In A.D. 700, St. Boniface swung his axe against the pagan Thunder Oak. When the great tree fell, a young fir stood unharmed in its place — the first Christmas tree, a living sign that Christ had conquered the old gods of the North. More than a thousand years later, in 1775, General George Washington ordered a different pine raised as a battle standard. On it were the words “An Appeal to Heaven.”
Between those two trees sits the longest divorce in Christian history. It did not begin with a new creed. Rather, it began with a coin. I’ll explain below.
I was raised Evangelical. I trained, for a time, to be an Evangelical pastor. My wife and I came into the Catholic Church together at the Easter Vigil in 2000. I have spent the years since explaining Catholics to Evangelicals and Evangelicals to Catholics, because I have been both, and I know what each side thinks the other believes. Most of it is wrong. Some of it is not. The hard work is telling them apart.
What follows is that work. It is the story of how a real abuse became a permanent schism, how the schism crossed an ocean and poisoned a new republic, how the poison finally began to thin, and why the rest of this century will be decided by whether Catholics and Evangelicals stand together or go back to fighting each other.
Actual Doctrine was not the Abuse
The sale of indulgences was the spark. It was not the root.
Official doctrine on purgatory and indulgences was stricter than the Protestants remember. An indulgence remits the temporal punishment due to sin already forgiven. It does not remit the guilt. Guilt is removed by confession and absolution, or it is not removed at all. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 banned simony outright. Canon law treated the sale of spiritual goods as a grave sin. The Council of Trent, when it finally met in 1545, did not invent a new standard. It codified what the medieval Church had already taught and then failed to enforce.
The practice was another matter. By the early 1500s the Church was effectively selling remission of punishment for money. The jingle was real marketing: “as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.” The 1515 Jubilee indulgence that Luther protested was, in part, a fundraising scheme to rebuild St. Peter’s Basilica, with the proceeds split between Rome and the archbishop of Mainz, who needed the cash to pay off the loan he had taken to buy his office. That is simony financing simony. A man does not need a new religion to see that it stinks.
This is the part modern polemic always skips. Luther was not holding Rome to a standard he invented. He was holding the Church to her own. That is precisely why the critique landed. A heretic with a novel doctrine can be answered. A friar quoting the Church against the Church is harder to dismiss.
Under the abuse sat older rot. The papacy had spent most of the fourteenth century in Avignon. The Western Schism had given Christendom two popes, then three. Offices were bought. The printing press, which no previous heresy had enjoyed, meant a thesis nailed to a church door in Wittenberg could be in a prince’s study before the local bishop had finished his dinner. And the German princes were already tired of Roman drains on German coin. Luther’s theology — salvation by faith alone, Scripture over tradition, a priesthood of all believers — gave them a moral vocabulary for a political break they already wanted.
Doctrine, corruption, technology, nationalism: remove any one of them and 1517 is a local quarrel. Together they were a rupture — the perfect storm.
Two Reformers, One Church, Opposite Targets
St. Francis of Assisi was a reformer. Martin Luther was a reformer. That is where the similarity ends.
Francis attacked wealth and clerical luxury. He took a vow of poverty, begged for bread, and founded an order that owned nothing. He never touched the Creed. He never questioned the papacy. He wanted to imitate Christ, not renegotiate the means of salvation. The Church could absorb him, and did. The irony, which Franciscans have lived with for eight centuries, is that the order grew so fast it became wealthy within a hundred years. Renewal produces institutions. Institutions acquire property. Property invites the next reformer. That cycle is older than Luther.
Three centuries later, Luther attacked the doctrine itself: Faith alone and Scripture alone. The Mass as idolatry. The pope as Antichrist. Francis worked in the 1200s, when a new order could be folded into the life of the Church. Luther hit in 1517, when princes were hungry and the press was faster than any legate.
People sometimes ask me whether a more orthodox Luther might be known today as Saint Martin of Wittenberg. No. Even if he had stayed inside the lines on indulgences, his core claims were not a protest against abuse. They were a denial of the sacramental system and of the authority that guards it. The Church tolerated Francis because Francis never questioned her right to exist. Luther’s theology made reconciliation nearly impossible from the first pamphlet. Trent did clean the stables — indulgences, simony, clerical corruption, the education of priests. By then Luther was dead and the split was on the maps.
