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Entry: Confederates and Catholics, Unite! Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/down_in_dixie#2519 Post contents: Anyone who likes this website and this article will love Southern Partisan magazine! Our website is currently under renovation. You can subscribe for $23.95/yr. (6 issues) or $39.95/2yrs. (12 issues) by calling 1-800-264-2559 or by mail to Southern Partisan, P.O. Box 11708, Columbia, SC 29211-1708. With that out of the way, Mr. Van Oosbree is gravely mistaken. The South was, indeed, made up of Catholics at every level: cabinet members, generals, colonels, and almost a president. New England Puritanism, however, is the source of American anti-Catholicism. The famous Rev. Henry Ward Beecher of the American Bible Society, in fact, instigated the arson of the Boston convent in 1834. Even political parties such as the Know Nothings, as seen in the blockbuster movie Gangs of York, grew out of Northern anti-Catholic sentiment. A new field of New England anti-Christian literature has even begun: history books about how only in the North, Protestants were extraordinarily intolerant of Catholicism. The anti-Catholicism that is more recognizable today comes from the KKK, which except for a couple of years after Reconstruction, had its highest numbers in mostly Northern states (Michigan, Indiana, and Washington). The myth of the South as anti-Catholic was a coincidental byproduct of NAACP's campaign over the last 20 years associate the Confederate flag with the KKK---an association which the KKK welcomed, hoping its numbers might grow. But even now, anti-Catholicism has not made significant headway in Dixie. The only Southerners who've bought that story are the occasional Baptists who've been infiltrated by Northern evangelists, or the unusual group of homegrown converts to Northern religions, such as Mormon, Jehovah Witness, and Seventh-Day Adventist. Yet, among the mainstream in the South of Presbyterians, Lutherans, Southern Baptists, and Episcopalians (yes, they're still conservative down here), there is almost no hint of anti-Catholicism. Tim Manning, Jr. Assistant Editor Southern Partisan magazine Sent at: 2008 10 13