"If they do exist, they shouldn't"

I haven't posted much here recently because I simply haven't come across things that interested me enough to go to the trouble. But today I found an essay by Philip Jenkins that I liked a lot. He is an historian with widely ranging interests who has recently been writing about American history in the 1890s. Most of this essay is about social movements during that decade, including the American Protective Association. From "1893: Crash, Crisis, and Anti-Catholicism":

...[T]he American Protective Association (APA) began as a marginal grouping dedicated to defending Protestant interests against the machinations of Catholics, who supposedly followed secret directions dispatched by the Vatican. Allegedly, the Vatican planned the takeover of the US through armed insurgency, mainly directed by the Knights of Columbus. According to some accounts, the Catholic conspirators intended to massacre all heretics, a scheme proven by the many bogus documents then in circulation. These were over and above the very lively world of bogus confessions and exposés purporting to reveal the sexual depravity of priests and nuns. Self-described “ex-nuns” could count on a flourishing lecture circuit at this time, and for many years afterwards. On the Protestant side, the anti-Catholic “resistance” was largely a Masonic affair. The APA’s founder was Henry F. Bowers, a Freemason, who structured the movement on Masonic lines, with regalia, oaths and initiations. ....

In numerical terms alone, it is difficult to think of a more successful mass political movement in American history, and the obvious parallel is suggestive: this was the rabidly anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan of the mid 1920s, which might have hit five million members, albeit very briefly. The Klan likewise drew heavily on Masons and the other fraternal orders. ....

...[G]enerally, we study what we like. We approve of heroic radical or civil rights group, while we hate the haters. The problem is that this approach means that we don’t pay nearly enough attention to some very important movements.

I offer a personal example. Back in the 1990s, I was very interested in social movements, which were and are the focus of a great deal of scholarly attention: How do they organize, how do they propagandize, to whom do they appeal, why do they rise and fall, how do they combine national and local activism? From all these points of view, I turned my attention to the Pro-Life movement which was then so active, and which integrated street activism with political agitation. To be clear, that interest did not reflect any ideological commitment on my part...

Around that time, I was chatting with a colleague who was then offering a course on Social Movements in American History, and described the various such groups I had studied. We got along fine. And then I mentioned the Pro-Life example, and suggested it might be a great topic for his course. Mere horror does not begin to describe his response. Obviously he would do no such thing. He would be studying feminist movements, civil rights movements, and gay rights activism, with all of which he was in total sympathy, and I am sure he would do an excellent job on all of them. But what about those other groups which were undoubtedly social movements driven by real passion? It seems they don’t exist. And if they do exist, they shouldn’t.

A subsequent conversation with another colleague about such movements introduced me to a common academic taxonomy of social movements. It seems that there are authentic ones derived from the grass roots, and then there are bogus ones generated by sinister interest groups to pretend they command mass support. These are not grass roots but rather “astroturf” movements, a term that dates from 1985. Further conversation revealed that my colleague viewed basically all left or liberal movements as “grass roots,” and thus authentic, while any and all conservative or reactionary counterparts were “astroturf.” To say the least, that is a convenient perspective, and one that carries a lot of weight in an academic world that leans heavily to the left and liberal. .... (more)

Philip Jenkins, "1893: Crash, Crisis, and Anti-Catholicism," Anxious Bench, June 26, 2025.