Anyone who knows their church-state history is aware that Baptists played a key role in the creation of America’s tolerant marketplace of ideas and “free exercise” on matters of faith.

Ask Thomas Jefferson. Here is a much-quoted, with good cause, passage from his pen, taken from the famous 1802 Letter to the Danbury Baptists:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

At various times in history, activists on the left and the right have found that letter disturbing.

So, as journalists prepare for whatever awaits Judge Amy Coney Barrett and her family (click here for this week’s podcast post on the “handmaid” wars), journalists may want to take a look at this short article from Baptist historian Thomas Kidd, published at The Gospel Coalition website. The headline: “Amy Coney Barrett and Anti-Catholicism in America.”

It’s sad to have to say this, but it helps to know that Kidd has taken his fair share of shots from social-media warriors on both sides during the Donald Trump era. Through it all, he has consistently defended — as a Baptist’s Baptist — an old-school liberal approach to the First Amendment and religious liberty (without “scare” quotes).

Here is Kidd’s overture:

The looming nomination of Amy Coney Barrett as a Supreme Court justice has renewed an ugly but persistent tradition in American politics: anti-Catholicism. Since 1517 there have been enduring and fundamental theological divides between Protestants and Catholics about tradition and Scripture, grace and works, the meaning of the Lord’s Supper, and more. Disagreement over theology certainly is not the same thing as outright anti-Catholicism, though theological differences are often components of anti-Catholicism.

Anti-Catholicism was a central force in British colonial history in America, not least because the colonies were routinely involved in wars between Britain and Catholic powers including France and Spain. These wars, including the Seven Years’ War (or French and Indian War), were interpreted by British colonists as conflicts against the power of “Antichrist” (not “the Antichrist,” as would become common later). 

The history here is often brutal and bloody. A key theme consistently emerges — that Catholicism is not “compatible with the basic values” cherished by Americans. Of course, there is also the question of whether popes will attempt to control American political life through the actions and beliefs of politicians who are, to one degree of another, practicing Catholics.

What does that mean? Well, will Pope Francis steer immigration policies in a Joe Biden White House? And, of course, there are all kinds of questions about Barrett and church teachings on marriage and sexuality.

The key, of course, is that the “basic values” cherished by American elites have evolved over time, making some American Catholics more equal than others. Kidd notes:

The second Ku Klux Klan (especially in northern states) was as much an anti-Catholic as an anti-African American organization. Through 1960 and the election of John Kennedy, Catholic politicians routinely had to face questions about whether their top political allegiance was to the United States or the Vatican. Such questions were as likely to be raised by mainliners and liberal Christians as by fundamentalists and evangelicals.

Conservative Protestant hostility toward Catholics became more muted in the 1970s and ’80s, as Protestants found themselves aligning with conservative Catholics such as Phyllis Schlafly, arguably the person most responsible for the downfall of the Equal Rights Amendment. Many evangelicals who appreciated their alliance with Catholics on issues such as the pro-life cause have wanted to maintain clear lines of theological difference, as they should. 

In other words, today’s anti-Catholicism is often linked to attacks on moral and doctrinal concepts that most conservative Christians — Catholic, Orthodox, evangelical, Pentecostal — share in common.

That brings us to attacks on Barrett and even her family. Consider this question: Why attack Barrett but not Nancy Pelosi?

Overt hostility today against Catholics is often limited to media and progressive outlets — but normally only against Catholics who defend their church’s teachings against abortion and same-sex marriage. (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for example, is a Catholic mother of five children, but gets no anti-Catholic flak from the media due to her progressive views on cultural issues.)

So prospective SCOTUS nominee Amy Coney Barrett gets subjected to breathless accounts tinged with anti-Catholic paranoia, such as the one from Reuters which, in all seriousness, presented the dilemma over Barrett as whether her fellowship group People of Praise was “totalitarian” or just “ultraconservative.” …

When those sneaky Catholics – especially pro-life Catholic women with many kids – are having fellowship meetings, you can bet that the red robes with the funky white visors are coming out next. They must be! Isn’t that what Catholics do?

Read it all and make note of a few of the links.

Kidd would also be a good conservative Protestant to follow on Twitter during the next few weeks — often pointing to ideas and voices that do not fit naturally into the pro-Trump or anti-Trump camps.

By the way, the YouTube video at the top of this feature is not an interview with Kidd. It features historian Philip Jenkins covering material linked to his 2004 book entitled “The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice.”