Antichrist, Babylon and a Clock
Luther’s identification of the pope as Antichrist was not a late insult. It was the end of his logic. If salvation is by faith alone and the sacramental system is a human invention, then the institution claiming to mediate salvation is not merely corrupt. It is opposed to God. The label followed the doctrine.
“Rome as Babylon” came out of Revelation 17, the “harlot on the beast.” Luther read the seven hills, the traffic in spiritual goods, the blood of saints, and wrote On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. This wasn’t just rhetoric. He believed the Last Days had begun and that the papacy was the final enemy before the return of Christ. I covered this in my book The Last Days.
He never set a date. In his lectures on Daniel he said that anyone who claims to know the day or the hour is a false prophet, and he mocked the astrologers who tried to calculate one. He did think the end was near in a general sense. He expected Christ within his lifetime or shortly after. A letter from 1532 hedged a guess of about a hundred years. A man who thinks the world is rotting and the clock is short does not wait for a council. He breaks.
That is not manipulation in the cynical sense. It is worse than cynicism. He believed it. “The pope is the Antichrist” is a sentence that ends a debate rather than starting one, and it gave ordinary Germans a cosmic permission slip that no treatise on justification could match. His eschatology was also pessimistic. He did not expect the world to improve. He expected it to get worse. Urgency, in that frame, is obedience.
The Jews, the Peasants, and the Turks
Luther’s early word to Christians about the Jews was unusually humane for his century. In 1523, That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew argued for kindness rather than force, partly because he thought mass conversion would precede the end. The Jews did not convert. Luther grew bitter. In 1543, he published On the Jews and Their Lies, calling for synagogues to be burned, Jewish homes destroyed, Jews to be beaten and rabbis expelled. Vom Schem Hamphoras is uglier still.
Call it what it was. The modern racial category did not exist yet. The Jew hatred did. Later men with swastikas quoted him, and they were not inventing the quotations. A Catholic with Jewish blood in the family, as I have, does not get to dismiss this. Elder brethren are elder brethren. A “reformer” who ends by demanding the torch does not get a pass because he started with a psalm.
The Peasants’ War of 1525 is the other stain. Luther had sympathized with peasant grievances. When Thomas Müntzer turned grievance into armed revolt, Luther wrote Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants and told the princes to crush them without mercy. Thousands died. This was not a betrayal of some German nationalism Luther never held. He was a German in the sense that he hated Roman drains on German money. He was not a nationalist. He feared anarchy more than he feared a prince. His loyalty was to order and to what he thought was the Gospel.
Set that next to his view of Islam and the hierarchy becomes clear. Luther called the pope the Antichrist. He called the Turk a scourge. His 1529 treatise, On War Against the Turk, told Christians to fight the Ottoman army and not to confuse that fight with a holy war. He even respected Muslim discipline — five prayers, the fast, a faith taken seriously — and held it up against a papacy he thought had gone soft. The pope was the theological enemy. The Turk was the political enemy. In Luther’s ranking, the Turk was the lesser of two evils. Read that again. Luther didn’t side with the Muslims, but he saw Islam as a far lesser thread than Catholicism.
Luther did not call for the persecution of Catholics. He wanted heretics answered with Scripture, and he opposed the execution of Anabaptists, which was radical for the time. The persecution of Catholics in German lands came from princes after the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, when each ruler chose the religion of his territory. The gospel, he said, should spread by persuasion. The state could handle the rest… but persuasion is not what the princes chose.
Calvin, Henry, and a Schism About a Son
Luther barely knew Calvin, as he was a generation younger. The Institutes appeared in 1536, a decade before Luther died. Luther’s recorded comment was a shrug: Calvin’s view of the Lord’s Supper was “a fantasy,” and he lumped him with Zwingli. Calvin, for his part, called Luther the greatest reformer since the apostles and built on his foundation. The respect ran one way.
