I was thinking about the tenor of the European debate over immigration issues and how it differs from our own, and one thing I came up with is that it's more similar to an older American debate, focused on the first wave of Catholic immigrants, in which people were troubled by the notion that Catholicism (a religion with hierarchy and authority at its very core) might be incompatible with democracy. Unfortunately, I knew very little about that debate except for half-remembered snatches of Stephen Macedo's Diversity and Distrust. But Ross pointed to this gem from The Atlantic's archives, a 1927 exchange on Al Smith's presidential candidacy which takes this subject up at length in the second half of Smith's contribution.
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The Eurabia Analogy I've Been Looking For
10 Dec 2007 05:16 pm
Comments (48)
Yeah Matt, honor killings were a real problem back then.
I'll refer you to this recent story for your edification.
The dynamic in Britain is shaped by generational issues: it's the second- and third-generation where there's radicalisation.
Ultimately, while the arrival of Catholic immigrants in Britain wasn't nearly the same as the Know-Nothing era, there are continuities with current issues, in that the terraces of a city like Blackburn that are now majority south Asian (and in Blackburn's case, Muslim) were, in their day, home to the Irish and Italians (and to a lesser extent, Poles), who set up their churches and schools and social clubs and lived tight, urban lives. That's reflected in the map of the Catholic dioceses of England: Liverpool and Salford and Leeds.
Of course, the children and grandchildren of those immigrants now live in the suburbs, and there's a certain amount of nostalgia-fuelled resentment at the changing face (and faces) of the terraces. Not that they'd want to live there.
My sneaking suspicion is that there's a similar gut resistance towards Hispanic immigration* in the US, with its extended families, close communities, and grounding in manual work. There's a throwback quality to it that taps into an ideal either of immigrant ancestors or 'the American experience' before widespread suburbanization.
It's no surprise, I think, that Bill O'Reilly was raised in Levittown, the archetypal burb, and educated in the Catholic school and college system.
[*Let's be clear, here: the usual blogwhoring suspects don't rail against Irish visa-overstayers pulling pints.]
Exactly,
I remember those bombings by Catholic terrorists in the 1920. The killings of Catholic girls who dated out of their faith by their families.
The riots by catholic youth, car burnings, the whole thing is like a carbon copy of what happens these days.
It wasn't just that the Catholic Church seemed hostile to democracy: it most definitely was. The 19th century popes explicitly condemned democracy and religious tolerance as part of the heresy of modernism. They also condemned smallpox vaccinations and even railroads! Catholicism was a fiercely reactionary religion back in those days. True, there was real bigotry among the anti-Catholics in this country, but they were not imagining a problem.
Here I think Matt's rather conflating anti-immigration with anti-muslim sentiment - they overlap, but they're not identical; the current italian anti-immigrant panic, for example, is against the Rom (who do seem, compared to Jews, to have got very little positive PR out of being the subject of Nazi genocide). Still, the quotes from Al Smith and his critics are spot on, and it's also true that his commentators don't fuss about the Rom, leaping directly into explaining why muslims now are different from catholics then -
Exactly, I remember those bombings by Catholic terrorists in the 1920s. The killings of Catholic girls who dated out of their faith by their families. The riots by catholic youth, car burnings, the whole thing is like a carbon copy of what happens these days.
Well, the specific analogy Matt's making is between protestants taking snippets from papal decrees saying what a good thing it would be if all the world was catholic and refusing to grant any other faith rights inconsistent with that and the same process of overinterpretation taking place with muslims. The issue, that is, is not with extreme factions blowing up airplanes, it's with moderate factions being tagged with the taint of sharing totalising ideologies - "Well, they may say they're moderates, but they still want the Caliphate, just like Osama!" Yes, in the same sense that Catholics used to want Catholic supremacy.
