Kinsman's Americanism and Catholicism

This book is one of Kinsman's works that's available on line in downloadable form. Almost exactly a century after its 1926 publication, this is a tough book to parse, in part because the issues that seem to have started Kinsman's train of thought are in some ways now moot. The wave of Catholic immigraton that took place in the post-Civil War period ended in the 1920s, while the decline of Main Line Protestantism that Kinsman anticipated has largely taken place.

However, I think the main force of his argument is still relevant, and even relevant to current circumstances. His concern, from the perspective of his recent conversion and sudden change of life from the peak of Protestant respectability to association with Catholic immigrant hordes, seems to have brought him to the question of how the hordes, and the Church that largely arrived with them, can integrate into Protestant American society. And let's keep in mind that he speaks quite consciously as someone whose family arrived, both literally and figuratively, on the Mayflower.

So he first argues that Catholicism is based on the same natural-law principles as those the founders wrote into the US Constitution. Catholicism carries with it the responsibility for Christians to obey the secular laws and support the secular state; Catholic authorities govern the area of faith and morals exclusively. And as a practical matter, Catholic immigrants have enthusiastically entered American life. But I think Kinsman was focusing even more on the future.

It is true, that Americans of the older stocks are becoming comparatively less numerous and in- fluential; that every year some lines of colonial descent become extinct. It is wholly probable that the descendants of later emigrations will eventually count for more in the country than those of the earlier; that there will be great changes in the proportions of the mixed ingredients of American blood. Yet the Americanism established by men of the earlier periods survives and is likely to survive. (p 13)

To this end, the book moves increasingly to the question of what will replace the 17th and 18th century versions of Protestantism, because, as he said in Salve Mater, these are bound to lose relevance.

The last four hundred years have seen a steady drift away from what is definite in Christianity. The various bodies which broke from the Church in the sixteenth century inaugurated changes which marked not fixed degrees of departure from mediaeval Christianity, but a process of gradual abandonment. This has been steady and continuous, sometimes unconscious, sometimes concealed by pleas for reconstruction and reinterpretation, sometimes deliberately devoid of every disguising pretence. The test-case is that of belief in the Godhead of Christ. There have been all degrees of confusion, hesitation, and explicitness of denial, and always vehement defenders of the truth. Yet the drift away from belief in Jesus as God among all classes of non-Catholics has become more rapid and overpowering, too strong even for the strongest swimmers caught in these side-currents. Abandonment of old Christian beliefs and practices is held to be alone worthy of modern thought; and what started as "justification by faith" is ending as justification of little or no faith at all. (pp 161-162)

The current situation, in which we're operating in a post-Main Line Protestant world, presents a new set of challenges to the Church. I think Kinsman foresaw the impact of Protestant abdication, but he couldn't foresee in any detail the precise conditions that would prevail when it finally became effective.

But I think he did foresee the need for the Church to assert itself as something beyond a cultural artifact that certain immigrants brought with them from the Old World. I think this is a strategy that figures like Bp Barron, whom pre-Conciliarists treat with great suspicion at best, are nevertheless beginning to articulate.