This short, wide-ranging, and expertly argued book considers the prevalence of anti-Catholicism in American history between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Maura Farrelly’s thesis is that there is an intertwined relationship between anti-Catholicism and the concept of freedom in America’s past. To study ‘no popery’, therefore, is to learn as much about national identity and intellectual history as it is about that specific prejudice. The Catholic Church ‘was at all times seen as antithetical to freedom’ (p. xii), whether as a threat to democracy and free government, individual salvation, or personal liberty. Farrelly traces how as concepts of freedom changed in American history so too did the presentation of the Roman Church as the great ‘other’ against which that freedom was defined in a particular context. This flexibility was the key to the survival of anti-Catholicism as a defining ideology of American identities. Anti-Catholicism declined in the twentieth century because the concept of freedom presented by the post-Vatican II church was more closely related to that prevalent in modern America: as such, the Catholic Church was no longer conceived as anathema to American notions of liberty.

The first three chapters consider the development of anti-Catholicism in British Colonial America. Chapter one shows anti-Catholicism to have been an import which permitted colonists to preserve a sense of English/British identity in the first two centuries of American history. European and British precedents—the Reformation, intra-Protestant debates, seventeenth century British politics—are covered with admirable clarity. Farrelly argues that the two antagonists of British Protestantism—described as ‘Calvinist’ and ‘Anglican’—were united by anti-Catholicism, which forged common Protestant/English identities. Work by Peter Lake, Anthony Milton, and others on the roles which anti-Catholicism played in contesting those common identities might have been considered here to complicate that picture.

In Chapter two, Farrelly notes that although anti-Catholicism was a pervasive ideology in the seventeenth century, it was a limited one. The Catholic Church thrived in Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania, and benefitted from formal toleration. This ended in the 1690s as ‘Protestant’ and ‘English’ identities were re-asserted with vigour following the 1688 Revolution, and ‘popery’ was re-imagined as a threat to both. In Chapter three—which considers the 1776 Revolution—Farrelly shows that anti-Catholicism in America became somewhat distinct from its British heritage. Fear of the Catholic Church featured prominently in revolutionary rhetoric and anti-Catholicism helped define concepts of freedom and liberty which drove that revolution. George III’s granting toleration to Catholics in Quebec (1774) raised the issue of whether a king had the right to grant liberty which was a gift from God. The British crown presumed to control what was outside the proper remit of the state: a ‘popish’ act of tyranny.

Chapters four, five, and six outline the history of anti-Catholicism in the New Republic up to the start of the Civil War. Chapter four charts a decline in anti-Catholic sentiment during the early years of the Republic because Protestants in America demonstrated a commitment to the principles of religious liberty as an ‘unalienable right’ presented in the Declaration of Independence. A detailed consideration of Protestant–Catholic relations in Boston underscores this argument in a neat manner. The Catholic Church grew in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but this did not eradicate entrenched stereotypes. Asserting that the rightness or wrongness of a belief was not a political matter and that the government should therefore have no role in permitting or prohibiting religion was not the same as stating that Catholics were not dangerous, and did little to undermine the centuries-old prejudices which remained dormant in American society and defined how they were understood and treated by Protestants.

Consequently, anti-Catholicism re-surfaced with vigour in the period 1820–1850 in response to substantial Catholic immigration from Ireland and Germany which, as chapter five shows, led to Catholics being presented as un-American and a threat to the health of the nation. The role of xenophobia and the emergence of popular evangelism which Farrelly considers as the significant factors in this resurgent anti-Catholicism have been noted as equally significant by scholars of the nineteenth century working on other regions (John Wolffe, Donald MacRaild): considering whether American developments were part of wider trans-Atlantic trends—or distinct from them—would have proven useful here to ground the analysis in a wider context.

Chapter six continues the discussion of the growth of anti-Catholicism in the mid-nineteenth century. Here Farrelly shows how a range of issues—the views of the Catholic Church on slavery, the war with Mexico (1846–1848), and a stereotypical presentation of Catholicism as a brake on progress—conspired to present the Roman faith as anti-America. The Nativist movement suggested that immigrants born in the old world were incapable of sharing the values which native-born Americans had held since the revolution, and presented immigration as a corrupting influence on America. Various missionary groups and political associations like the nativist Know Nothing party utilised anti-Catholicism as part of their platform. Although vocal and vociferous, these various anti-Catholic groups never gelled into a unified movement, and the force of anti-Catholicism was blunted by both the emergence of the Civil War and the growing influence of the immigrants themselves.

Farrelly covers a great deal of ground in a concise manner, and her book will be useful for both students and scholars. Some readers will question the points of contact made between past and present (particularly in discussions about the equivalences between historical anti-Catholicism and contemporary Islamophobia); others may question whether the notion of freedom is consistent enough throughout to be feasibly presented as the factor tying together anti-Catholicism across the centuries; and others still will wish that Farrelly had integrated her study into the growing body of scholarship presenting anti-Catholicism as a transnational as much as a national phenomenon. This is a provocative book, however, and one which urges us to consider a neglected topic seriously. ‘Bigotry can be highly complex’ Farrelly warns us (p. xiii): her study underscores that this is certainly the case with anti-Catholicism.