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PDF versionThe Catholic Vote
by Michael Sean Winters on Feb. 21, 2012
My colleague Tom Gallagher has already called attention to Stephen Schneck’s article at CNN about the “Catholic vote.” It is a must-read, examining the distinctions within the category “Catholic” between Latino Catholics, intentional Catholics and cultural Catholics. Schneck is right to insist that the "Catholic vote" be put into the plural if it is to remain a meaningful category within political discourse.
There has long been a debate about whether or not there is a “Catholic vote” anymore. Yesterday, the New Republic ran an article by Ed Kilgore that denied there is such a thing as a Catholic vote, but Kilgore was less convincing than Schneck. As Schneck points out, in the 18th century, immigrant Catholics were overwhelmingly Democratic but this had less to do with national politics than it did with local, machine politics in large urban centers. An immigrant might be met by a family member at Ellis Island, and taken to the ethnic neighborhood that would become their home, introduced to the local priest and the Democratic ward boss. That forged a link that carried over to the national party, which, at the turn of the century was led by William Jennings Bryan who was not a “natural” fit for Catholics and later for Woodrow Wilson who was decidedly anti-Catholic.
As Schneck points out, the Democrats came to embrace the principles of Catholic social teaching on issues like the minimum wage and what was then known as “old age insurance” and what we know as Social Security. These policies cohered both with Catholic ideas and Catholic lives during the long tenure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the postwar era, as Catholics moved to the suburbs, they lost some of their distinctive religious and ethnic ties, and their partisan links to the Democratic Party became more attenuated. Their political decision-making came to reflect their socio-economic status more than their religion and the Democrats embrace of abortion rights in the 1970s was a final push for some to join the GOP. In 1980, the term “Reagan Democrats” was devised to describe longtime Democrats who bolted their party to back the charismatic Reagan, but the term “swing voting Catholics” might have been devised to describe the same cohort of the electorate.
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Social scientists and commentators have argued over the past twenty years of there is any such thing as a Catholic vote and, if there is none, how can it be seen as a swing vote? It is a good question and it should be answered in class Catholic intellectual fashion with a “both/and” rather than an “either/or.” It is true that Catholics as a whole, due to assimilation, now reflect the electorate as a whole. There are conservative Catholics on one side and liberal Catholics on the other. In between, are the Catholic swing voters. What distinguishes Catholics as a religious group in politics, then, is not that they vote as a bloc but that a significant number of them remain up for grabs, which is not necessarily true of other religious cohorts within the electorate.
Let me explain. We know that white evangelicals are going to break for the Republicans by, say, 75% to 25%. (I am dying to meet someone who belongs to that 25% of white evangelicals who vote Democratic!) So, if you are running a campaign for a Democratic candidate, you might be reluctant to run a radio ad the day of the election on Christian radio, reminding people to go to the polls: For every one vote you get for your candidate, you might inspire three voters to vote for the other guy. Conversely, a Republican candidate has little incentive to run a get-out-the-vote ad on a station that targets African-Americans or in a Jewish newspaper. But, campaign strategists do have an interest in targeting those voters in the center of the electorate who might be swayed. The message must be targeted to appeal to those swing voters and, insofar as a lot of them are Catholic and mainstream Protestants, the appeals will likely be inflected with images and ideas that might resonate with Catholics and mainstream Protestants.
Let me give an example of how this can work. When I was working on political campaigns as a speechwriter, I would try to work some quote from the readings at Mass on Sunday into the candidate’s speeches. Those words are already ringing in the ears of your listeners – since the early 1990s, Catholics and most mainstream Protestants have employed a common lectionary, so Catholic, Lutherans, Episcopalians and Methodists all listen to the same readings on Sunday. Rather than having to create a rhetorical meme out of thin air, that you will have to repeat a hundred times before it sticks, if you can quote from the Scripture your listeners already have heard, you strike a chord and create a connection more easily. Most congressional candidates do not have the funds to make weekly television ads, but Team Obama and Team Romney would be well advised to make sure the campaign’s speechwriters and ad makers have a lectionary at hand.
There is one other aspect of Schneck article to which I want to call attention, and that is his idea about distillation being a consequence of disaffection, that is, as some people have drifted away from the Church, for whatever reasons, those who remain do so because they have made a decision to remain within the fold. One of the heartening things about the debate of the HHS mandates and conscience exemptions – and something I hope the bishops noticed – was the obvious fact that Catholics of both the left and the right really love the Church, they really love its colleges and its charities and its hospitals and, even at the cost of publicly disagreeing with a President they like, prominent liberal Catholics rose to defend their Church from what they perceived as a government overreach. To be sure, conservative Catholics continue to dismiss the bishops’ teachings on immigration reform and liberal Catholics continue to dismiss the bishops’ teachings on contraception, but both groups really love the Church, even when they think it is politically quirky and takes stances not to their liking. Schneck’s idea about distillation requires a great deal of study and thought. I think he is really on to something and as the Church continues to navigate what its role in American culture will be, examining why some stay and some go should be a priority for the Church’s leadership.
