(Second attempt at asking the question)

I will start this question with a statement that I do not believe to be controversial: that being anti-Catholicism is no longer present in modern American society. Now, obviously I cannot speak for the experience of every American, but just to use a prominent example, President-Elect Joe Biden and Vice President Michael Pence is a Catholic. More importantly to my point, his religious beliefs has never really been an issue for him. No one has ever questioned if Biden’s “true loyalty” is to the Pope, or implied that he can't be President because “a papist can never be a true American”. These are very “top-heavy” examples, but I believe they help back my point that, in contrast to so many other prejudices, anti-Catholicism in the United States is pretty much a thing of the past.

To me though, this raises a question of how “truly” anti-Catholic America was to begin with. Many history books I’ve read depict anti-Catholicism in the US as basically a bi-product of anti-immigrant prejudice. WASP Americans didn’t like the Catholic Church mainly because WASP Americans didn’t like the Irish, or the Italians, or the Germans, or the Latinos etc.

But is this conception accurate? Was there more to the prejudice than simply people being against foriegners? To use another presidential example (though it’s a bit outside the scope of “early US”), I’ve seen some people attribute Democratic candidate Al Smith losing many southern states in the 1928 presidential election (back when it was still the “solid south” for the Democratic Party) as being because of anti-Catholic sentiments in those states.

So how strong was anti-Catholicism in the US society generally? Was it just another facet of anti-immigrant bigotries, or was it a distinct and “sincere” prejudice that was embraced by most (white) Americans? Would Americans have looked down on something just for being Catholic? To give one final example, fictional president Josiah Bartlett from the tv show West Wing is a member of a long line of prominent Americans (“the right sort of family” you could say). But he was also baptized a Catholic thanks to his mother. So would Josiah Bartlett, a "White Anglo-Saxon Catholic", have ever faced any sort of discrimination for that at any point in US history?