to get Louise released. The Bishop dismisses Diganu’s challenge: “know you not that resistance to the authority of the lawful Priests is rebellion against God, not to be tolerated in thought, much less in word and action? ” (91). Persisting, Diganu will soon be branded a “heretic”: before long, he will glory in the brand. Returned to the convent, Louise begins a new “narrative” of her experiences, reflecting deeply on the world in which she must now live. She thinks about the outward appeal of what appears, on the surface, to be 102 D ICKSON D. B RUCE , J R . “a haven of quietude” and “the garden of an earthly paradise,” all the product of “Jesuitical artifices and seductions” (127). At the same time, she perceives the “deadening” power of a life dominated by the tedium of tightly structured, “monastic” routines (128). And she is especially critical of the seductive power of the Confessional, which she sees as an essential feature of the convent system: “Artful questions are asked” to penetrate the innermost recesses of the mind, to manipulate innocent young women into submissiveness. “Often are the young women made to believe that they are an inferior race to the men, and only created to administer to their enjoyments” (131). Only a few things help Louise to resist. First, she has learned to reject the convent’s ceremonials. She prays her own prayers, placing her hope in God alone. And she has her Bible, which she reads constantly. Here, for Bourne, is Louise’s most critical resource. As he asserts at several points, Louise’s personal devotion to the Scriptures places her severely at odds with her Catholic oppressors. Priests, he claims, do not want their people to read the Bible. Priestly authority depends on an exclusive right to read and interpret Scripture. Marguerite had directed Louise to the undefiled source; Louise had done the same for Diganu and Chretien. The Bible was to be Louise’s chief source of solace in the totalitarian world of the convent. And its power was to provide the basis for much of what would follow in Bourne’s novel. Louise is never to receive physical release from convent life, but she is soon allowed a kind of emotional escape when, after seven years, she is reunited with her long-lost mother, a nun named Therese. The two are allowed to live together in Therese’s convent at Trois Rivieres. At this point, too, Bourne shifts his novel from plot to exposition. Therese, like Louise, has found little but misery in convent life. Louise will ultimately learn that Therese was also the daughter of a nun and, “trained” in the “vile associations” of the convent (205), was the mother of both Diganu and Louise, by two different priests. By this time, Therese’s health is poor, her constitution weak, and her religion offers her little consolation. It is for Louise to reveal to her mother the alternative of Protestant Christianity. Therese remains wedded to the authority of the priests and the Church, or at least is afraid to let them go, but Louise is not to be deterred. She decries the meaninglessness of Catholic practices. She condemns the blind obedience of the people, their vulnerability to the externals of rituals and images: “the Church is a theatre,” she declares, “and the Priest and his assistants are only actors” (158). Louise draws sharp contrasts between Catholicism and the Protestant alternative as she seeks to win her mother’s soul, not only away from Catholicism but also for salvation. Again, the Scriptures play a central Lorette: Anti-Catholicism and Religious Freedom in Antebellum America 103 role. The Bible itself exposes the “idolatrous and corrupt practices” of the Church, Louise tells Therese; the Scriptures provide no real foundation for “Popery” (165). But the Bible is the only true basis, Louise asserts, for genuine Christian faith and practice. No less significant is Louise’s effort to replace Catholicism’s “theatre” with a more inward faith. Priestly mediation and, especially, practices of Confession and absolution deaden the conscience and, more importantly, blind people to the need for an “evangelical” repentance of their sins through a new birth in Christ. It is not enough to know Scripture. Through prayer and constant effort, one must learn to appreciate the “experimental application of the divine oracles” in order to experience the “work of Divine mercy” in her heart (188, 192). In essence, Louise works to help Therese on the way to a direct experience of God’s power, unmediated by Church structures and external authority. Louise’s own life is a testimony to the workings of divine grace and, in the end, by persuasion and example, she succeeds in bringing her mother around, “the instrument in God’s hands,” as Therese proclaims, “to convert a sinner” (199). Therese’s conversion is to be the climax of her life. Over the next year, her health steadily deteriorates and soon she must face death. A priest comes to offer last rites, but Therese refuses. She does not want her last moments sullied “by a rite which Christianity condemns” (233). Instead, she