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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   22376 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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I think English-speaking, unlike other European Catholic immigrants, and had an advantage by getting into power and clinging on to it in the face of organised opposition. See Tammany Hall. This meant an alliance between the clergy and the secular powers, to protect rights of the Irish against that opposition and broader anti-Catholicism in society (see Dagger John Hughes):

In 1844 anti-Catholic riots instigated by Nativist agitators threatened to spread to New York from Philadelphia, where two churches had been burned and twelve people had died. Hughes put armed guards at Catholic churches and, after learning a Nativist rally was scheduled to take place in New York, famously told the Nativist sympathizing mayor that "if a single Catholic Church were burned in New York, the city would become a second Moscow" – a reference to the Fire of Moscow. City leaders took him at his word, and the anti-Catholic faction was not allowed to conduct its rally.

There was also a heavy emphasis on integrating into mainstream American society, to show that you were 'as good as the rest of them' and that was easier for the Irish since they didn't stand out like the Italians, Poles, etc. The Germans had a lot of trouble due to the First World War and were forced to integrate, such force didn't have to be applied to the Irish:

Hughes held a "strong commitment to the cause of Irish freedom" but also felt that immigrants, particularly his fellow Irish immigrants, "should demonstrate their unswerving loyalty to their adopted land."

Scholars agree that flags became more common in American churches during World War I. German immigrant churches and pastors suffered humiliating incidents related to the flag, with pastors being forced to genuflect before the flag and kiss it by anti-German nativist crowds.

...Some pastors rejected overtures to display the flag. When Herman Hoeksma, minister of a Christian Reformed church in Holland, Michigan, refused to put the flag in the sanctuary during World War I, he was reviled as a pro-German traitor and a Communist. One newspaper suggested that Hoeksma should be deported or shot. Another Dutch Christian Reformed minister in Iowa was run out of town, and had his church burned by vigilantes, for declining to display the flag. (For more, see James Bratt’s Dutch Calvinism in Modern America.)

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