Until Vatican II, fifty years ago, all good Catholics held beliefs that, if pressed to the limit, would yield Al-Qaida-like outcomes . In 1945, say, the Vatican believed (in addition to everything it believes now about gays and abortions) in ghettos for jews, intolerance in catholic states, and headgear for women. In Smith's time and in Smith's mind the conflict was muted because both sides of American politics accepted middle-of-the-road Christianity as essentially binding, whatever the constitution said, and the distinctions between the moral codes of each were pretty marginal; (civil) divorce, yes, abortion, no.
Why the difference, then, in terms of car bombs? In general, in Smith's time the theories weren't pressed to the limits, because in general people didn't actually believe with any intensity what they thought they believed. In part because there was a Vatican to react against. If there was a Caliphate anywhere that could speak with binding force we'd soon see it being marginalised by the forces of diversity; but there isn't, so that doesn't happen.
And if we're talking car bombs, some proportion of the deaths down to the provisional IRA have to be attached to its catholic exclusivity. If England had been holding down more than one catholic country the same bombs might indeed have been detonated in the name of catholic solidarity rather than Irish nationalism; they weren't, so it didn't.
I see the trolls are out in force. I would like to defend MY's "Eurabia" analogy, prefacing it by saying I am Catholic. His point is that the logic of the situations in similar; there were questions about whether or not Catholics could be integrated into progressive pluralism.
Similarly their sarcastic sneers suggesting an absence of Catholic terrorism are poorly-conceived. The IRA was a violent rejectionist movement, although I do not know off the top of my head their history of violence against civilians (and they were certainly nicer than Islamic terrorists are now). I think the Hitler's Pope crowd are poorly-informed, but while the Catholic hierarchy was opposed to fascism except when it wasn't (Slovakia, Croatia), EUropean fascism was closely intertwined with Catholic civilization of Europe with its siege mentality possibly encouraged by the Church. Slovakia, Croatia, Italy (the hissy-fits by the Popes on Italian unification were a reason to be suspicious of Catholicism. The fact that almost no baptized Catholics followed orders not to participate in the political life of new Italy is a reason not to have been worried about Catholicism), Belgium, Vichy France, Spain, Portugal, Austria. Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels were all Catholic by background. Irish neutrality. It would have been stupid for Catholic clerics to preach resistance, but the practice of the Catholic religion does not seem to have encouraged disaffection among Catholic soldiers who were attended to by Catholic clerics in the fascist armies. It's not that believers could have been used as a tool to fight against fascism. It's that many people who were Catholic for their entire lives were enthusiastic supporters of fascism, enabling its rise and rule. Fascism did work through the intimidation of the population but also relied on a measure of popular support which would not have materialized if the Catholic religion did not have a measningful coexistence with fascism. Many other Catholics of course did great and heroic work hiding Jews, fighting in the British, American (Joseph Kennedy's sympathies for the bad guys did not stop his sons from feats of heroism to the point of loss of life), Free French militaries and so forth.
As far as this coiuntry goes it is interesting and important to note that the clerics quoted by SMith are almost all Irish. THere were differences in late 19th early 20th American Catholicism between IRish clerics and German clerics, with the former as a class being more willing to distance themselves from ultraconservative Roman doctrine iirc. Catholic immigrants in America have been integrated with the gretest success (to a greater extent than is probably possible with Muslim immigrants) but the problems with which they were associated (simplisitcally) were not those of the Syllabus of Errors, mentioned repeatedly in Marshall's letter to Smith. It was with criminality, politics (I don't have the time to go into the whole thing in the ways in which late 19th early 20th century may have changed America drastically. It may not have changed America that much, but it should not still be tossed aside as an outrageous and dated assertion.) and to a certain extent language. It is fine for children to be taught that people came to American because they loved American English and the original understanding of the Constitution, but this should not be taken as being automatically correct.
Dale Light's "Rome and the New Republic" is probably the most comprehensive history of Catholicism in the early Republic. It's not exactly a zippy read, but his analysis of the early nineteenth century American Catholic Church does indicate that, at least at a clerical level, many American Catholics were indeed authoritarian and hostile to the enthusiastically democratic political culture of the antebellum US. Light leads you to believe that this was in part a reaction to the widespread hostility to Catholics.