dies at peace, Louise by her side, confident in having found “acceptance in Christ” (234). Only months will pass before Louise joins her mother in death, looking forward to the time when she, Diganu, and Therese will meet again, and be “present with the Lord” (242). In Bourne’s novelistic case against Catholicism, several key themes stand out. One, clearly, has to do with what Bourne presents as the sexually exploitative character of the convent system. As Marie Anne Pagliarini has detailed, the theme was ubiquitous in the anti-Catholic literature of the day (98, 112). Again, Yacavone notes Bourne’s indictment of the exploitation of women in both abolitionist and anti-Catholic writings, and such an indictment occupies a central place in Lorette. At one level, this story of exploitation drew on rather old traditional themes in anti-Catholicism, themes which occasionally showed up in Bourne’s Protestant, and it probably need not be stated that the story had much more to do with anti-Catholic tradition than with any facts of convent life. At the same time, however, Bourne told the story in a way that had great literary resonance in his own time, entailing a peculiar version of the sentimental seduction fiction that had appealed to Anglo-American audiences since at least the middle of the eighteenth century. Just as that fiction centered on vulnerable young women confronting seducers who used promises of love and marriage to lure their prey to ruin, Bourne’s story returned, 104 D ICKSON D. B RUCE , J R . ceaselessly, to episodes in which innocent victims faced “artful” priests who, promising absolution and rewards to come, were lured to ruin through a false sense of security. Bourne also drew heavily on gender conventions from such stories. Describing her misery to Louise, Therese laments, “Had I then possessed the smallest particle of becoming feminine sensibility or of sound rational intellect, I must have glimpsed enough of my own foolishness, at least, to have guarded me against the direct assaults of unveiled iniquity” (157), a recognizable lament in the literary setting of the day. But Therese’s lament is rich in its implications in the context of Bourne’s novel, because it ties in, more specifically, with his larger case against the Church. Bourne continually seeks to demonstrate that the whole force of Catholicism is directed, methodically, toward blunting both “feminine sensibility” and “rational intellect.” The techniques for the former were harsh, because, for Bourne, women had natural tendencies toward purity and tenderness that had to be overcome. He made this point in his works on slavery, especially in his 1837 Slavery Illustrated in Its Effects on Women, as he detailed the anguish every female slave felt in the face of the institution’s endemic, aggressive sexual brutality; he made it in Lorette, as well. For his nuns, the training to accept that “vile association” between priests and nuns that Therese had bemoaned was part of a process of overcoming such tendencies, sexual exploitation leading to sexual corruption. No less critical, according to Bourne, were approaches to dealing with the unwanted offspring of corrupt liaisons. Although Bourne retailed, briefly, legends of Jesuits who murdered their own children (much as he told about slaveholders who willingly sold theirs), he spent far less time with that hoary anti-Catholic motif than he did with condemning what he described as the near instantaneous separation of mother from infant - much as both Therese and Louise had themselves experienced. The effect, Bourne wrote, was to destroy “all their tender sensibilities,” creating a “callous” character all the more willing to participate in the convent’s vile system of “female seduction and ruin” (163). Such an argument would have had great potential within the framework of antebellum American gender ideals, which celebrated maternal instincts. This was, after all, a world that accorded best-seller status to John S.C. Abbott’s The Mother at Home, the book that beat out Lorette on the 1833 list. Purposefully offering advice from a perspective “usually denominated evangelical” (5), Abbott urged that “no one else can possibly have the influence which a mother may possess,” asserting that “maternal affection is the most eloquent pleader” in the inculcation of good character and true piety (108). Bourne’s convent system was aimed at destroying both, and destroying their effects, as well. Lorette: Anti-Catholicism and Religious Freedom in Antebellum America 105 The destruction of a “sound rational intellect” was more complex. There was, at least in part, what Bourne portrayed as the unrelieved tedium of convent life, with its deadening force. Just as crucial, however, was the power of imagery to seduce the mind, even as “priestcraft” destroyed virtue. Capturing a more generally held antebellum fear of the deceptive power of appearances (Halttunen 37-39), Bourne argued that young people were especially vulnerable to such powers: “Youth merely glance at the surface, and