Insert "Christian" Instead of Catholic and This Anti Catholic Classic Sounds Modern

Dr Francis Beckwith has a good post at Will Herberg's 1949 Commentary review of Paul Blanshard's notorious American Freedom and Catholic Power on his blog Return to Rome.

He makes a good point here:
There is much that those of us in 2010 can learn from Will Herberg's important 1949 review of Paul Blanshard's famous (or infamous) tome, American Freedom and Catholic Power (1949). Long before Christian conservatives were called "American Taliban" by secular progressives, and long before the United States had to wrestle with controversies surrounding its Muslim citizenry, American Catholic Christians were confronted by a truly vile form of bigotry and suspicion that was embraced by both elite and popular culture. Catholics were labeled by those like Blanshard, who called themselves the "true Americans," as enemies of the very idea of America and the rights, liberties, and alliegences that this nation requires of itself and for its citizens to uphold. Appearing in the August 1949 issue of Commentary, I reproduce Herberg's scathing review in its entirety.

Again read the whole thing. insert Christian for Catholic in places and it sounds like today.

For instance do it in this paragraph:
Mr. Blanshard's prejudices make it impossible for him to appreciate the deep concern that many religious people feel about an allegedly “neutral” school system that in fact indoctrinates the child and young person with an outlook on life in which man is held to be sufficient unto himself and God is treated as an outmoded irrelevance. This secularism, linked to an exaltation of the “social-welfare state” as an omnicompetent agency for the total control of social life, prevents Mr. Blanshard from understanding how people may seriously insist that since social, family, and educational problems are at bottom moral, they cannot be separated from one's religious faith, and if that faith is institutionalized in that form, from one's church.

His perfervid nationalism and statism make it hard for him to grasp how any person genuinely devoted to democracy can nevertheless contend that there is a higher law in the name of which the dictates of the state may be disallowed if these dictates are felt to come into conflict with obedience to God. Mr. Blanshard excoriates (pages 52-53) the Catholics for affirming that they would disobey a law outlawing parochial schools and compelling parents to send their children to the public schools. He thinks such an attitude outrageously undemocratic and a menace to American freedom. To me, on the contrary, this attitude seems not only intelligible but thoroughly in line with the best of democratic tradition, which has always rejected the pretensions of the state to a monopoly of social and cultural life.