Zionist:
Well, you and I at least agree on these points with respect to History. As someone who was born raised and will die in Louisiana, and has travelled extensively in the South and lived for a short time in 2 other Southern States, the ole aristocratic South [High Church Episcopalians], who were the civic, political and cultrual elite of the antebellum South were not anti-Catholic in the hate sense. It was the more rural Protestant South and the more independent Congregationist type Protestants [in the Northeast as well as the Presbyterians, Methodist and Baptist that were then, and to some degree, now anti Catholic. I made the distinction and on that point, do agree with you. And you are also correct that in the Northeast, it was Congregationalist, Calvinist and puritan streams in it and was also very anti-Catholic, and immigration did change the demographics and thus defacto removed the religous anti-Catholicism in those regions as bascially, Protestantism in the Northeast, the congregationalist have collapsed into secular atheism or Unitariansim and thus the anti Catholicism in the Northeast is more of the secularist type directed at orthodox Catholic Bishops who are gradually starting to reappear in that part of the country, i.e. Dolan of NY, Tobin in Rhode Island, etc.
Now as for your comments about Catholics reducing the biblical text and writers to ignorant and myth, I think that is a mischaracterization and is not accurate.
You leave out a very important point, which is the secularization of the once-Catholic population in the northeast itself, and the hostility or passivity of such ancestral Catholics in those regions. Catholics are a majority of the population in liberal Rhode Island, and a plurality in most of New England and the Mid-Atlantic, yet the Church no longer has the political power, or hold over the population, that it did from the 1920s-1960s (the peak of Catholic political/cultural influence in the northeast). Folks like Dolan can take strong public stances, but they do not have the power to deliver (or subtract) votes like they used to as the regions/populations they represent have become highly secularized.