“Our Enemy, Who for Our Religion… Abhorred Us”: The Establishment and Maintenance of 18th-Century Anti-Catholicism in North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the centuries following the Protestant Reformation, religion was a point of contention between Catholic and Protestant nations. These contentions are reflected in literature that was produced during colonial disputes between opposing Catholic and Protestant imperial regimes. Academics including Johnathan Clark have described the significance of religion in times of warfare, in spurring the support of the masses and providing a rallying cry for troops. Scholars that study 18th-century conflicts in North America, including the Seven Years’ War, often do not consider the significance of religious affiliations in this age of empire. Despite this lack of attention, in the years leading up to and including the Seven Years’ War, British North American settlers employed anti-Catholic rhetoric to demonize their French Catholic neighbours to the north. This article considers published letters, sermons, and legislation from the mid- to late-18th century in order to describe how terms including “papist” and “catholic” became synonymous with “French” in the North American context. These texts suggest that the Seven Years’ War was conceived as divinely ordained and justified by British settlers as the defense of Protestantism in North America. Protestant denominations overlooked the differences that had historically divided them in the face of this common French Catholic “enemy.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".