Calvin’s cruelty toward religious dissenters was far more harsh than Luther’s. Michael Servetus denied the Trinity. Calvin had him arrested in Geneva in 1553. Calvin argued for the sword rather than the fire. The council burned him anyway. Geneva’s Protestant Consistory policed dancing, cards, and bright clothing. Adultery and blasphemy could mean death. Jacques Gruet was executed after anti-Calvinist placards. This was the sixteenth century. Catholic and Protestant courts alike burned heretics. Calvin applied, without flinching, a standard of his age.
Both men despised Henry VIII, and both were right about him.
Henry wrote a defense of the seven sacraments against Luther in 1521. The pope gave him the title Defender of the Faith, which the English crown still uses. Luther answered with Against Henry, King of England and called him a fool, a pig, and a bad Latinist. Calvin was colder and more technical. Henry broke with Rome for a dynasty, not a doctrine.
Catherine of Aragon had given him a daughter and no son. Henry decided the marriage was cursed because he had married his brother’s widow. The pope would not annul it. Catherine’s nephew, Charles V, had just sacked Rome. So Henry declared himself head of the Church of England, gave himself an annulment, married Anne Boleyn, and had Thomas Cranmer tidy the paperwork. The Act of Supremacy in 1534 made the break official. The Mass stayed. Transubstantiation stayed. Clerical celibacy stayed, until Henry was dead and the boy Edward’s regents tore the altars out.
That is the whole schism. A king wanted a divorce the pope would not give him. Theology arrived later, as window dressing.
Three Sovereigns, One Wrecked People
Edward VI was nine when he inherited the break, and fifteen when he died. His regents pushed the Book of Common Prayer, married clergy, and stripped images. Then Mary, Catherine’s daughter, reversed the lot. She restored the pope, married Philip of Spain, and burned some 280 Protestants, Cranmer among them. England still calls her Bloody Mary. The fires did not kill Protestantism. They baptized it. A movement that had been a royal project became a martyr’s cause.
Elizabeth inherited the throne in 1558 and built the famous settlement: Catholic structure, Protestant theology, herself at the top. Pius V excommunicated her in 1570. After that, loyalty to Rome was treason by legal definition.
Her cruelty was colder than her sister’s, which is why Catholics called her Bloody Bess, and it lasted longer. Mary burned people for belief. Elizabeth hanged them for loyalty and billed them for absence. Recusancy fines ran twelve pence a week for missing the Anglican service — about a laborer’s monthly wage, compounded across years until families broke. Priests caught saying Mass were hanged, drawn, and quartered. About 130 priests died that way under her, and laymen who hid them died with them. The Act of 1585 made it treason simply to be a Catholic priest in England. The Armada battle of 1588 turned every English Catholic into a suspected Spaniard.
The English penal laws that grew out of this were a siege against Catholics. After the Gunpowder Plot they hardened. By the 1690s a Catholic in England could not vote, hold office, own land freely, practice law, or send a child abroad for a Catholic education. The Act of Settlement in 1701 barred Catholics from the throne. Relief began in 1778. Catholic Emancipation came in 1829. A few disabilities remained — the ban on a Catholic chapel having a steeple and a bell — limped into the twentieth century. The ban on Catholics from the English crown remains in effect. Irish Catholics got the worst of it, and the worst of it is still visible in emigration, in partition, and in the long memory of the North.
Ordinary Englishmen watched their parish church change three times in a decade. Altars out, altars back, altars out again. A father at Mass, a son at the prayer book. That kind of whiplash does not heal in a generation. It sets the stage for an anti-Catholicism that would outlast the memory for why it existed in the first place.
Across the Pond
The English colonies imported the divorce.
Maryland was the exception. The Calverts, Catholic proprietors, founded it in 1634 as a refuge. The Toleration Act of 1649 guaranteed worship to all Trinitarian Christians, which was radical for the age and brief. After the Glorious Revolution, Protestant colonists overthrew the Catholic government in 1689. Maryland became a royal colony. Anglicanism was established. Catholics lost everything, including the right to vote.
