Religious Freedom Is America's Greatest Export—and It's Under Attack

Up! Up! I beseech you…. Shut your gates," said a prominent New Yorker who would soon launch a political career.

A foreign nation, he warned, was sending us "their criminals" because the United States hadn't erected enough "walls" or "gates." The heart of the problem: These new immigrants practiced a religion that was so "despotic" and "ignorant" that it would destroy democracy. He also complained that men like him who had the guts to tell the truth about that dangerous religion were unfairly labeled "bigoted" and "intolerant" by a liberal media that was "on the side of your enemies."

The man was Samuel Morse, then a well-known painter who later helped invent the telegraph and the Morse code. The religion he assailed in 1835 was not Islam but Catholicism. The foreign nation he warned about was not Iran, Syria or Mexico but Austria, which, he believed, was financing the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Catholics to the United States.

Although Morse was defeated the following year in his run for mayor of New York City, he became an influential figure in the anti-Catholic movement that arose during the period. In the 1830s and 1840s, Protestant mobs burned convents, sacked churches and collected the teeth of deceased nuns as souvenirs during anti-Catholic riots—just one of the many spasms of "anti-papism" that roiled America from the colonial era until well into the 20th century.

Morse's comments are especially jarring because today we have a U.S. president who said Mexico was sending us its "criminals, drug dealers and rapists," claimed "Islam hates us" and persistently blurred the distinction between Islamic terrorists and regular American Muslims. Activists and critics have decried such hostile language, arguing that it can morph into violent acts. By the time of the April shooting at the Chabad synagogue in Poway, California, there was a risk of normalization setting in, as the world had already lived through attacks at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, churches in Sri Lanka, and the Al Noor and Linwood mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

But the Catholic example