all appears robed in the very witchery of delight,” Louise says. The “conventual system,” as she sees it, “involves a species of infatuation bordering on lunacy, unless it is more appropriately transferred to vice” (127). Louise, it may be recalled, signals her escape from that system by ridding herself of the crucifix, mass-book, images, beads, rosary, and holy water that Diganu and Chretien, helpfully they believed, had provided for her room. She had even earlier marked her emancipation from error, as she later tells Therese, when she “secretly rejected the adoration of images” even as she appeared to join in the rites of the Church (183). Getting rid of “idolatrous trash” is, she urges, an essential first step toward receiving the “evangelical substitute” for what she describes as the “monstrous absurdities” of the Catholic faith (187, 180, 181). What, then, did Bourne offer as that “substitute”? As the story of Louise’s psychological escape and Therese’s conversion makes clear, what Bourne offered was, above all, the Bible. It is impossible to overemphasize the Bible’s significant and recurring place, thematically, in Lorette. Again, Louise saw the Bible as the ground of her own faith; her knowledge of the Scriptures gave her the strength to resist the priests’ efforts at seduction. It was the chief vehicle whereby Therese came to “evangelically” repent of her sins. Bourne also made much of what he portrayed as Catholicism’s priestly control over access to the Bible, its denial, as he saw it, to the laity. Early in Louise’s life, the older Marguerite, seeking to protect the young woman from corruption, had urged her to read the Bible, but had stressed that it must be done in secret. As a young woman herself, Marguerite had been discovered with a Testament, causing an uproar. Priests and nuns had raged against her, confiscating the offending book. Louise, during her exile, must similarly resort to secrecy. Therese, of course, has never read the Bible for herself prior to Louise’s arrival. If, according to Bourne, the prohibition was, in part, the product of priestly self-protection, it was also, he claimed, part of more general efforts to create a certain kind of follower, one whose loyalty was given blindly to the Church rather than, as a result of knowledge and experience, to God. Louise refers constantly to Therese’s “ignorance” of Christianity, an ignorance which can be cured only by direct exposure to the Word of God 106 D ICKSON D. B RUCE , J R . driven by what Louise describes as “an inquiring mind” (170), a mind seeking religious truth, a “sensible” rather than a “superstitious” mind. Such Biblicism was common in the anti-Catholic literature of the day. Maria Monk, not surprisingly given Bourne’s influence, stressed the denial of the Bible to the nuns in her convent. The priests, she said, saw it “as a most dangerous book, and one which never ought to be in the hands of the common people” (56). Sarah J. Hale, soon to become, as editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, one of antebellum America’s most influential journalists, published an 1835 short story, “The Catholic Convert,” in which a young convent-raised woman tells her Protestant mentor that she had actually been taught that Bible-reading was a sin (76). The leading anti-Catholic Lyman Beecher - Harriet Beecher Stowe’s father - charged that, under Catholicism, “none may read the Bible but by permission of the priesthood, and no one be permitted to understand it and worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience” (Beecher 67). The charge was deeply rooted in the Protestant tradition out of which Bourne and other anti-Catholics came. It was also, of course, disingenuous. Bible reading was and had been urged on Catholics for centuries. As New York’s combative Bishop John Hughes pointed out in 1836, the Church itself had long sponsored translations of the Bible into many languages so that it might be accessible to the laity (Hughes and Breckinridge 222-25). Undoubtedly, what the charge did was to adapt - and to exaggerate - the Church’s assertion of its “teaching authority” in the interpretation of the Scriptures (Whealon 514), and to contrast that assertion with the Protestant Biblicism Bourne and others championed, the view that individuals could and should interpret the Bible for themselves, without any mediating authority. But this, in itself, was important to Bourne. In The Protestant, he had condemned “Popery” for refusing “the right of individual examination and private judgment, in the concerns of religion” (1: 91), a point consistent with his presentation in Lorette. It was a view that even provided links between his hostility to Catholicism and his opposition to slavery, where his language, even from his earliest writings, anticipated what he said in Lorette. He accused defenders of slavery of protecting their own interests by “handling the word of God deceitfully,” of basing their case on “a sophistical interpretation of the sacred volume” (Bourne, Book, 111, 186). In