Pennsylvania, under the Quaker Penn, left the door open for Catholics. Rhode Island, under Roger Williams, opened it wider. Massachusetts nailed it shut. A 1647 law made it a capital offense for a Jesuit to enter the colony. Pope’s Day, also called Guy Fawkes Day, every fifth of November, burned an effigy of the pope in Boston. The French and Indian War (Seven Years War) was preached as a war against Catholic France. The Quebec Act of 1774, which granted religious freedom to Catholics in Canada, was listed among the grievances that pushed the colonies toward independence. Read that again. A toleration, extended to Catholics, was treated as tyranny. That is how deep English anti-Catholicism went in colonial America.
Then the revolution forced a correction.
In 1774, as the colonists began organizing resistance to English rule, George Washington and John Adams attended a Catholic Mass at Old St. Mary’s in Philadelphia. They went as observers, and to show solidarity with Catholics who had been historically persecuted by the English crown. Adams was Congregationalist, and found the whole experience captivating. He wrote an elaborate letter to his wife describing it. Washington, an Anglican (Episcopalian), was well familiar with liturgical worship and ceremony. What was different for him was the Latin, iconography, statues, vestments, incense, tabernacle and rosary beads (the Oxford Movement had not yet happened). Washington returned to Old St. Mary’s nearly thirteen years later, during the Constitutional Convention to once again show solidarity with America’s Catholics.
Washington also banned Pope’s Day (Guy Fawkes Day) in the Continental Army in 1775. Benjamin Franklin was the principal American who forged the alliance with Catholic France in 1778, and the United States came to rely on Catholic France in its war with Protestant England. In 1779, Washington wrote to the Catholics of Canada and promised religious liberty if they joined the cause. Charles Carroll of Carrollton signed the Declaration of Independence, the only Catholic to do so. His cousin John Carroll became the first bishop of the American Church in 1789. Daniel Carroll helped draft the Constitution and pushed for the liberty clause. The First Amendment — no religious test for federal office, no established church — was partly an answer to the anti-Catholicism that had defined colonial English culture. New York repealed its anti-Catholic laws in 1806. By the 1820s most states had followed.
Thus, the American Revolution began (by necessity) the healing of the Catholic-Protestant divide. American anti-Catholicism was (and remains) stridently English in character. Separation from England, at the time, began the process of burying the hatchet. It was not a full repentance. It was a ceasefire. The ceasefire held at law and failed in the streets.
Know-Nothings, Knights, and a Pledge
The nineteenth century moved the fight from statute to riot. The Know-Nothings (The American Party) of the 1840s and 50s ran on anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic platforms. The Philadelphia Bible Riots of 1844 killed people because Catholic children would not read the King James Bible in a public school. Al Smith, in 1928, was the first Catholic nominated for president and lost in part because Protestant ministers warned that he would take orders from Rome. John F. Kennedy broke the barrier in 1960, and he had to stand in Houston and promise that his faith would not dictate policy. Think about that. A Protestant candidate has never had to make that speech. This set a new standard, primarily held in the Democratic Party, that the only good Catholic is a faithless one, meaning one who will not let is religion influence his decisions or character while in office. No other Christian was expected to do that. The standard remains in the Democratic Party to this very day.
Catholics answered by building a parallel country. Schools, hospitals, colleges — Notre Dame, Georgetown, Fordham — and ethnic parishes in Boston, Chicago, and New York. Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker, from 1933, joined the faith to the poor.
The Knights of Columbus were founded for a narrower reason and grew into a public defense. Father Michael McGivney, an Irish-American priest in New Haven, started them in 1882 because Catholic widows were being left with nothing. Catholic men could not get into the mainstream benefit societies. The Knights sold insurance and buried the dead. Then they fought. They took on the Blaine Amendments, those state bans on public money for religious schools that were written to cripple the parish school. They ran a Commission on Religious Prejudice and exposed the fabricated “Bogus Oath” the Klan circulated about them. In the 1920s they funded the Society of Sisters against Oregon’s compulsory public-school law, a Klan project aimed at Catholic education. The Supreme Court struck the law down unanimously in Pierce v. Society of Sisters in 1925. Parents, not the state, direct the education of their children.
