Religious Differences in the United States

Cultural Differences
The predominant religions of Northern and Western European American and Southern and Eastern European Americans are Protestantism and Catholicism. Prior to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, Europe as a whole was Roman Catholic. That unity of religious expression was shattered when Luther, Calvin, Knox, Henry VIII and others revolted against the Church and preached their own new religious ideas. The aristocracy got behind them in many cases, particularly in the Northern and Western portions or Europe (England, northern Germany, pockets of France), while Southern and Eastern Europe remained attached to the Catholic Church (Italy, Spain, Hungary, Poland, southern Germany). The Protestants aligned with Jewish groups, who saw an opportunity to get out of the ghetto by working with the new Protestant aristocracy (Jones, 2014). Jews were welcomed back into England (they had been kicked out for centuries), and they settled in parts of Germany and France. Eventually they all came to America, with White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs) leading the political way forward, as the Founding Fathers were all English Deists. These groups—Protestants, Jews and Catholics—all influenced American culture and society since the founding of the nation, as they all came over from all parts of Europe and brought their cultural and religious beliefs with them. This paper will show how these predominant religions, primarily the Protestants and the Catholics and their religions impacted values, attitudes and behaviors in American culture.
Protestants primarily settled in the South in the U.S. in the early days of the nation. Though, as Kottak and Kozaitis (2012) point out, there were other cultures that influence American life, WASPs did play a significant role in developing the traditional American values at the heart of the nation for the first two centuries. They were agrarian and controlled the land in the South and the finances (along with Jewish families from European wealthy backgrounds) in the North. The Northern states were more industrialized and urban and attracted a variety of diverse peoples—ethnic Catholics from Ireland, Poland, Germany and Italy; Protestants from England and Germany; and Jews from Eastern Europe. The urban areas had their own enclaves—pockets of ethnic communities—the Italian quarter, the German center, and so on. Catholics were more liberal with their attitudes and behaviors while Protestants tended to be more severe. The Protestants were Puritans in their religious beliefs. They were very legalistic, viewing the letter of the law as important, while Catholics were much more willing to be indulgent and to accept the fact that people are sinners. Catholics enjoyed drinking—whether they were Irish or German or Italian. Protestants tended to view drink as problematic for society and they were primarily the ones to promote teetotalism and Prohibition, which made the sale of alcohol illegal in the U.S.
WASPs also emphasized race more than Catholics. The idea of whiteness was largely and extension of the Anglo Saxon mythology, whereas Catholics throughout Europe were generally of various races—Spanish, Italian, Polish, German, English, Irish—all of these various ethnicities were inclusive of multiples races, so racial tension was not really an issue for Catholics. Ethnic differences aside, they all shared the same values informed by the same religious teaching. Protestants, however, were generally from England in the U.S. and their outlook was distinctly racial. As Diller (2015) notes, this racism was predominant in American pockets from the beginning—particularly in the Southern region where WASPs dominated the culture. Racism was what allowed the Protestants in the south to engage in slavery and maintain slaves. They did not view blacks as equals and this was an extension of their belief that they themselves were the chosen people. This belief was similar to what the Jews believed and both Protestants and Jews were the main drivers of the slave trade that brought blacks to the U.S.
The problem of white privilege as Diller (2015) calls it, thus stemmed from the behaviors and beliefs of the Protestant groups in America. They were not confined to the South and in the North one could find the same type of problem. Jim Crow laws were not just a Southern phenomenon after the Civil War, it is just that this is where the majority of the blacks were. The examples of WASP racism are numerous—from the forcing of Native Americans off their land from the time of the House of Burgesses in Virginia (when, after the Native Americans had negotiated a treaty with the English, the Virginian WASPs broke the treaty and stole the land from the Natives anyway), to the laws against immigration to bar other ethnicities from coming to the country and gaining citizenship (such as Asians in the West). WASPs viewed themselves as having a “Manifest Destiny” in which it was their right and duty to push the boundaries of America as far west as possible and from there to expand the empire all over the world—which they finally started doing with the Spanish-American War at the end of the 19th century.
The Catholic influence on attitudes, values and behaviors in America was seen in urban areas like New York, where when Catholics began to exercise political power there was a real struggle between the Protestant Establishment and the Catholic immigrants who built for themselves their own brand of politics and law enforcement known as Tammany Hall—the vast political machine that was largely viewed as corrupt and immoral for its commonplace practices of bribery and looking the other way in terms of policing the city for crimes like prostitution and drinking and so on. When drinking was outlawed on Sundays in New York, future President (and Protestant) Teddy Roosevelt was in charge of the police in NYC and made sure that the German Catholics would abide by the law—and they hated him for it. He also reformed the largely Irish Catholic police force and prosecuted officers for taking bribes and for looking the other way when it came to cracking down on prostitution, drinking, etc. They also disliked him for this. But it was an example of the ways in which tension was created between the two groups—the legalistic group of Protestants on the one-hand and the okay-with-corruption group of Catholics on the other hand. The Catholic Al Smith ran for President during Prohibition and his platform was the wet-ticket, meaning he wanted to end Prohibition, and he very nearly won—but in the end another WASP was elected president and the first Catholic president would not come until the 1960s when John F. Kennedy would win the White House. And he would be assassinated just three years into his presidency—and his brother five years later when he mounted a campaign against Nixon.
In conclusion, the influence of religion in the lives of Americans came from the role it played back home in Europe. It was largely a battle between Protestant values and Catholic values playing out in America as more and more ethnic Catholics arrived from various countries in Europe and spread their ideas, customs, behaviors and attitudes. There was a great deal of culture class, particularly when these groups got into politics and law and order. Their social views were also different, for instance, on birth control—at least until the latter half of the 20th century. The behaviors of these groups were focused on different ideas, all the same—control on the one hand, and acceptance and liberality on the other.

References
Diller, J. (2015). Cultural Diversity: A Primer for the Human Services, 5th Edition.
Cengage Learning.
Jones, E. M. (2014). Barren metal. Fidelity Press.
Kottak, C. & Kozaitis, K.  (2012). On Being Different: Diversity and Multiculturalism in
the North American Mainstream, 4th Edition . McGraw-Hill Higher Education (2012).