1776: The Musical

Turner Classic Movies broadcast 1776 on Independence Day. I missed some of it on Saturday but I have seen it before. Of course I know we should always be careful of taking our history from dramatizations like this and we have to grant that they may or may not be attempting to depict history accurately, but this movie and the musical play on which it is based is very disappointing.

It's disappointing in part because the musical numbers are so dull compared to my favorite musicals. Then all the historical inaccuracies pile up--John Adams was not the irritating man he's depicted to be; Martha Jefferson never came to Philadelphia that summer; James Wilson was certainly not the non-entity his character wants to be, and Caesar Rodney was not an old man when the Continental Congress was meeting etc, etc.

The inaccuracy--through omission not commission at least--that irritated me the most was leaving Charles Carroll of Carrollton out among the signers at the end of the movie/play, which were I know only representative of all the signers. Since he was the only Catholic and the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, passing him over seems dramatically and historically foolish.

Turner Classic Movies did make up for this lackluster musical offering with Meredith Wilson's The Music Man later Saturday night. It has clever, rousing, poignant, and beautiful songs, including counterpoint numbers. Even though it's not about Independence Day, it is about brass bands, small-town America, and love. You know, of course, that Marian's song Goodnight, My Someone" is just "Seventy-six Trombones" in waltz time.

Catholic Liturgical Beauty and Anti-Catholicism

I've read this letter from John Adams to his wife, describing the Catholic (Tridentine Rite) Mass, in which he sums up the experience: "Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear, and imagination–everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant." The same sentiments were often expressed at the Court of St. James when Henrietta Maria or Catherine of Braganza's chaplains celebrated Mass--the Protestant onlookers were shocked by the incense, candles, music, art, and beauty in the service of the worship of God (evidently they had not read the Book of Revelation!). 

Oxford Movement converts were often chastised by their relatives and friends remaining on the Anglican side of the Tiber for falling for the beauty and sensuousness of Catholic worship. Gerard Manley Hopkins, for instance, responded to those charges by pointing out how simple the liturgies were in most Catholic churches. Low Mass would have been the norm, with far fewer "smells and bells". The Catholic rebuilding projects of the mid-to late-nineteenth century included great artistic structures by Hansom and Pugin but they also included small parish churches in simple buildings.

This attraction-repulsion pattern--outside viewers acknowledging the beauty and its attractiveness while expressing distaste and disgust for its sensual appeal--continued in nineteenth century America, as demonstrated in Ryan K. Smith's Gothic Arches, Latin Crosses: Anti-Catholicism and American Church Designs in the Nineteenth Century, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2006:

Crosses, candles, choir vestments, sanctuary flowers, and stained glass are common church features found in nearly all mainline denominations of American Christianity today. Most Protestant churchgoers would be surprised to learn, however, that at one time these elements were viewed with suspicion as foreign implements associated strictly with the Roman Catholic Church. Blending history with the study of material culture, Ryan K. Smith sheds light on the ironic convergence of anti-Catholicism and the Gothic Revival movement in nineteenth-century America.

Smith finds the source for both movements in the sudden rise of Roman Catholicism after 1820, when it began to grow from a tiny minority into the country's largest single religious body. Its growth triggered a corresponding rise in anti-Catholic activities, as activists representing every major Protestant denomination attacked "popery" through the pulpit, the press, and politics. At the same time, Catholic worship increasingly attracted young, genteel observers around the country. Its art and its tangible access to the sacred meshed well with the era's romanticism and market-based materialism.

Smith argues that these tensions led Protestant churches to break with tradition and adopt recognizably Latin art. He shows how architectural and artistic features became tools through which Protestants adapted to America's new commercialization while simultaneously defusing the potent Catholic "threat." The results presented a colorful new religious landscape, but they also illustrated the durability of traditional religious boundaries.

Smith quotes one Protestant minister's confusion: "Why do we abuse the papists, and then imitate them?" John Adams certainly did not want to imitate them--he was uncomfortable with either the Episcopalian or Presbyterian church service or meeting and much preferred Congregational or Independent services.

British and Colonial Anti-Popery

Reflecting on Guy Fawkes day in colonial America, author and politician Daniel Hannon makes these surprising comments in The Catholic Herald--surprising in that a culture that feared Catholicism (Papistry/Popery) as inimical to freedom and liberty yet realized that religious freedom was necessary and that Catholics must be able to practice their faith:

Guy Fawkes Night used to be popular in North America, especially in Massachusetts. We have excised that fact from our collective memory, as we have more generally the bellicose anti-Catholicism that powered the American Revolution. We tell ourselves that the argument was about “No taxation without representation” and, for some, it was. But while constitutional questions obsessed the pamphleteering classes whose words we read today, the masses were more exercised by the perceived threat of superstition and idolatry that had sparked their ancestors’ hegira across the Atlantic in the first place. They were horrified by the government’s decision, in 1774, to recognise the traditional rights of the Catholic Church in Quebec.

To many Nonconformists, it seemed that George III was sending the popish serpent after them into Eden. As the First Continental Congress put it in its resolutions: “The dominion of Canada is to be so extended that by their numbers daily swelling with Catholic emigrants from Europe, and by their devotion to Administration, so friendly to their religion, they might become formidable to us, and on occasion, be fit instruments in the hands of power, to reduce the ancient free Protestant Colonies to the same state of slavery with themselves.”

Puritans and Presbyterians saw Anglicanism, with its stately communions and surplices and altar rails, as more than half allied to Rome. There had been a furious reaction in the 1760s when the Archbishop of Canterbury sought to bring the colonists into the fold. Thomas Secker, who had been born a Dissenter, and had the heavy-handed zeal of a convert, had tried to set up an Anglican missionary church in, of all places, Cambridge, Massachusetts, capital of New England Congregationalism. He sought to strike down the Massachusetts Act, which allowed for Puritan missionary work among the Indians and, most unpopular of all, to create American bishops.

The ministry backed off, but trust was never recovered. As the great historian of religion in America, William Warren Sweet, put it: “Religious strife between the Church of England and the Dissenters furnished the mountain of combustible material for the great conflagration, while the dispute over stamp, tea and other taxes acted merely as the matches of ignition.”

John Adams is remembered today as a humane and decent man – which he was. We forget that he earnestly wondered: “Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion?” Thomas Jefferson’s stirring defences of liberty move us even now. Yet he was convinced that “in every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”

Americans had, as so often, distilled to greater potency a tendency that was present throughout the English-speaking world: an inchoate but strong conviction that Catholicism threatened freedom. Daniel Defoe talked of “a hundred thousand country fellows prepared to fight to the death against Popery, without knowing whether it be a man or a horse”. Anti-Catholicism was not principally doctrinal: few people were much interested in whether you believed in priestly celibacy or praying for the souls of the dead. Rather, it was geopolitical. . . .

And here’s the almost miraculous thing: they ended up creating a uniquely individualist culture that endured when religious practice waned. Adams and Jefferson led the first state in the world based on true religious freedom (as opposed to toleration). From a spasm of sectarianism came, paradoxically, pluralism. And, once it had come, it held on. “I never met an English Catholic who did not value, as much as any Protestant, the free institutions of his country,” wrote an astonished Tocqueville.

The title of Daniel Hannan's forthcoming book is Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World--I wonder how he will interpret the so-called Glorious Revolution? Will he acknowledge James II and the campaign for religious toleration and freedom of conscience or will he repeat the old canards about William and Mary invading to defeat tyranny?