Protestant Roots Behind Trump’s Antipathy to Catholic Leaders

The article argues that Donald Trump’s recent attacks on a pope fit a long-standing pattern of Protestant-led skepticism toward Catholic political influence in the U.S. It traces his upbringing at Marble Collegiate Church under Norman Vincent Peale—a pastor who helped mobilize opposition to John F. Kennedy’s Catholic faith in 1960—and situates current hostility within a historical arc that includes debates over church–state separation and earlier anti-Catholic campaigns by Protestant groups and even the Ku Klux Klan.