Volume 11, Issue 4

This paper goes in search of the contribution of the five major religious families in American society to the ideological landscape for electoral conflict. Taking advantage of new methodological opportunities and a rich but underutilized dataset, it considers the distribution of political values within denominations, the link between these values and voting behavior, and the strategic landscape – plus strategic dilemmas – that results from that link. By considering these across the most recent quarter-century, it isolates an older world sometimes characterized as “the Protestant nation,” where Catholics offered additionally distinctive political behavior, and a new world in which the great denominations behave very differently, but where changes in Catholic behavior are arguably most critical to this change.

This article seeks to contribute to the scholarly understanding of both Catholicism and Latino religious beliefs. Our approach is to look within the Catholic category to test whether differing theological approaches have political implications. Using a recent Texas survey with a range of religious questions and an oversample of Latino respondents, we test whether intra-Catholic religious orientations help to structure attitudes toward immigration and life policies for Latinos and Anglos. For each group, we compare two kinds of Catholics – “Evangelical Catholics” (those who report evangelical-charismatic-literalist beliefs) and “Mainstream Catholics” (those who do not). This builds on McDaniel and Ellison’s findings by asking whether ostensibly similar religious beliefs may have different effects by race and ethnicity. Our aggregate data provide some evidence that intra-Catholic differences can influence policy opinions, and that race-ethnicity can play a mediating role.

Throughout the history of the US, the Catholic Church has occupied a variety of political roles. This essay identifies three distinctive periods of Catholic politics: An era in which US Catholicism represented a primarily “immigrant” church (approximately from the mid-19th century to World War II), a period of assimilation and acculturation (roughly 1945–1980), and a period of integration into the dominant partisan and ideological cleavages of American politics (approximately 1980 to the present). Each of these eras was characterized by a distinctive pattern of interaction among the American Catholic laity, the organized Roman Catholic hierarchy in the US, and the Vatican.

In this article, I place the American Catholic Church into a broader historical and global perspective, giving context to both the world in which it operates and the decisions it makes. I argue that several of the decisions that were made by the earliest Church leaders continue to reverberate today. Furthermore, the circumstances under which Catholicism made its way to the New World not only gives meaning to its past path, but provides clues about its future direction. These historical and geopolitical angles must be assessed when evaluating Pope Francis’s challenge to the Vatican, the American Church, and Catholicism around the globe.

Catholics have long been an important force in American electoral politics. Once a vital and loyal component of the New Deal Democratic coalition, Catholics in recent decades have shifted their political loyalties away from the Democratic Party to more of a partisan equilibrium. Indeed, by 2012, the White Catholic vote had become predominantly Republican, even in a year in which a Democrat was re-elected to the White House, and on balance party identification among these voters showed a slight Republican edge. Only the growing contingent of Latino Catholics kept the national vote of the entire religious community closely balanced. Despite widespread agreement among scholars that the partisan behavior of Catholics has changed, there is much less consensus on the nature of that change, its permanence, and its causes. We review the historic patterns of Catholic partisanship and voting behavior, discuss three major perspectives on electoral change among Catholics, and test these perspectives with data drawn from the 2012 National Survey of Religion and Politics, with a rich battery of religious measures. We find that socioeconomic factors, religious perspectives, and issue preferences among Catholics all influence partisanship and vote choice, reducing any true “distinctiveness” of the “Catholic vote.”

Has the Catholic preferential option for the poor become an optional preference in contemporary American Catholic advocacy? If so, why? Commentators on both the left and the right agree that the “culture wars,” particularly over abortion access, have come to trump economic advocacy among American Catholics. In the following, I refine this claim, testing several mechanisms by which the culture wars could have influenced Catholic economic advocacy. Evidence is strongest that the culture wars have mattered in three ways: shaping organizational politics within the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, driving polarization among Catholic civil society organizations, and generating blowback among Catholics in the pews to the infusion of religion into politics. However, the culture wars have not fundamentally changed Catholic theology of the economy or eliminated traditional Catholic advocates for progressive economic policy. After documenting evidence of these effects, the piece closes with implications for the likelihood of a “Francis effect” on American Catholic economic advocacy.

In his 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry, a Catholic, was threatened with being denied Holy Communion because of his pro-choice voting record. This article investigates the extent to which communion denial impacted Catholic elected officials and analyzes public attitudes regarding communion denial for Kerry. The results of our analysis suggest that, despite heavy media coverage, few bishops endorsed the communion denial and few pro-choice Catholic officials were threatened. While the data also indicate there are meaningful political implications for public attitudes on communion denial, the tactic does not command support from many Catholics.

John F. Kennedy is remembered as the consummate American politician of his day, but he was also shaped by a distinct ethnic-religious tradition, that of Catholic Irish-Americans in the US. The often tragic history of Ireland is not easily reconciled with the power and glamour of the Kennedy family, but John Kennedy was closer to his immigrant roots than perhaps any other president. That heritage was often evident in his early political career and his rise to the White House. It was necessarily less obvious once he became president of a large and diverse nation. In the final months of his presidency, as he began to set a clearer direction for the nation both at home and abroad, he found time to visit Ireland. This seemingly sentimental journey had a more serious tone as well, as Kennedy recognized the origins of modern Irish nationalism.

This article examines how the Catholic Church has sought over the past 30 years to participate meaningfully in political life and civic dialogue in the US – a nation constitutionally predicated on a strict separation of church and state, but which accommodates compromises, and a society historically hostile to its minority Catholic population.

This article explores the leading analyses of the contemporary situation and future prospects of the Roman Catholic Church in the US today. It suggests an alternative view, and it concludes by discussing the potential impact of Pope Francis I on the contemporary crisis and on the leading analyses of same.