The same basically goes for all people in American Protestant culture. So much of the shock over the Vatican’s positions, from USians of all political backgrounds, comes from the fact that an imagined version of the Church has been a tool of US political discourse for centuries.

April 10, 2026 - 22:26 UTC

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There’s an enormous literature on this if you are interested in it. The fact that the Church is an ancient transnational organization that also had temporal power until fairly recently is important, but it’s also been a key foil for American political identity formation since the colonial period!
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"monarchy in every instance is the popery of government."
-Thomas Paine, Common Sense
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And the church in the 19th and 20th centuries was a big foe of socialist secular government. They wrote papal bulls about it and helped to fund Action Francais up until the 1920s, for instance. (It was really complicated. Rerum Novarum was pro labor and anti socialist at the same time, for example.)
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You can and should teach this in your US history surveys! Both halves! Anti-Catholicism is an important part of US history *especially* if you’re talking about the late 20th c evangelical/Catholic alliance over abortion.
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