Thanks to RP Burke for passing along this piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education: A review of a new book, detailing the American Protestant stance toward Catholic-tinged symbolism in the 19th century:

It was a time of rising anti-Catholicism, "always latent in Anglo-America," writes the scholar, a historian at Virginia Commonwealth University. Catholics were a rapidly growing presence, expanding through immigration from about 195,000 in 1820 to 1.75 million in 1850. But as anti-Catholicism grew, crosses, Gothic architecture, stained glass, candles, flowers, and other accouterments once condemned as "popery" were competitively adopted by Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists well aware of the appeal of the Catholics’ "sensuous sanctity."

If it’s hard today to imagine crosses as a target, consider, for example, one Presbyterian magazine that called the cross "not a symbol of redemption through the blessed Saviour, but a perverted, abused symbol of a great system of superstition and imposture." Ironically, some Congregationalists were equally ugly backing their use: "There is no good reason why every little chapel of the Mother of Harlots should be allowed to use what appeals so forcibly and so favorably to the simplest understanding, and we be forbidden the manifest advantage its use would often give us." The author shows how by adopting the cross, but not the crucifix, Protestants sidestepped squeamishness about Christ’s body. An empty cross expressed not agony, but the triumph of the resurrection.

Mr. Smith goes on to describe how Protestants "Gothicized" countless churches while playing down the Gothic’s Catholic roots, emphasizing its English qualities, arguing that it actually derived from nature (think arching trees), or even claiming it had origins in ancient Israel. He ends by detailing further "Rome-ward heresies," among them observing holidays such as Christmas and Easter, placing flowers in sanctuaries, and making the communion tables in even Baptist churches "something of an altar."

Amazon link to the book.