Perceived religious conspiracy in revolutionary America

In chapter 3 ("The Pope, the Devil, and All Their Emissaries"), Kidd does a nice job drawing together several different anxieties afflicting the American colonists in the middle of the eighteenth century. Kidd ties together irritation surrounding the growth of Anglican bureaucracy in the colonies, British handling of Quebec after the Seven Years War, and general anti-Catholicism. On the basis of this bundle of concerns, Kidd makes the case that revolutionary fervor in the American colonies benefitted tremendously from prevenient anti-Catholicism and the efforts of many colonial pamphleteers to tie Anglicanism and the government in England to Catholicism.

Certainly, we've seen abundant evidence of colonial anti-Catholicism, not just at second-hand in Kidd but first-hand in Thomas Paine's Common Sense. There's no doubt in my mind that colonial passions could run very high against the Roman Catholic Church and anything that looked much like it. Nevertheless, I was struck by the extent to which colonial behavior (as described by Kidd) resembled not so much that of people taking reasonable and calculated steps to preserve a valued religious way of life as that of conspiracy theorists. To be sure, Kidd adduces an abundance of ham-fisted behavior on the part of the British that provoked Congregationalists, Baptists, and others. But it takes a mind committed to finding a conspiracy to look at such crass and crude steps as the Anglican establishment took and see an insidious Catholic menace. Indeed, had there really been an subtle plot with any chance of success at all, wouldn't that plot have needed to be a little more subtle? But this step of reasoning is frequently overlooked in conspiracy theories: obvious and ill-managed bungling is taken to be only the tip of an otherwise well-concealed iceberg, never mind the implausibility of such bunglers directing a crafty plot. "They just want you to think they're incompetent!" And no amount of evidence of incompetence can persuade otherwise.

In other instances, colonial religious judgments do not seem to have been so determinedly irrational. It did not take a great leap of imagination or presumption of guilt to associate, say, Benedict Arnold with Judas Iscariot after Arnold was caught. (Kidd 123-124) This seems a reasonable (if highly religious) evaluation, and of an actual, documented conspiracy, too. Was it the case that colonial anti-Catholicism was simply so violent that the mere mention of the word "bishop" made them lose their minds? No, clearly not: the colonists allied willingly enough with Catholic France. Were colonists vigilant to the point of paranoia, such that they saw conspiracy around every corner? No, because again, those colonists would likely have noticed more of the actual British scheming during the revolution if they had been. Were colonists so naive that they blithely accepted the word of Patriot pamphleteers when the latter insisted on a vast Catholic conspiracy? Maybe, but that rests on interpreting the colonists as being far less discerning than we savvy twenty-first century Americans are. I'm reluctant to equate the quality of being past with the quality of being simple. More than anything, I wonder whether anti-Catholic conspiracy theories really provided a substantial support for revolution, or whether instead it is more the case that, once Parliament and the crown became the perceived enemy of certain publishing Americans, Parliament and the crown were associated, on an ad hoc and frequently implausible basis, with another hated enemy, the pope in Rome.