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This stuff goes ALL the way back. Biden managed to be the first Catholic President to SURVIVE office. That was a deep concern when he ran and won.
It goes back to the 1840s with a large immigrant wave of Irish Catholics here -
The Philadelphia Bible Riots
Mobs don’t think, as the adage goes, but they have often substituted for thinking by playing a leading role in fomenting political disagreements and deciding political questions.
Mobs fill vacuums. They arise and pose a threat in multiple circumstances: when government is weak or ineffective; where government actively participates in actions that a large proportion of the population perceives to be unjust; and when mobs and governments join forces to assault an out-of-favor group. American history is replete with examples of each.
In May and July 1844, the streets of Philadelphia were witness to combinations of these circumstances to deadly effect. In The Fires of Philadelphia: Citizen-Soldiers, Nativists, and the 1844 Riots Over the Soul of a Nation, George Mason University history professor Zachary M. Schrag offers a meticulously detailed blow-by-blow account of how a dispute ostensibly over Bibles in public schools inspired deadly rage.
Although the tinder that sparked the so-called Bible Riots was—as is so often the case—alleged concern about “the children,” the debate regarding which Bible kids should read in school was actually a proxy for a more insidious divide in which “nativists” strove to deprive new Catholic immigrants of the full rights of citizenship.
(snip)
Mobs don’t think, as the adage goes, but they have often substituted for thinking by playing a leading role in fomenting political disagreements and deciding political questions.
Mobs fill vacuums. They arise and pose a threat in multiple circumstances: when government is weak or ineffective; where government actively participates in actions that a large proportion of the population perceives to be unjust; and when mobs and governments join forces to assault an out-of-favor group. American history is replete with examples of each.
In May and July 1844, the streets of Philadelphia were witness to combinations of these circumstances to deadly effect. In The Fires of Philadelphia: Citizen-Soldiers, Nativists, and the 1844 Riots Over the Soul of a Nation, George Mason University history professor Zachary M. Schrag offers a meticulously detailed blow-by-blow account of how a dispute ostensibly over Bibles in public schools inspired deadly rage.
Although the tinder that sparked the so-called Bible Riots was—as is so often the case—alleged concern about “the children,” the debate regarding which Bible kids should read in school was actually a proxy for a more insidious divide in which “nativists” strove to deprive new Catholic immigrants of the full rights of citizenship.
(snip)
This ain't nothing new.
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