his Picture of Slavery, a work roughly contemporary with Lorette, he made the links especially clear when condemning the religious instruction Southern churches offered to slaves: “The preaching slavites have professed to open a sort of schools for the oral instruction of the coloured citizens. This incomparable theological tragic-comic farce is only matched by that Jesuitical imposture, a Popish Sunday school” (173). The slaves, he said, Lorette: Anti-Catholicism and Religious Freedom in Antebellum America 107 were taught to be good slaves, just as Catholic education taught children to be good “Popish” subjects, through a manipulative rendering of the Word and a denial of access to the real thing. The significance of such views for Bourne’s Biblical anti-Catholicism is made more fully intelligible by another comment from his first important antislavery work, “The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable”. “Revealed religion,” he wrote, “is predicated upon the natural equality, the individual responsibility, and the reciprocal duties of the human family, and the paramount claims of the most high God to the services, and the obedience of all his creatures“ (166). In many ways, Lorette is a gloss on these ideas, tailored to fit the specific needs of Bourne’s anti-Catholic case. Like the Bible, and underlying Bourne’s Biblicism, religious individualism and responsibility represent recurring themes in Lorette. So, too, do reciprocity and concern for an egalitarian religious community. Lorette shows, in its contrasts, the main contours of Bourne’s thinking on these issues. In demanding priestly authority, celebrating hierarchical infallibility, and, especially, in standing between the believer and God, the Church, as portrayed by Bourne, is exactly what an evangelical faith is not. At one point, Louise learns that, to Therese, sin is simply equated with offending the Church and its leaders, something quite distant from Louise’s own understanding of sin as disobedience to God. Louise, in response, tries to teach Therese that conscience, not submission to authority, is crucial to that “individual responsibility” upon which “revealed religion” is predicated. So, too, are reciprocity and equality, both of which Bourne represents as repeatedly violated in Catholic faith and practice. His emphasis on deception and manipulation as endemic to the Church is part of the story. “Reciprocal duties” demand honest dealings on both sides. Priests who, like all seducers, take advantage of those who offer respect and obedience, exemplify the failings of a church that, for Bourne, does not meet the evangelical standard. But hierarchy and the demand for submission, central to his portrayal of the Church, in themselves contradict the faith Bourne presents as ideal. The language of “family” is far from trivial here. The convent system, like slavery, is presented as the antithesis of family ties and family feeling. In an era that was increasingly celebrating domesticity and affection and even using the family unit as a rhetorical model for everything from the religious to the national community, Bourne’s presentation of a system in which affection and mutuality were systematically violated created links between social and religious ideals similar to - even drawing on - those related to gender. And, again, Bourne was not alone in creating such links. Sarah Hale, in “The Catholic Convert,” did so, too. One of the most important contributors to the development of antebellum ideals of domesticity, Hale had one of 108 D ICKSON D. B RUCE , J R . her characters reflect on the techniques of convent education by describing it as a system of force, urging, by contrast, that “to make men wiser, happier, and better, we must cultivate the benevolent and social affections. This can only be done by kindness and persuasion” (92). Here was an imperative that underlay much of Bourne’s writing in Lorette, embodied fully in Louise’s nurturing approach to her mother’s ultimate conversion and salvation. Though eschewing nativism, Bourne’s Lorette captured and dramatically summarized much of the anti-Catholic thought of the age, especially insofar as religious concerns were at issue - and Bourne’s novel helps to stress the extent to which they were. In addition to shared indictments of Catholicism’s purported denial of the Bible to all believers, everyone focused on what they saw as the Church’s hierarchy and authoritarianism and, as they saw it, its dismissal of individual rights of conscience in favor of priestly dictation and external theatrics. Even such radical nativists as Beecher and Samuel F.B. Morse, raising dire specters of foreign conspiracy and Catholic domination, drew on these ideas to portray the Catholic threat. But how are we to understand this thinking and its place in American ideas about religious freedom? To approach this question, it is necessary to place Lorette within a larger political and religious framework, one that helps to define further the issues on which Bourne’s anti-Catholicism