The "American tradition" has been Catholicism since the 1840s. It hasn't been protestantism for 160 years, even since there were massive wave of immigration from Ireland. In sheer membership, The Catholic church far outranks the second largest organized Christian church in the U.S.A (60 million for the Catholic Church vs. 15 million for the Southern Baptist Convention) Indeed, the ONLY part of the U.S. where the "historic cultural tradition" is protestantism, is parts of the deep south (and I say "parts" because states like Louisiana and Texas are exceptions to that rule).
IMO, the reason more Hispanics are becoming Protestant is they were Catholics In Name Only to begin. They may have been baptized Catholic, but they never observed their Catholic faith.
Heh, Catholics of all stripes only make up 23.9% of the US population.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholicism_in_the_United_States#By_percentage_of_Catholics
Protestants make up 51% of the US population.
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5h7rc3tC9fKhoJW6X9PV6ZmG2BIng
“The “American tradition” has been Catholicism since the 1840s. It hasn’t been protestantism for 160 years, even since there were massive wave of immigration from Ireland”
From the mid-19th Century up until the mid-20th Century, the Roman Catholic Church was seen as an ethnic church- Its services were not conducted in the language of this country, and its membership was dominated by people who tended to isolate themselves in urban immigrant neighborhoods such as “Little Italy”. World War 2 and the subsequent mass exodus to the suburbs are what changed all of that. Vatican II also helped by making it easier for people who were not born and raised Catholic to join up.
That is ridiculous, a nation founded and created by Protestants and that was about 5% Catholic in 1840 and after 150 years of foreigners flooding in, including the millions of peasants walking in from the backwards nation of Mexico, is still only about 25% Catholic.