America and the Evangelization of Culture

Until sometime in the early 1960s nearly all Catholics in the United States would probably have agreed that it was the mission of the Church to convert the country to the true Faith, even if many would not have proclaimed it with the clarity and zeal of Archbishop John Hughes of New York, who had said in an 1850 sermon: “Everyone should know that we have for our mission to convert the world – including the inhabitants of the United States, – the people of the cities, and the people of the country, the officers of the navy and the marines, commanders of the army, the Legislatures, the Senate, the Cabinet, the President, and all.”[i] And of course there were efforts to bring about that conversion, such as door-to-door campaigns for convert-making or regular advertisements in secular magazines of Catholic literature by the Knights of Columbus. But I suggest that there was something fundamental that was lacking in all these efforts to convert the country, good and necessary though they were. This is the question of what exactly it was that needed conversion.

Of course it was America that was to be converted.[ii] And properly so. But it was perhaps not noticed by everyone that the term America can mean more than one thing. It is first of all a large body of land. That does not change. But what America is is much more complicated than merely the land or even the land and its inhabitants. This is clearly shown in that although in 1300 the land that would later become the United States certainly existed, and people dwelt on it, America did not yet exist. Nor did it exist 300 years later in 1600, although by this time European explorers and settlers were already present within the boundaries of the future United States. For these settlers were chiefly Spanish at that time, and the cultural tradition they represented would play no part in the formation of the future United States. The tradition that would contribute to the formation of America began with Jamestown in 1607 and Plymouth Colony in 1620. Although since the conclusion of the Revolution in 1783 the United States has never been without citizens of French or Spanish heritage, they contributed essentially nothing to the central cultural tradition of this country. They were few in numbers and generally living in places remote from the center. Had they been strong enough to attempt to influence the main currents of American thought and life, very quickly there would have arisen the sort of cultural and even religious strife which has often characterized countries of two strong competing traditions. America therefore from the beginning was a citadel of Protestant culture, mainly Anglo-Saxon, but definitely Protestant.
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