I don't get the analogy. There's no Pope of Islam.
American progressives had good reason to distrust the Vatican -- they looked at cleric-ridden Quebec with understandable distaste.
Matt,
I think you need to study up on this subject.
What actually happened was two-fold:
- In response to American Protestant antipathy toward Vatican demands on American Catholics for political obedience, American Catholics moved significantly toward American Protestant norms. (By the early 1970s, say, Catholic schools were a lot like small town public schools in the 1950s.)
- Then the history was rewritten to make it sound like there had never been any rational reason for Protestant concerns about the Vatican's influence.
So, the Protestants got what they wanted on substance, and the Catholics got to be victims of irrational Protestant prejudice in the history books, and everybody is happy.
But don't try to apply the conventional wisdom about 19th Century American Catholics to current issues, because it's mostly flapdoodle.
Forty-seven years ago a Catholic candidate for president reassured us that he would not take orders from the Pope. Four years ago the bishops ordered Catholics not to vote for a Catholic candidate who would not take orders from the Pope.
The IRA!
The IRA at the height of its terrorism was a hardcore MARXIST movement. People are really so foockin' studip as the Irish would say...
and stupid too
"In response to American Protestant antipathy toward Vatican demands on American Catholics for political obedience, American Catholics moved significantly toward American Protestant norms. (By the early 1970s, say, Catholic schools were a lot like small town public schools in the 1950s.)"
Steve,
Isn't it more likely that American Catholics became more like American WASPs because of simple assimilation, just as Protestant and Orthodox Christian Americans did? Moreover, American Catholics, like Protestants from mainstream denominations like Episcopalians and Lutherans, also became more secular in their outlook and behavior during the 20th century. Therefore, even if we take anti-Papist claims at face value (that American Catholics obeyed their clergy without question and were inclined to place their loyalty to their religious leaders in the Vatican above their loyalty to the United States), the process of secularization wiped out any threat of a Papist conspiracy to undermine the constitutional order of the United States.
BTW, this secularization is why Catholic schools by the 1970s became like small town public schools in the 1950s. In addition, by the 1970s many urban Catholic schools, particularly those in the African-American inner cities, found that their old customer base of Catholic, mostly white, immigrants was disappearing, and unless there was a widespread Latin American immigrant presence in their immediate surroundings, there was nobody to replace the old customer base among the Catholic faithful. Therefore, Catholic schools also became less sectarian and more secular in order to attract African-American students, who were predominantly Protestant.
Finally, increased secularization was an inevitable result of decreased membership in Catholic religious orders, which supplied most of the teachers in Catholic schools well into the 1950s. During the 1960s, Catholic schools began hiring more lay people to serve as teachers, as the Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans, etc. began sending out less and less of their members to serve in these schools. By the 1970s, the faculty of most Catholic schools was no longer dominated by priests, nuns, and monks. Most teachers in Catholic grammar and high schools were lay people, and many were Protestant. Some were even (gasp!) Jewish. Some were even (heaven forbid) agnostics and atheists. I wouldn't doubt if today's Catholic schools have a sizable number of faculty members who are Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or even Wiccan.
Two points.
1- Pat Buchanan is a conservative catholic, though this doesn't seem to improve his feelings towards Mexicans.
2- The Ira split, before the beginning of the most violent period of its modern history (1970-) into the
Official IRA, which was Marxist, and the Provisional IRA, which was nationalist, catholic, and enjoyed the support of elements in the church. The Provos were far more successful and make up today's IRA (and sinn fein)
Yeah Matt, honor killings were a real problem back then.
I don't know about in the North, but in the South in the 20's if you had a daughter who was behaving badly in sexual ways, filicide was an option. This is just from conversations with my great-grandmother and her sisters, and they never said it like it was a bad thing. It wasn't de jure legal, but you weren't going to get arrested for it either.
While I understand that there have been major historical ramifications, as a non-believer I find it extremely difficult to understand just what the hell the difference between Catholics and Protestants really is. I thought that there was more variation within the Protestant movement than there was between P's and C's. Presumably years of avoiding the theological literature have left me ignorant regarding the pertinent details.
