Throughout the nation's history, Americans have used foreign events as a screen upon which to project their own domestic hopes and fears. European revolutions in particular have become the occasion for airing homespun anxieties about social (and religious) upheaval. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the Red Scare of 1920 are simply the most prominent examples of how revolutions abroad can stir the fears of American conservatives. According to some historians, the American reaction to the Paris Commune of 1871 was just as swift and negative as the reaction to the French and Russian Revolutions. An examination of clerical response to the Commune, however, suggests a very different picture: that of a community of public spokesmen trying to make sense of a foreign upheaval for their American audience while offering hope that similar events were avoidable on this side of the Atlantic.