appears to have been based. America was moving in a number of key, and interrelated directions during the period in which Bourne wrote his novel. In religion, an Arminian theology, with its stress on individual choice and freedom of the will, was coming to supplant the older Calvinist orthodoxy, undermining theological traditions of human depravity and predestination. A growing market economy, stressing individual responsibility as well as voluntarism and reciprocity in contractual obligations was coming to pervade every aspect of American life (Sellers). All found obvious echoes in Bourne’s religious ideals. Most significantly for issues of religious freedom, however, the 1830s represented an era of rapid political change that also related closely to Bourne’s concerns. It was a “democratizing” world, at least so far as white males were concerned (and, ideologically, for others, too, democratic ideals serving as a foundation for both emerging abolitionist and women’s rights movements). The years during which Lorette and other early anti-Catholic works appeared marked a highpoint in this process of democratization, signaled for many by the political triumph of Andrew Jackson, elected to the presidency in 1828 and reelected in 1832. His was, famously, the platform of the “common man” against “aristocratic” institutions, and it suffused politics throughout the era, celebrating equality, majoritarianism, and “common sense.” Jacksonian ideology was particularly dismissive of the kind of Lorette: Anti-Catholicism and Religious Freedom in Antebellum America 109 monopoly on authority Bourne’s priests repeatedly claimed. Bourne’s fellow anti-Catholic William Nevins - also writing in the early 1830s and turning yet again to the Bible question - put the issue in a way that also helps to highlight the democratic impulses behind Lorette: “If it be so hard to understand what God says, how was the divine Savior able to make himself understood by the common people who heard him? ” (14). Synthesizing Protestant tradition with Jacksonian predilections, Nevins and others were certain that common sense made Scripture accessible to anyone who had the “inquiring mind” to seek its truth. But, as historian Nathan Hatch has shown, political democratization was matched by a “democratization of American Christianity” during this period, and this process, too, had many dimensions. Giving greater power and influence to the laity over the clergy, even in doctrinal matters, it was a process that increasingly framed those perquisites of “revealed religion” Bourne cited in the language of popular democracy (9-10). Even Catholicism was touched by this trend. The American Church had been rocked by the development of the “trustee system” during the 1820s, a system that gave great autonomy to local congregations, including the right to appoint or to dismiss priests (Dolan 166-67). Denunciation of trusteeism by Pius VII in 1822 and the 1829 endorsement of the Pope’s actions by the First Provincial Council of American Bishops were widely viewed as confirming the Church’s “antidemocratic” character, and probably served as one stimulus to outbursts of anti-Catholicism over the next several years (Stokes and Pfeffer 217-18; Billington 38-39). It is in terms of such issues that one may begin to look more closely at the implications of such a work as Lorette for thinking about religious freedom and civil liberties in antebellum America. In this era of democratizing Christianity, religious ferment was also an important fact of life, providing a context not only for Lorette but also for an array of efforts to come to grips with the complexities of American religious circumstances. The religious ferment of the antebellum era had many sources, took many forms, and went well beyond the divisions between Protestants and Catholics that began to peak in the 1830s. Questions of religious freedom were themselves important, called to the fore, for example, by such events as the bitter and protracted debates over disestablishment it Massachusetts in 1833, the year of Lorette’s publication (Stokes and Pfeffer 77-78) or, only a short time before, by controversy over the Sunday mail question in 1829. This controversy grew out of a series of petitions to Congress from religious groups urging that post offices be closed on Sunday in observation of the Sabbath. In a widely circulated response, Kentucky Senator Richard Johnson, a staunch Jacksonian, opposed the petitioners’ demands as a potentially serious violation of American religious freedom. He refused 110 D ICKSON D. B RUCE , J R . to grant Congress the right to “a controlling power over the consciences of others,” which he believed any Sunday legislation would entail (275). Alluding to religious persecutions of past times - including the Inquisition - he condemned, especially, assaults on rights of conscience “under the pretext of holiness” (277). Here was a rhetoric that clearly anticipated Bourne’s, even if the issue was, on the surface, different. One of Johnson’s supporters, the