Anti-Catholicism in Colonial Virginia

[...]we now have an increasing number of accounts of Virginia's contribution to religious freedom, but still no proper account of anti-Catholicism's place in its early history. If one thinks of antiCatholicism primarily as a sort of ethno-religious prejudice that can be measured by how people treat actual Roman Catholics or their religion, one will not find much in Virginia. [...]the late twentieth century, the number of Roman Catholics living in Virginia was tiny and unobtrusive. [...]the anti-Catholicism cultivated among colonial Virginians helped drive their transformation into Americans and define their contribution to religious freedom.3 Surveying the roughly 200 years between the founding of Roanoke in the 1580s and the end of the American Revolution in the 1780s, this essay highlights some of the principal ways anti-Catholicism (or anti-popery, as it is often called in British scholarship) figured in colonial Virginia's history. [...]Catholics occasionally got some things right, like their reverence for tradition and hierarchy within the church. Anglican defenders of the authority of bishops were especially prone to view the pope's greatest error to be thinking that he could rule over all Christians instead of being just the "Bishop of Rome. 6 Church of England ministers knew that some in their congregations found much to admire in Roman Catholicism.