In the Great War the Knights ran canteens and raised millions. A suspect immigrant fraternity came home as a patriotic one. That reputation helped Smith and, a generation later, Kennedy.
Francis Bellamy, a Baptist and a Christian socialist, wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892 for a Columbus Day school ceremony, and it had no God in it. In 1951, the Knights’ board began adding “under God” at their own meetings. They lobbied for three years. Eisenhower signed the change on Flag Day, June 14, 1954, and wrote them a thank-you. The words were a Cold War answer to a state that called itself godless. They were also a Catholic laymen’s answer to a republic that had spent a century doubting whether Catholics could say the pledge at all.
And they did not sit out the Cristero War. From 1926 the American Knights raised a million-dollar Mexican Fund — on the order of thirteen million today — for refugees, exiled priests, and seminarians, and they put some five million pamphlets into American hands. Supreme Knight James Flaherty led a delegation to Calvin Coolidge. About seventy Mexican Knights died. Nine of the martyrs were later canonized. Pius XI actually named the Order in his encyclical Iniquis Afflictisque. The Order did not field an army. It refused to be quiet. That is a layman’s vocation, and it is why I am a Fourth Degree Knight and proud of it.
They also lobbied Columbus Day into a federal holiday, which Roosevelt signed in 1937. A man can argue about the holiday. He cannot argue that the Knights helped make it happen.
Protestant Divisions, and a Truce
Twentieth-century Protestantism did not stay one thing. It became three, and the argument that matters for Catholics is the argument between two of them. In the early 20th century, Protestantism began taking a more liberal posture on many different things. Many Protestant denominations began accepting the possibility that Catholics might be Christians, but simultaneously they began accepting German higher criticism and the Darwinian theory of evolution. This resulted in blowback from more conservative elements of Protestantism, particularly Baptist and Presbyterian theologians in the United States.
Fundamentalism is the second group of Protestants who coalesced between 1910 and 1915 around The Fundamentals, a tract series paid for by the Stewart brothers, written against German higher criticism and Darwin. Just as the Fundamentalist movement began gaining real traction, the Scopes-Monkey Trial in 1925 humiliated it in the newspapers. It briefly became the laughingstock of America, and subsequently retreated into Bible colleges, the Sword of the Lord, and separation. The Independent Fundamental Churches of America, the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, Bob Jones, Dallas Seminary, Carl McIntire’s American Council of Christian Churches: these are the bunkers of Fundamentalism which promptly developed a bunker mentality.
Evangelicalism was the collective decision to come back out of the bunkers. The National Association of Evangelicals was founded in 1942. Christianity Today followed in 1956. Billy Graham, Carl Henry, and Harold Ockenga kept the Fundamentalist doctrinal core — inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth, the atonement, the empty tomb — and dropped the separatist edge of anti-Catholicism. Fuller, Wheaton, InterVarsity, Campus Crusade: that is the third group of Protestantism. The Southern Baptist Convention was Fundamentalist in temperment until the conservative resurgence, and is Evangelical in posture now. Today, it is the largest Evangelical body in the United States.
The Mainline — the old Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal establishments — took the third road and lost the crowd. From roughly thirty percent of Americans in the mid-1970s to about eleven percent now. They’ve become museums with steeples. America is a center-right society, and Christian Americans tend to make up the more conservative end. Moving to the religious-left was the poison pill that killed Mainline Protestantism. Members bolted, and many of them became Fundamentalists and Evangelicals.
Here is the line that actually divides Fundamentalists from Evangelicals on the Catholic question. It is not the Creed. Both can recite the ancient articles. It is whether a Catholic is a Christian.
The Fundamentalist answer is no. The Mass is idolatry. Mary is a rival. The pope is the Antichrist. Catholic neighborhoods are mission fields. Jack Chick’s tracts are the popular version of Luther’s Babylon book, four centuries downstream. This is literally the original Reformation polemic brought down to the 20th century.