radical Fanny Wright, looked still more directly toward Bourne when she referred to efforts to curtail Sunday mails as betraying “the whole soul of priestcraft” (in Stokes and Pfeffer 255). The emergence of anti-Catholicism also cohered with the growth of a movement that was, in its way, almost as potent, if its significance was shorter-lived. This was the movement against Freemasonry, which also achieved great strength during the late 1820s and early 1830s. Creating a literature of its own, and evoking some of the same fears of hierarchy, conspiracy, and even ritualism, anti-Masonry also linked the order to Catholicism - despite official papal opposition to it going back to the mid-eighteenth century (Davis 146-47; Stokes and Pfeffer 256). Lumping, as did one editorialist, “Masonry, Roman Catholic Faith, Monks, and the Inquisition” (in Bennett 49-50) as a united front against religious liberty, anti-Masonry achieved some political success in the early 1830s, even as the movement contributed to the larger pattern of anxiety about the health of religious freedom. But no less critical issues, and more general ones, were essentially definitional. Most serious was the explosion of denominationalism that had come to characterize religious life since the early years of the American republic. In this emerging denominational system, even relatively minor religious differences were inflated into matters of Christian integrity and purity of doctrine, serving as bases for conflict both within and between religious organizations, serving as bases for the formation of new religious bodies. The result was a religious environment marked by schism and competition, as different groups vied for popular support. There is no question that many people found religious diversity troubling. As the scholar Candy Gunther Brown has shown, the explosion of denominations was accompanied by an explosion in evangelical print culture - devotional literature, fiction, and other forms - intended to create a textual community that overcame denominational lines while defining the core of an evangelical identity (11-12, 18; see also Bennett 10-11). Brown omits anti-Catholic works from her study, but a novel such as Bourne’s certainly fits her model. In its stress on Scripture over doctrine it proffers a foundation for Christian belief that lies below the surface of denominational divisions. In those lengthy expositional sections where Louise seeks to acquaint Therese with the beauty and necessity of “evangelical repentance,” it adheres closely to the core evangelical tradition Brown has defined. Lorette: Anti-Catholicism and Religious Freedom in Antebellum America 111 Still, despite such efforts toward a common evangelical identity, rivalries and divisions remained and, in some places, led to fierce disputations and confrontations along doctrinal and denominational lines. Even within mainstream Protestantism, a residual Calvinism still tended to create powerful tensions within what had become a largely Arminian consensus (Conkin 250), and David Reynolds has documented a body of anti-Calvinist polemical fiction that actually shared motifs with the roughly contemporary but larger body of anti-Catholic works (175-76). Catholicism, as even its critics understood, occupied a special place in the complex interplay of similarity and difference created by antebellum religious diversity. Most obvious, of course, was the fact that it was both Christian and something other than Christian from the anti-Catholic point of view (Griffin 9-10). Sharing a common vocabulary and similar basic beliefs, Catholicism’s fundamentals could not be easily divorced from a largely Christian framework; hence, to many anti-Catholics, its power to deceive, in an environment where definitions of “true” Christian faith were already unclear and contested. This concern would have been especially meaningful to such an individual as Bourne, who had been involved in conflicts over what was truly “Christian” since the earliest days of his ministerial career. Having vociferously asserted the “unchristian” character of slaveholding religion for well over a decade, he could only have been powerfully affected by the substantial growth of a Catholicism that, from his perspective, appeared to share in some of the same “anti-Scriptural” and authoritarian features. One of the most common disclaimers on the part of anti-Catholic writers was the assertion that, to quote Lyman Beecher, they had no intention “that the civil and religious rights of the Catholics should be abridged or violated” (61). Their concern was, they said, focused on Catholic expansion at the expense of, as they saw it, Protestant rights. The disclaimer was, of course, disingenuous. Beecher was as hostile to what he defined as Catholicism’s authoritarian, “unscriptural” principles as anyone. But the disclaimer was also impossible - at least within the antebellum American context - and for reasons Lorette helps make clear. In Bourne’s novel, “Christianity” entailed more than a set of beliefs and