This is interesting. Could you tell me where I might find this article?
Sure.
renewamerica.com/columns/kellmeyer/050427
It’s written by Steve Kellmeyer. I felt that he brought a good deal of relevant historical information to the table. I don’t agree with some of his opinions on Protestants- for example, near the end it seems that he attempts to associate Protestants with every bad group of people he can think of- but he brings up some very good historical information and assesses it pretty well.
I remember an episode of Little House on the Prairie where Mrs. Olson is asked to read the bible. She has been disparaging another character for being illiterate. The Bible is not in English and it is pointed out to her that she is not illiterate because she cannot read a different language. I wonder how many might have been considered illiterate because they couldn’t read English?
I could see how that’s possible, but I can’t see that as a factor of great significance. It did get me thinking, though- in a very real way, literacy is relative to the standard imposed by whoever assesses a person’s literacy. For example:
By some measures of literacy, a person is called “literate” if they are able to sign their own name to a document. By other measures, though, you have to be able to read all the roadsigns you’ll ever see while driving or be able to read a newspaper reasonably well. It kind of depends on what is required of “literate people” at a particular place and time in history.
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the standard for bare-minimum literacy was quite a bit lower than it is today. In this particular situation, though, I feel that Protestants would have judged Catholics primarily in terms of their ability to read the Bible. For the average Protestant, daily reading of the Word started quite early. Even if a Protestant family was poor to lower-middle class and knew that their children would never handle anything at a higher reading level than the Bible, the parents would require the children to read it from the earliest age possible and- God willing- never look back. The end result was one where Catholic children were consistently less developed in overall reading ability from the earliest age possible, and in particular, in the area of what I’ll call Bible literacy.
I think it’s important for us to consider this in terms of what Protestants thought of Catholics and to view it primarily in terms what’s most relevant specifically to Protestantism and Catholicism. Protestants felt this way about Catholics for reasons having to do with things typical of Catholics that aren’t at all typical of Protestants, and as a result of this, it’s an issue primarily having to do with Protestants and Catholics. Class, education, and relative levels of poverty have, at best, supporting roles. One of the most noticeable differences between Protestants and Catholics at this time- particularly in the way parents raised children- was the practice of reading the Bible.
19th-century Protestants obviously felt that the Protestant way was much better than the Catholic way, and they didn’t stop at simply saying so. They would point out all the things that they felt resulted from this difference of opinion for the purpose of demonstrating that the Protestant way was better. It was not a simple matter of noticing a set of correlating factors that happened to be somewhat intriguing- it was an argument for one way of doing things against another. In his article, Steve Kellmeyer points out a number of reasons for why Catholics of that time period would have been bad at evangelizing and sharing their faith. For a great number of 19th-century Protestants, though, it boiled down to one thing: Bible literacy and the overall development of “religious intelligence” that results from it. Most Protestants felt that Catholics were making a very big mistake in deciding not to read the Bible, and they felt that the results were as follows: You wind up barely knowing what you believe, you certainly don’t know why you believe it, and you have to depend on others (ie., a priest) to tell you what to believe. Among Catholic children, I suppose this would have been seen as a failure to properly develop “Bible literacy.” Among Catholic adults, though, a typical Protestant parent may very well have felt that their pre-adolescent children were better equipped for serious Bible study than most Catholics their own age. This is obviously not a favorable comparison, but it seems to me that a lot of Protestants felt that it was dead on.
The short version looks like this: It wasn’t until the 19th century that Catholics started coming to America in large numbers, and as late as 1920, 75% of American Catholics were European immigrants. These immigrants were, on the whole, less well-endowed with education and money than their Protestant counterparts. This situation was exacerbated, however, by the fact that Protestants placed a great deal of importance on reading the Bible a lot and knowing it from cover to cover while Catholics, as a general rule, never read the Bible at all. In the past century or so, much has been done in rectifying the first inequity, but progress has been slower on the second. Along with the inter-generational opinions and biases that have survived to this point, the continuation of the Catholic tendency to avoid reading the Bible serves as an enduring relic of past differences between Protestants and Catholics, and this particular relic has always been featured as the main centerpiece in the belittlement of Catholics, particularly when it has to do with intelligence.
It seems to me that there is a lot of animosity between protestants and Catholics and it spills over in the way we interact.
Carlan