The Evangelical answer, the one Billy Graham’s generation made normal, is yes, with an asterisk. They say Catholics are Christian brethren, who are wrong on secondary things — justification, authority, the sacraments. Graham would not bar them from his crusades. He invited them forward and let their own churches do the follow-up. The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) broader coalition had room for them. Fundamentalists broke with the NAE in 1942 in part over that.
Today, U.S. Protestantism can be divided into three main groups: Mainline at 28%, Evangelical at 57%, and (anti-Catholic) Fundamentalists at about 15%.
Evangelicals and Catholics Together, released in March 1994, put the Evangelical answer on paper. Charles Colson and Richard John Neuhaus drafted it. The sentence that carried the document was simple: Evangelicals and Catholics are brothers and sisters in Christ. J.I. Packer signed. Bill Bright signed. Pat Robertson signed. Mark Noll signed. On the Catholic side, Cardinal John O’Connor, Avery Dulles, Michael Novak. It was personal, not conciliar. No church adopted it. It refused to relitigate justification as the price of cooperation. The backlash was immediate, and it came from the Fundamentalists, which is how you know the split was real. Packer had to write “Why I Signed It.” He signed the later statements too, on salvation, Scripture, Mary, and religious liberty.
Why did Evangelicals let the old anti-Catholic polemic go? Because they changed jobs. The Evangelicals were originally Fundamentalists who wanted the culture, not the bunker. The Cold War put Rome and Wheaton on the same side of an atheist empire. The culture war after Roe put them in the same trench on abortion, school choice, and the family. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, urged on by Francis Schaeffer, was an alliance before it was a brand. Evangelicals are a movement, not a church. They have no magisterium to keep an old anti-Catholic anathema alive once the enemy changes. Fundamentalists kept the anathema because separation is their identity. Evangelicals dropped it because engagement is theirs.
Now, I’ll say the quiet part out loud. On the narrow question of the sixteenth-century polemic, the (anti-Catholic) Fundamentalists are the more consistent heirs of Luther, Calvin and Elizabeth. Consistency, however, is not the same as truth. Catholics are Christians. The Church says so. The Creed says so. The martyrs Elizabeth hanged said so with their necks. As a convert, from Evangelicalism to Catholicism, I do not owe the old Protestant polemic any courtesy, and a growing number of today’s Evangelicals are starting to feel the same way.
Where the Growth Actually is
The growth is not in the places that still argue about 1517.
Evangelicals, broadly counted, are the fastest growing of the three Protestant blocs, on the order of one and a third percent a year, toward something like six hundred million by mid-century. Pentecostals and Charismatics, overlapping that category, are the engine — near two percent a year. Catholics remain the largest single communion, about one point three billion, growing slowly, mostly by births in Africa and Latin America, toward about one and a half billion. The Orthodox grow slower still. The Mainline Protestant is the loser, both in America and in Europe.
In 1900, about eighty-two percent of Christians lived in Europe and North America. By 2020 that share was about a third. By 2050 the Global South will hold nearly four Christians in five. Sub-Saharan Africa alone is projected to hold close to two in five. Islam is growing faster than Christianity, on fertility more than on conversion. This is what political leftists, secularists and atheists get wrong. Christianity is not dying. It’s moving. What we are experiencing today is not a global apostasy. It’s a global migration.
In the United States the Christian share fell from seventy-eight percent in 2007 to about sixty-two, and has held there since 2019. Evangelicals are about twenty-three percent, down from twenty-six. Catholics about nineteen. Mainline about eleven, the steepest drop. The nones are about twenty-nine percent, and their rise has also paused. The loss is political as much as religious: liberals shed Christian identity by the tens of points, conservatives by a handful. What little Christian growth exists is nondenominational and Latino, not denominational and Anglo.
Canada is further down the same road. Christian affiliation has slipped under half in recent surveys, from more than three quarters at the turn of the century. About one Canadian in ten sits in a pew on an ordinary Sunday. There is a flicker among the young — Gen Z more open than the Millennials behind them, a few pastors reporting the first uptick in decades. A flicker is not a revival. It is a reason not to despair.
