ABSTRACT
The American central government moved from a War-time Alliance, to a loose Confederation of States, to a Federal Union, one might well anticipate that the ideological differences between the Protestant enthusiasts and the Enlightenment-rationalists would have been a source of continual disputes and eventual disunion. The American Revolution broke many of the intimate ties that had traditionally linked religion and government, especially with the Anglican Church, and turned religion into a voluntary affair, a matter of individual free choice. The post-Revolution Catholic population in America surged due to immigration, as well as large families, and these Catholics soon chaffed under the hegemony of an American Protestant culture that was quite different from their nations of origin. The connotation of "Catholic" that gave rise to animosity in American colonialists was specifically the Catholic hierarchical polity, its priesthood as directed and regulated by the Pope, and its supposed sympathy for absolutism.
