has faded in importance. On social issues the Catholic Church takes strong positions against abortion and same-sex marriage and has formed coalitions with Protestant evangelicals. The Church has been a fierce opponent of liberalized abortion laws, has formed coalitions with evangelicals to oppose abortion and has inspired political resistance to such legislation in several Western countries. Currently, 24 of the 100 U.S. Senators are Catholics (15 Democrats, 9 Republicans). 132 of the 435 members of the House of Representatives are Catholics. The former Speaker of the House, Democratic Nancy Pelosi of California, is Catholic. The Know Nothings The Know Nothings were a short-lived American political party in the mid-1850s. Know Nothingism was an anti-slavery party that recruited its strength from the collapse of the equally short-lived Free Soil Party and, in turn, provided the voters who formed the Republican Party and elected Abraham Lincoln to abolish slavery. The motivators of the Party's rise are considered to have been, 1.) nativist sentiment caused by the sudden, unprecedented influx of German and Irish immigrants in the late 1840s, 2.) a rapid, steep decline in factory wages caused by the sudden influx of very large numbers of Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Famine, 3.) the threat members perceived the expansion of a slave system would pose to free labor which, in the eyes of supporters of both the Free Soil and Know Nothing movements, threatened to reduce free men to "wage slaves,"' and 4.) fear that land in the western territories would be awarded to wealthy slave owners rather than to small farmers. It was due to this fear that slavery would destroy the economic prospects of white working families thffcffcfcat the Party enrolled massive numbers of voters in the wake of the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854. The party is remembered for anti-Catholicism, an attitude that resulted not only from the fact that America was an almost entirely Protestant country confronted for the first time by a wave of Catholic immigration. Religion: pietistic Republicans versus liturgical Democrats Religious lines were sharply drawn. Methodists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Scandinavian Lutherans and other pietists in the North were tightly linked to the Republicans. In sharp contrast, liturgical groups, especially the Catholics, Episcopalians, and German Lutherans, looked to the Democratic Party for protection from pietistic moralism, especially prohibition. While both parties cut across economic class structures, the Democrats were supported more heavily by its lower tiers. Cultural issues,