What seems to me a little funny about all this "honor killing" nonsense is that in the Western/Christian tradition it's generally been "understood" if a husband kills his sexually-misbehaving wife.
On the other hand, in the Islamic tradition, the tendency is more for a sexually-mishaving woman to be killed by her brother, or perhaps her father.
Now both these traditions have obviously varied sharply in degree over time and under different social-economic conditions. But offhand, I don't quite see why one is regarded as being "acceptable" while the other is uniquely barbaric.
On the other hand, in the Islamic tradition, the tendency is more for a sexually-mishaving woman to be killed by her brother, or perhaps her father.
Arranged marriage, it's like a customer service issue.
The Western/Christian tradition had it's own wierd wrinkle, until fairly recently if your daughter was raped before she was married you exterminated her so she wouldn't have to "live with the shame".
Ed Marshall:
Yes, "customer service" indeed---I'd had the exact same thought!
I actually missed a gear in stupid when I read what Robertson said. My reaction won't make any sense because killing the kids would have to be a sectartian phenomenom to scare him and make him post links.
Filicide based on dishonor (which almost always means killing a daughter for violating sexual norms defined by the family) exists completely outside religious boundaries. If you are within a geographical area (or came from such an area)that allows behavior like that, every religion in the area will show the same thing. It's just backwardsism, and it has nothing to do with anyones confessional beliefs.
>until fairly recently if your daughter was raped before she was married you exterminated her so she wouldn't have to "live with the shame".
That was the plot of "The Searchers." So the practice was at least respectable until the '50s...
"But offhand, I don't quite see why one is regarded as being "acceptable" while the other is uniquely barbaric."
There's a straw man argument: since when has it been "acceptable" in the U.S. (or the West in general) to kill a woman for having sex with the wrong man? You do that in this country, and you go to jail. You do that in Saudi Arabia or Gaza and you don't even get prosecuted.
It really is amazing how the adolescent reflex of lefties to make America the butt of invidious comparisons to every sordid group in the world makes you apologists even for such a benighted faith as radical Islam. American Christian Evangelicals who spend their summers helping the destitute in Africa are anathema to you, but if some unshaven rag-head in Arabia strangles his daughter to death because she was raped, well, "hey, that's not so barbaric now, is it?". Pathetic.
Grow up, Harry.
Actually, I don't think we should encourage that hair to grow any longer.
To follow Matt's analogy, clearly the Europeans need to severely restrict Islamic immigration now, the same way that the US placed severe restrictions on Catholic immigration in the 1920s and 30s. It was only when immigration was stopped that assimilation really began.
"The Western/Christian tradition had it's own wierd wrinkle, until fairly recently if your daughter was raped before she was married you exterminated her so she wouldn't have to "live with the shame"."
Uh, when exactly was this a "tradition"? The common practice when abortion was illegal was for the daughter to be sent away to "school" where she would go through her pregnancy and then give the baby up for adoption before returning home.
We're talking about the difference of a couple decades here.
After the 60's. of course, anything went. Before that you had the 50's, where it didn't. And before that you had the 40's. 30's, 20's, etc.
Two lousy decades can make a difference in cultural attitudes.
Like "age of consent". Everybody assumes it was always 18. Got news for you - it's 14 in Hawaii, 15 in several states, 16 in others, 17 in others, and 18 in others. The Fed treat it as 18. But as Playboy pointed out once, most of the 16-year-old pregnant girls back in the 20's were married to guys older than 20.
So what does "age of consent" mean, really? Nothing. It's a fiction used to put some people in jail when the parents of their girl friends (or boy friends in the case of, say, Art Bell) don't like them. It's a control mechanism, nothing more.
How old is Hayden Panettiere's boyfriend, Stephen Coletti? He was born in 1986. Do the math. Anybody think that he isn't porking Hayden, who's 17? Illegal in the state of California. Does anybody care?
