ABSTRACT
In the winter of 1865, New York University chemist John William Draper, often considered one of the co-founders of the “conflict thesis,” the idea that science and religion are fundamentally and irrevocably at odds, gave a course of four lectures at the New York Historical Society on the “Future Civil Policy of America.” During the first half of the century, for instance, overpopulation and adverse social and economic conditions in Ireland forced many Catholic peasants to emigrate to Britain, becoming a flood during the great potato famine of 1847. Anti-Catholic feeling was further exacerbated in 1845 when many of the Tractarians left the Church of England and converted to Roman Catholicism, especially after Newman submitted to the Roman Catholic Church. Antipathy toward the Roman Catholic Church was of course a transnational cultural phenomenon. Nineteenth-century nativists often fashioned themselves as protectors of the geopolitical territory against perceived foreign threats in their midst.
