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Religions have always been a huge part in history. It is ironic how most religions teaches peace, good morals, salvation,etc… yet so much blood had shed over religious conflicts throughout history. At the beginning of this chapter Emmons wrote, “Nations had a distinct cultural identity; they did not create that identity but were created by it (Emmons 2)” This was as true to England/Britain as it was America who’s once a colony of Britain. Britain defined themselves as Protestants. Yet, Emmons argued that what really held Britain together was not Protestantism but the abiding hatred of Catholicism (Emmons 3). At some point the Irish and Catholic became one and thus received the tremendously amount of hatred and discrimination for it.
The Irish also received the similar hatred across the ocean in America, who’s inherited Protestant ideology from Britain. Early America had little tolerance for Catholics, but they are the “necessary evils” because America need more labor to build it new nation. An interesting parallel that Viktoriya Shalunova said on her blog about how Native Americans were discriminated against yet used by Americans for their knowledge of the land and nature.
Protestant Americans to believe that Republicanism and Catholicism could not coexist. “Many Americans saw the Catholic Church in the same way they saw chattel slavery…,and they used the same language in their attacks on both. (Emmons 15)” Scholars had pointed out that there is a correlation between slavery and Catholicism; the Civil War crisis between the North and the South emerged as the same time as the overwhelming number of Irish immigration to the United States (Emmons 17).