I would like to know exactly how many honor killings are committed annually by Muslims in the West. And how many western-equivalent crimes, crime passionnel and just garden variety domestic abuse murders. Do the rates go up or down for each category? How fast?
Then we will have something to compare. Without relevant statistics this is nothing but bigotry.
"So what does "age of consent" mean, really? Nothing."
Is this a hint as to why you are an ex-convict?
Honro killings were not unknown in the early 20th Century US:
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071110/METRO/711100379&imw=Y
"Without relevant statistics this is nothing but bigotry."
Condemning honor killings is bigotry? There has to be a point beyond which your moral relativism makes you feel stupid.
Condemning honor killings may not be bigotry, though seems like a rather pointless and slightly hypocritical (considering the level of domestic violence in the US native population) exercise.
Condemning a large group of people identified as 'Muslim immigrants' because of these alleged honor killings, while having no idea whether any significant number (if any) of these killings have ever been committed - that would be bigotry. A variant of the blood libel, I'd say.
Folks seem oblivious to the comment above about the 19th century catholic church: it really did oppose democracy as contrary to the divine right of kings. Christian Democratic parties were formed later by people who claimed that it was possible to vote and be a good Catholic. Times do change, but there is such a thing as history, and it's useful to know some of it.
Here's a link to the a description of the anti-Irish riots in Philadelphia. At one point, the rioters bring in cannons.
http://www.irish-society.org/Hedgemaster%20Archives/philadelphia.htm
Marc,
Do you have any evidence that this is true? I find that claim dubious at best, considering Catholic France was one of the first democracies in Europe.
It seems that many don't really understand the history of the Irish uprising. I don't know why one would view a bombing in Northern Ireland as a religious act, or think that the Catholic Church had views similar to Al-Queda until 1945. That is completely false.
There's a straw man argument: since when has it been "acceptable" in the U.S. (or the West in general) to kill a woman for having sex with the wrong man?
A negro having sex with a white woman (or suspected of having sex) would be hanged and\or burned while the townsfolk - men, women and children - looked on, cheered and took photos. If the woman was a willing participant she was flogged. It was perfectly acceptable behavior.
Yeah Matt, honor killings were a real problem back then.
Nobody does honor killings wth quite as much verve as the catholic immigrants frm Sicily did.
Back to the original post and some observations on Catholicism in the 19th century --
(1) Major literary figures (Lowell and Hawthorne) had children who converted to Catholicism -- in fact Rose Hawthorne is venerated as a saint among some non-marginal Catholic groups. Related to the fact that upper class Protestants not infrequently chose to have their children educated in Catholic schools.
(2) The No-Nothings had very little to say about the quite legitimate criticisms of Catholic illiberalism cited above but remained focused on bigotry and stereotypes, in the case of blaming Catholics for cholera not dissimilar to some of the crap inflicted on homosexuals in our own age.
(3) Catholic cultural centers in Europe (Italy, France, Spain, Southern Germany -- remember the completion of Cologne Cathedral) exercised an influence on American intellectual and cultural life, particularly among the elite, quite unlike anything Islam does today. Romanticism had a great deal to do with this. But then its influence was far stronger at Harvard than among backwoods preachers.
All this said, Mr. Yglesias' original point is certainly an interesting one, and worth discussion better than some of the observations in the thread above.
Well, I'm hardly a specialist in this corner of sociology, but I'd suspect that the crucial factor regarding the type of honor-killing in a society isn't so much religion as whether the social structure is based more upon the family/clan or the nuclear family.
In the former case, brothers or fathers kill "bad" women, while in the later case it's generally the husbands. This would certainly seem to fit with the evidence from Sicily and the Mid East, as well as from e.g. England or Latin America, where (I think) angry husbands are usually the killers.
It would be useful to take a look at those Islamic societies in which clans/families are weakest and see if the pattern holds. And I'll bet that all those Christian clans of Lebanon are really big on "honor killings."
