The anti-Islamic bigotry on this forum is reminiscent of some of the same looney anti-Catholic ideas which were prevalent in the years just before the Civil War. People used to talk about how Catholics were loyal to the Pope, how they were inherently subhuman, and how they were a grave threat to the future of the United States.
Irish Catholics in particular were singled out for harsh treatment even in (already Catholic) New Orleans. One historical character was purported to have explained the deaths of a dozen immigrant workers on his steamboat with the statement that he didn’t care, and he went on to state that: “if I had my ni***rs working there, I would have been out a lot of money, but my steamboat is insured, and I can pick up some more of the dumb Irish tomorrow for almost nothing”.
So, you had the know-nothing party, all sorts of anti-Catholic vigilance committees, and every third protestant preacher in North America predicting the death of Western civilization because of the Catholic influx. The reality? A couple of decades later, thousands of Catholics served honorably on both sides of the Civil War, the Catholic church does its part for reconstruction, Catholics go on to serve in government offices, loyal to the constitution, and 100 years after all the conspiracy theories we had a Catholic president, who exported an American Catholicism that helped win the cold war in places like Hungary and Poland.
The same types of people who spooked my third great grandparents about Catholics are alive today, raging about Islam (and hispanic immigrants too). These people have no faith in the power of America to better people’s lives, or to instill a sense of Americanism in newcomers, despite the fact that their people came from elsewhere too. In essence, they have no faith in America itself. They point the fingers at others as bad Americans, but the reality is in the mirror.