practices. Instead, as Louise ultimately proves to Therese - and as she herself had learned from Marguerite - it was a way of believing, even, as Kwame Anthony Appiah has said of religion generally, an “alternative epistemology” (86-87) compared to its Catholic rival. And it was, as well, an epistemology to be thought about. Even as religious diversity forced people to look for a core of evangelical belief, even as the Catholic “threat” forced them to think about the meaning of Christianity as such, this was an era of mounting secularism. As Mark Hanley 112 D ICKSON D. B RUCE , J R . and others have shown, many Americans believed a religious perspective - a religious “epistemology” - to be under fire as science and commerce conspired to take the divine out of everyday life (7, 27). Bourne and his compatriots dramatized an approach to the world in which everything was to be pervaded by an individual experience of divine power and divine will. Their portrayals of Catholicism, emphasizing the role of ritual drama and the externals of faith, gave to the Church a kind of materialism of its own, and served as a powerful means for defining precisely what Christianity should be by placing a fairly well demarcated “spirituality” at the center of the religious life. And, again, Bourne and others went beyond simple matters of doctrine, or even structure, to portray a religious “way” that should represent the true Christian, religious experience. As their works show, Bourne and his colleagues had a real need to find an identity for themselves in the turbulent religious world of antebellum America, and it is not surprising that they should have reached for and found a “common enemy” that could serve as both a foil for defining “true” as opposed to “false” religion while creating a basis for unity among what they feared were otherwise too disparate groups. People have done this, seemingly, forever. But the distinct character of antebellum religion gave the effort a specific shape. For one thing, American Protestants were almost duty-bound to accept religious diversity, and of a fairly high order. Not only was denominationalism institutionalized, but, in its American incarnation at least, religious individualism suggested a right of, even an obligation to spiritual self-determination that clearly implied the acceptability of differences of religious opinion. And here, a deeper tension arose, because such an acceptance of diversity was at odds with the truth-claims at the heart of any religious system, including Bourne’s. In The Protestant, for example, he characterized the “distinguishing Protestant doctrines” as representing, “the only true interpretation” of the Bible (1: 38). Predicated on the possession of some kind of ultimate truth about the world, about the course of events, about the nature of human existence, religion raises difficult questions for its adherents, especially in a pluralistic religious setting. How much diversity, for example, can any religion tolerate before its claims to truth are compromised? How will it define those perspectives that move beyond the pale? How will it incorporate diverse “truths” into a single social order? Such questions would have been particularly pressing for people in antebellum America, where many, including the leading anti-Catholics, believed that freedom of religion did not, and should not mean discarding religious standards as bases for moral, social, and political judgments (Handy 37-38). As the influential nineteenth-century Unitarian William Ellery Channing argued, rejecting the imposition of a “national Christianity” did not Lorette: Anti-Catholicism and Religious Freedom in Antebellum America 113 mean rejecting the idea of America as a “Christian nation” (Hamburger 270). The tension such questions betray, the tension between truth and toleration, is complex and, perhaps, even impossible to resolve, especially when, as Appiah says, society is forced to deal with a variety of alternative and competing epistemologies, sacred and profane (86-87). Embracing the desirability of a Christian nation that was ideologically grounded in both community and autonomy, Bourne and his compatriots tried to find a resolution through a radical Biblicism and an experiential spirituality that appeared to allow lots of room for religious self-determination while doing so within what was understood to be a clear framework of revealed and historically-grounded truth. And they used what they represented as the dictatorial, externalized “way” of Catholicism to define more clearly what they meant. There are many ways of thinking about religious freedom. We have become accustomed to viewing it, as Philip Hamburger has pointed out, primarily in terms of the “separation of church and state,” a difficult idea and, as both Hamburger and Appiah have argued, an idea that creates problems of its own, evading rather than addressing the claims religion makes on its adherents and on society (Hamburger 486-89; Appiah 83). 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