The future American Church looks less like Geneva or Canterbury and more like the Global South: more Hispanic, more immigrant, more Pentecostal, less institutional. The Reformation’s old flags matter least where the faith is actually growing. In Lagos and Manila the living argument is Christianity versus Islam, not Wittenberg versus Rome.
The New Anti-Catholicism
The old anti-Catholicism is not coming back in its institutionalized Protestant form. Pew’s thermometers have Catholics among the warmest Christian ratings in the country. The Know-Nothing sermons do not fill arenas. Protestant Fundamentalism is a dying breed.
Something else has taken its place.
One face is political. A Catholic who speaks as a Catholic about immigration, war, or the poor is told to stay in his lane — by politicians, by pundits, and often by Catholics whose first loyalty is a party. We have watched a president call a pope weak on crime. We have watched a Catholic vice president tell the Vatican to stick to morals. We have watched an eleven-million-dollar contract with Catholic Charities cut because the work opposed the policy. That is not Luther. It is the old American demand that the Church volunteer for silence. It’s the same demand the Democrats made of Kennedy, and still makes of all Catholics today, now transferred to the Republican Party.
Another face is violence. Church vandalism, arson, a Mass for schoolchildren fired on in Minneapolis, a man with incendiary devices removed from the steps of St. Matthew’s Cathedral before the Red Mass. The bishops have counted hundreds of attacks. Under the Democrat Biden Administration, an FBI memo floated “radical-traditionalist” Catholics as a domestic threat, and field offices were pointed at parishes. Call that what it is.
A third face is the old polemic, back in fashion on the edge of the new Christian right. Pastor Doug Wilson and his followers do not regard Catholics as Christians. They will take Catholic votes. They will not take Catholic doctrine. This is the Know-Nothing in a nicer suit. It’s not nearly big enough to make law, but it is a direct threat to the only alliance that can still move a vote.
The loudest contempt for Rome, in this decade, now comes from Catholics. I’m speaking of the Sedevacantists in particular. That is the part that should bother us more than Chick tracts. A man who treats the pope as the director of a foreign NGO has already accepted the premise of the penal laws: that Catholic loyalty is foreign loyalty. He has just aimed it at a pontificate he dislikes.
Why the Alliance is not Optional
Evangelicals and Catholics together are on the order of two Americans in five. The nones are near three in ten. The Mainline Protestants cannot carry a culture, nor do they seem to want to. Neither can we, alone.
Evangelicals have the energy and the conversions. They also have a short institutional memory and a habit of two-kingdoms retreat when the culture turns ugly. Catholics have the schools, the hospitals, the charities, the liturgy, and two thousand years of having seen empires come and go. We also have a talent for losing the evangelistic nerve that built those institutions. Energy without memory dissipates. Memory without energy becomes a museum. We need both.
The shared ground is not a sentiment. It is life, the family, religious liberty, a moral order that does not come from a court or a committee. That ground made Evangelicals and Catholics Together possible. It is what put parental rights into Pierce, conscience into the clinics, and a generation of voters into the same booth without requiring them to share a theory of the Eucharist.
It is also fragile. Foreign policy can break it, especially the status of the modern State of Israel and the wars of the Middle East. Immigration is breaking it in real time — bishops helping migrants, while Evangelicals are cheering the opposite policy. The theological questions of 1517 were never settled. They were set aside. Setting aside is not the same as resolving. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling a merger.
I do not want a merger. I want a durable social and political alliance that lets each side keep its own creed. Catholics do not have to become Baptists. Evangelicals do not have to become papal. Both have to stop handing elections to people who hate what both of us still believe about the unborn, the marital bed, and the right of a church to be a church.
Politics is downstream of religion. A people who forget that eventually lose both.
If we Ignore the Warning
If the alliance fails, do not expect an immediate persecution by legal statute. Expect a managed decline, the European kind.