"Folks seem oblivious to the comment above about the 19th century catholic church: it really did oppose democracy as contrary to the divine right of kings. Christian Democratic parties were formed later by people who claimed that it was possible to vote and be a good Catholic. Times do change, but there is such a thing as history, and it's useful to know some of it."
Marc,
To be more precise, it was the Vatican that was in opposition to democracy during the 19th century. However, the Catholic laity weren't necessarily in agreement with this, and as Freddicmac points out, Catholic France was one of the 1st democracies in Europe.
Contrary to the beliefs of both the Vatican and anti-Papists, lay Catholics throughout the world do not mindlessly follow every dictate that comes from the Bishop of Rome. This was true of lay Catholics even in the 19th century. It's amazing how those who preach about knowing history forgot this pertinent fact; the Enlightenment was not an exclusively Protestant phenomenom.
"A variant of the blood libel, I'd say."
The blood libel was the claim that Jews used the blood of Christian children to make matzoh. Since, of course, Jews never did this, your comparison is spurious.
Fred, that's my point exactly. Do you know that Muslim immigrants in the US and Europe do honor killings? Do you have the numbers? Without the stats it's just pure fear-mongering, like with the blood libel.
Do you have any evidence that this is true? I find that claim dubious at best, considering Catholic France was one of the first democracies in Europe.
Actually, revolutionary France was officially atheist and actively suppressed the Catholic church--later the Emperor Napoleon I reached an agreement with the Pope and restored Catholicism.
I'm not going to provide links for this--it's high school history, for crying out loud.
Re: There's a straw man argument: since when has it been "acceptable" in the U.S. (or the West in general) to kill a woman for having sex with the wrong man?
Never acceptable in the legal sense (unless you go all the way back to the early years of the Roman Republic when the paterfamilias had the power to order the execution of any family member). But until fairly recently a husband who killed an adulterous wife, especially if she was caught in act, might well escape with a slap on the wrist. This only applied to husbands and wives though: no such leniency ever applied to fathers and brothers, nor was the murder of an unmarried female caught in flagrante ever tolerated.
Re: Everybody assumes it was always 18.
Huh? Most of us when we are teenagers knew exactly what the local age of consent was, much as we knew how old you have to be to drive and buy booze. Do a lot of people forget it when they grow older?
Re: it really did oppose democracy as contrary to the divine right of kings.
I don't think that's quite right. The Catholic Church never really defended monarchy as such: it was perfectly happy with oligarchic republics like Renaissance Florence. It disapproved of democracy to be sure, but not of republics run by the "better" sort of people. Indeed, kings gave the Church a lot of trouble and in the Middle Ages the Church actually encouraged municipal republicanism in Italy and Germany to limit the power of the Holy Roman Emperor.
Re: Catholic France was one of the 1st democracies in Europe.
The French Revolution was ferociously hostile to the Church and in its Jacobin phase it made a serious attempt to completely suppress Christianity in favor of either Deism or a "Cult of Reason".
"The French Revolution was ferociously hostile to the Church and in its Jacobin phase it made a serious attempt to completely suppress Christianity in favor of either Deism or a "Cult of Reason".
JonF,
The French Revolution's hostility to the Church was primarily anti-clerical; it was hostile to the Catholic cardinals and bishops who tended to sympathize with the monarchists. Before the Jacobin phase then, the Revolution's efforts against the Church then were aimed at breaking the institutional power of the Church, not at suppressing the faith of the laity (after many of the revolutionaries still identified themselves as Catholics).
Note that the Jacobins' efforts to suppress Christianity (in all of its varieties, not just Catholic) in France failed; France remained a Catholic country during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Moreover, the people of France remained predominantly Catholic even as their forms of government changed throughout this period (from Empire to constitional monarchy to republic to empire to republic).
Comments closed December 24, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
That debate is still going on. Why do you think so many Americans are so up in arms over immigration? Don't you think the great Catholic masses from Latin America have a part in this whole "not assimilating into our culture" banter? I think even Pat Buchanan has said as much. Well, that and they're brown.
Posted by freddiemac | December 10, 2007 5:39 PM