President Obama’s recent speech at Notre Dame was a rare strategic blunder. Until Notre Dame, Mr. Obama had been able to skillfully avoid a confrontation with Catholic conservatives who opposed his vote for partial birth abortion and embryonic stem cell research. During his campaign, the MSM willingly portrayed Obama as a thoughtful liberal Protestant (UCC) sympathetic to Roman Catholics of a similar, liberal bent. At Notre Dame, however, this calculated strategy was unmasked. In what Mr. Obama called “a little controversy,” Catholic voters were exposed to an argument over Roman Catholic theological liberalism as well as to a heated discussion over liberal policy goals that Obama wanted to downplay, if not conceal.
Republicans and Democrats both claim the Roman Catholic vote. Both are wrong. For American Roman Catholics do not vote as a bloc but split their vote almost evenly between Republican and Democratic candidates. In this split, Democrats get secularist and liberal Catholic voters; Republicans get traditional, church-attending Catholics. Thus, Democrats are making inroads only if “Roman Catholic voter” is loosly defined.
If one’s political goal is the vote of salient Catholics – casting the net narrowly -- Republicans win. If the goal is to get the vote of cultural Catholics by casting the net broadly to catch CINOs (Catholics In Name Only) along with practicing Catholics -- Democrats win. In terms of numbers, though, they're both pulling in about the same catch. Whether this proves to be true in the future is anyone's guess.
I'll go out on a limb and predict that today’s “lightly religious” Catholics are tomorrow’s secularists. If this proves to be true, "lightly religious Catholics" are the trailing edge of the Catholic vote. They'll disappear into the growing bloc secular voters who are predominantly Democratic. In the near future, then, what remains of the Catholic vote will be increasingly Republican, like the evangelical Protestant vote is today. But the size of that bloc wil be smaller ... much smaller.
In the 2008 election, a plurality of Catholics voted for Mr. Obama – 54 percent. As a group, Catholics voted like typical American voters. In a Quinnipiac poll taken the week before Mr. Obama’s speech, 70 percent of Catholics who attended mass infrequently supported Notre Dame’s decision to invite the president; in contrast, frequent church-goers were much less likely to agree that Mr Obama was an appropriate choice for a commencement speaker.
Roman Catholic beliefs cluster around
two opposing poles. Traditionalist Catholics are pro-life, liturgy-loving,
priest-obeying (male only), mass-attending Christians who revere the Pope and
try to obey church pronouncements. In 2004, these cultural
conservatives voted three to one for President Bush against Roman Catholic John
Kerry, for example while secular Catholics voted two to one for Mr. Kerry
against incumbent President Bush. The nearly 400,000 people who signed an
online petition against the invitation to speak at Notre Dame mainly came from
this traditional cohort. They are Republican Catholics.
Theological liberals are Catholics eager
to “rethink the canon.” To these left-Catholics, Christian belief is merely a social or
intellectual "construct" which must be re-construed to accommodate
“contemporary realities." Politically, then, it makes sense that liberal Catholics are predominantly pro-choice,
tolerant if not supportive of gay marriage, and believe women, gays and married
couples can be priests. These Catholics vote
Democratic. They're Obama's Catholics. Their vote mirrors that of secularists.
What pollsters don't often discuss is
that the number of
progressive Catholics in the pews is quite small, less than 20
percent of the total, and shrinking. They're not active in the churches. On Sundays, they're on the golf course or catching up on chores -- not in church. In contrast, traditionalist Catholics are growing in both number
and influence within the church, albeit slowly. Traditionalists have clout because they show up. On any given Sunday, if you count those actually sitting in pews, you will count 19 percent liberal Catholics and 63 percent traditionalist Catholics Traditionalism, then, is the face of salient, active Roman Catholics. These are the Catholics who take Catholicism seriously. And it was from this cohort that Obama's recent
speech at Notre Dame was vehemently opposed.
As an Arizonan, I wonder what sort of
impact the Notre Dame speech will have, if any, on our local Roman Catholics. Metrics are hard to find. About
40 percent of Catholics in America are Hispanic and I would assume the percentage of Hispanic Catholics in the Southwest and Arizona is much
higher. Are these Hispanics traditionalist or secularized Catholics? How seriously do they take their
faith? In other words, will
salient Hispanic Catholics follow the broader American trend toward Republican
Party ID?
Some will. In 2004, one-third of Hispanic Catholics told pollsters they were "born again," a phrase often synonymous with a traditional or conservative belief system. Fully 53 percent of Hispanic/Latino Catholics voted for Methodist George Bush in 2004; another 47 percent for John Kerry, the Roman Catholic, Democratic challenger. Republicans campaigned on social issues among these Catholic voters -- against gay/plural marriage and unfettered abortion. Kerry, in contrast, spoke mostly about health and education, issues that pundits said were salient within this cohort. Pundits, again, were wrong. With a socially conservative style and substance, Republicans made gains among Hispanic Catholics. But, again, many Hispanic Catholics are quickly secularizing, following the trends established by Roman Catholic Americans.
This suggests that social issues, at
least among Hispanic Catholic voters, will sharply demarcate the left from
salient Catholics. If there are enough
salient Catholics remaining to make an electoral difference is a question for which I have no answer. But among those of faith, social issues do count. And they count in the Republican column.
Attending mass regularly has become a proxy for Republican ID. In 2000, for instance, Bush won 56 percent of Catholics who attended religious services every week -- Gore won 41 percent. This is significant because the election in 2000 was evenly split between the parties, unlike subsequent elections. Please note, though, that Catholics who attended mass occasionally gave Gore 51 percent of their vote. Thus, there is a strong correlation between Catholic salience and Republican ID.
This is why, four years later, Mr. Obama could not win the majority of Catholic voters who both attended church regularly and maintained a salient faith. This explains the anger within traditional Catholicism toward inviting Mr. Obama to speak at Notre Dame. And this is why Obama lost ground with Catholics, at least those of a salient faith -- church attenders.
I predict this to be the pattern from this point forward -- in national elections, Catholic voters with a more salient faith who attend church regularly will increasingly vote Republican. The secular or those in the process of secularing will vote Democratic. As time progresses, the Republican Party will increasingly appeal to the more religious -- Christian and Jew -- as the Democratic Party becomes the party of seculariists.
