When, in The Ambassadors, Lambert Strether introduces Waymarsh to his new acquaintance Maria Gostrey, he fears that his friend will see her as “a jesuit in petticoats, a representative of the recruiting interests of the Catholic Church”:

Just enough over the top to signal itself as parody, this description of the Catholic Church as an octopus ironizes Protestant stereotypes about Catholicism on which James had drawn less self-consciously in some of his earlier novels. Yet if he shifts the tone of its expression, the equation of all the evils (and all the attractions) of Europe with the Catholic Church is a motif that appealed to James's imagination throughout his career. His writing draws continually on traditional Protestant conceptions of Catholicism, some positive but few without a suspicious underside: historical consciousness and dusty rituals, aristocratic grandeur and hyperconsciousness of rank, intellectual complexity and Jesuitical dissembling, spiritual suppleness and devious conduct, chivalry and mistreatment of women, aesthetic richness and sensual pleasure but also hypocritical asceticism.

Despite his lack of interest in formal theology, Henry James's imagination seems profoundly shaped by the Protestant religious tradition.