One night in 1834, renowned Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher delivered a sermon in Boston railing against the "despotic character and hostile designs of popery upon our country."

Not far away that night, a mob stormed an Ursuline Sisters convent and burned it to the ground.

It was never proved that the sermon incited the attack. Still, Lynn S. Neal, a religion professor at Wake Forest University, maintains that Beecher's caustic rhetoric contributed to the violence by "weaponizing" the prevailing anti-Catholic bias.