Christian identification in the United States drifts from the low sixties toward something nearer forty by mid-century. The nones cross forty. The Mainline finishes its long exit and becomes a cultural society with good architecture. A sectarian Evangelical and Fundamentalist remnant keeps the lights on in parallel institutions and loses the public argument. Abortion law, religious exemptions, and the freedom of a school to be a school erode, because the coalition that defended them has split over a war or a pope or a meme. Catholic hospitals and parish schools do not vanish. They become what the Amish are now: admirable, intact, and politically weightless.
Christianity does not disappear in that future. It becomes what it was before Constantine, except with none of the apostolic fire and all of the bureaucracy. Too visible to be ignored. Too divided to matter. That is the worst of the options. A persecuted church can be holy. A church that is merely irrelevant becomes a hobby.
All of this clears the way for Islam. A secular society is not free of religion. It is a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. That’s true in physics, but it’s also true for humanity. Historically speaking, wherever Christianity retreats, Islam advances.
If we Heed it
If the alliance endures, do not expect the confessional state to return right away. Expect a Christian minority that remains a public voice.
The alliance holds on life, family, and liberty, so those laws stabilize at the state level instead of being nationalized by a court in either direction. Tax exemption and conscience protection survive, because the people who would repeal them cannot assemble a majority against a united Christian vote. Subsidiarity does actual work: families, parishes, towns, and small institutions rebuild what centralized management hollowed out. Parish schools and classical Evangelical academies grow. Mutual aid — the original Knights’ work — becomes a real alternative to a state that catechizes against the family.
The foreign-policy carve-out is honored, so the alliance is not murdered by a war neither side has to bless. The Republican Party is pushed, from inside, toward the middle-class it forgets whenever a donor class writes the platform. No theocracy. No two-kingdoms surrender. The Great Commission is applied to government, culture, and commerce, without a sheriff at the font.
This is Christian Patriotism. It is the American form of the Social Kingship of Christ under conditions of religious freedom: society ordered, as far as a republic allows, toward the common good, by persuasion and law, not by a rack. Vatican II’s declaration on religious freedom is not a surrender of that kingship. It is a refusal to counterfeit it with coercion. Christ is King whether the statute book says so or not. The work is to live as if that is true, in public, without pretending we can force the neighbor to agree.
I wrote Pine Tree Politics because I do not see another road. Unite on the domestic goods. Disagree honestly on foreign policy. Disciple the nation instead of hiding in the living room. Strengthen the family and the town against the capital and the monopoly. Reform a party from within rather than fantasize about a third one. Refuse both the secular pretense of neutrality and the crank’s dream of a purge.
Liberal neutrality is a lie. Every regime catechizes. The only question is whether we will have any say in the catechism.
The Pine Still Stands
Boniface did not found a political party. He cut down a tree that had been lied about, and a smaller tree was already growing in its shade. Washington did not found a church. He raised a flag and appealed to a judgment he did not control. The men who came after them — Carroll at the Declaration, McGivney in New Haven, Colson and Neuhaus in a conference room in 1994 — were doing the same work at different scales. They refused the divorce.
We are not the first Americans to notice that a distant power, whether a crown across the water or a class across the Potomac, will not save us. We appeal again. Not to a party as if it were a church. Not to a strongman as if he were a king. To Heaven, and then to the ordinary work: Mass, the sermon, the school, the council, the vote, the neighbor who is Evangelical and wrong about the Eucharist and right about the unborn child.
Protestant anti-Catholicism began because corrupt practices betrayed Catholic doctrine. It hardened because princes found the betrayal useful. It crossed the ocean because the English crown could not stop using it. The American Revolution was the first line in the sand — no more! — and Catholics were given breathing room to live. It can stop being a crippling handicap in this nation on the day Catholics and Evangelicals decide that a five-hundred-year divorce is not worth the life of a child, the integrity of a family, or the destiny of a republic.
The pine still stands. The only question left is whether we will answer it.
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Shane Schaetzel is an author of Catholic books and he is an Evangelical convert to the Catholic Church. His articles have been featured on LifeSiteNews, The Remnant Newspaper, Forward in Christ, and Catholic Online. You can read Shane’s books at ShaneSchaetzel.Com
