Wapshott’s whopper

Nicholas Wapshott, the New York Sun’s lead reporter, has an opinion column in today’s paper on Mitt Romney’s religion speech that is scheduled for tomorrow. In the course of the column, Wapshott says this:

John F. Kennedy gave a similar address in West Virginia during his 1960 presidential run after voters in the state and elsewhere let it be known that they were unhappy that his Catholicism might guide his decisions as president. The antipathy toward Catholics in American public life is rooted in the experience of the earliest protestant settlers who had escaped Catholic persecution in Europe. By the mid 20th century anti-Catholic sentiment still lingered, particularly in backwoods places such as are to be found in West Virginia.

Question to readers: before you click to see the continuation of this blog entry, can you identify the historical whopper in the above passage?

The answer, of course, is that the earliest Protestant settlers in America were escaping, not Catholic persecution in Europe, but Anglican persecution in England. They were English Calvinists who rejected the Church of England outright (the Pilgrims) or who sought to reform the Church from within (the Puritans). Does Wapshott—who is himself an Englishman—believe that the earlier Protestant settlers in America came from some Catholic country in central Europe?

Yesterday I linked a YouTube video of a French quiz show in which 56 percent of the audience thought that the sun rotates around the earth. It is hard to conceive how such ignorance could exist among even the most uneducated people. But for an educated person in our society, a reporter for a leading newspaper, who on television comes across as a sophisticated Brit, to think that the earliest settlers in America were fleeing Catholicism is almost equally astonishing.

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Sage McLaughlin writes:

When a contemporary writer makes any historical reference to the Catholic Church, you just have to accept that he is using the Church as a shorthand for “all things bad and oppressive.” When an Englishman does so, you can be absolutely sure of it. Yes, it’s ignorance, but it’s more than that.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 05, 2007 12:17 PM | Send