And it isn't an old attitude. I remember documentaries stating that John Fitzgerald Kennedy's Catholicism was something that could have cost him his election.

https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2024/05/07/cbc-...

> The past which the 'make america great again' people want to take us back to absolutely loathed Catholics, something I don't think modern Catholics realize.

The past that MAGA refers to is imaginary. It's "the good old days", whatever that evokes in any individual, with however selective that individual's memory is or however incomplete that individual's knowledge of history is.

It's like the Brexit referendum - Britons voted on "the status quo is bad, would you like something better than the status quo?" and a slim majority of them voted yes. They didn't agree on exactly how things should be negotiated to be better, just that they could imagine something better than the current state.

"The colony... The US was explicitly not founded on religious tolerance, it was founded on freedom to persecute Catholics"

Seems a bit broken to claim that something that happened in 1689 when it was a colony, as you explicitly note, is fundamental to the founding of the nation a century later.

I'm ex-catholic but not quite sure the "we want to be free to oppress catholics" narrative quite holds up in the case of the trump admin.

The current supreme court has 6 catholic justices, with 2 appointed by trump. 2 of them rubber stamp everything trump does (alito and thomas), and most of the others support him more often than not (rogers, coney-barrett, kavanaugh). Only sotomayor opposes him frequently.

If you covertly (or not) want to oppress a religion why stack the highest court in the country with people from said religion?

Yes, the stupidity and shortsightedness of American Catholic integralists like Vermuele is stunning to me. If America does ever become a Christian theocracy, it's going to be a Protestant theocracy. It wouldn't be an altar-and-throne continental monarchy, it would be more like Cromwell's England, where "Papists" were considered enemies of the state. Do these guys not remember that Jack Chick wrote just as many comics villainizing Catholics as he did atheists? That's how evangelicals actually think, once any temporary alliances of convenience have accomplished their goals.

Perhaps somehow related to founding protestants fleeing catholic persecution. It’s the sort of thing that will leave the world blind.

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