"QUIRKY" IDOLATRY .........
"QUIRKY" IDOLATRY ......... MSW, what do you mean precisely when you say Catholics "love their Church"? Do they love the pope or the bishops or the buildings? I hope not! Jesus gave little attention to any institution. If anything, Jesus was wary of clerical castes like the Sadducees, the predecessors of our hierarchy. He offered a new way of living life; a new rule to follow.
Over time, Catholics selected leaders to facilitate worship, but it was Jesus' rule that has always remained paramount. These leaders turned things upside down and began selecting themselves, as we saw in the Roman circus last Saturday when a large group of men in red gowns told each other how great they were.
Catholics love Jesus and will listen to those who both repeat and follow His message. Catholics will not listen to those who seek power, abuse children and support wars. Pretty simple, really. I don't think Catholics will be fooled by cynical politicians and their ambitious advisors who sprinkle proof texts from the Lectionary into political speech.
For more detail on this, please read the links and comment, "Santo Subito St. Santorum", readily accessible by clicking on at:
http://ncronline.org/blogs/distinctly-catholic/santorum-theologian-chief
I still want to see the
I still want to see the polling data on whether Catholics who voted for Obama care at all about the recent contraception flap, both originally and how it was resolved. I suspect little impact, since many of those Catholics who voted for him don't go every week and did not hear the letter read. Those who do go every week mostly think for themselves, so I suspect there will be little impact. Obama Catholics certainly won't vote for Santorum either and any evangelicals who are still anti-papist will also stay home if he is the nominee.
“ --- those who remain do so
“ --- those who remain do so because they have made a decision to remain within the fold.”
Have you heard of intertia? A body in motions tends to stay in motion. A body at rest tends to stay at rest. And a pew potato has learned to sleep through most of it, while watching her/his watch in anticipation of the parking lot rumble before brunch.
How is "old-age
How is "old-age assistance"/Social Security consistent with the commandement "Honor thy Father and Mother" and the catholic principle of subsidiarity when we let the state do the honoring and subsidizing?
What is the faithful,
What is the faithful, healthy, and morally acceptable alternative to contraception?
Natural Family Planning.
Information and resource links can be found here:
http://allhands-ondeck.blogspot.com/2012/02/benefits-of-natural-family-p...
These discussions imply that
These discussions imply that the teaching against artificial birth control is a central teaching of Roman Catholicism. It is not. The Catholic Church in the Decree on Ecumenism explains there is a "hierarchy of truths" in which the primary focus is on the "foundation of faith" in Christ Jesus. Try this comment about the "hierarchy of truths" from the JWG of Centro Pro Unione:
According to the official reason (ratio) in Modus 49 for the introduction
of the phrase, the importance and the "weight" of truths differ because o
their specific links with the mystery of Christ and the history of
salvation.(7) . . .On the other hand, in the continuing response of
faith to revelation by God's pilgrim people, one sees an ordering of
truth which has been influenced by the historical and cultural contexts
of time and place. These varied responses in faith to revelation have
resulted in different orderings and emphases in the doctrinal expressions
of various churches in their various historical periods, and of groups
and even of individuals within churches.
http://www.pro.urbe.it/diaint/jwg/doc/e_jwg-n6_7.html
And this we are to delineate with charity, truth and humility.
I do not see the humility nor the careful distinctions re centrality and importance of teachings in this debate. Nor do I see acknowledgement that such issues as contraception do not have the same weight in European countries with large Catholic populations--or in fact, in Latin and Central America. It simply is not true that only American Catholics have differed with Vatican teaching on birth control.
The shadow side of Catholicism has been prominent in recent weeks with the all-male panels seemingly obsessed with female behavior. Science has been jettisoned--e.g. are IUDs really abortifacient?--along with the data that 58% of birth control prescriptions medicate potentially life-altering (and fertility-infirming) gynecological conditions.
The Church has never really come to terms with its inquisitional past regarding women and, John Paul II's millennial commitments not withstanding, has been loathe to repent of sins of religious coercion directed at women or religious minorities such as Jews or other Christians.
At the Second Vatican Council the Church used a very different language than it ever had before, says John W. O'Malley in What Really Happened at Vatican II, regarding the Church in the modern world. It was hopeful, inspiring, theologically grounded language which respected the freedom of Christian believers and brother and sister Catholics. It was the new style of language, O'Malley insists, which launched a Church-wide renewal.
In this debate we see Catholics developing their own heresiologies and voting each other off the island. That critique goes for Prof. Schneck's analysis. I do not find myself in any of his categories and I suspect that many other Catholics would not.
In 1997 NCR ran an article about the Vatican's guidelines for confessors on the birth control issues. Confessors were told not to bring up the issue. The Vatican pointed out that many people did not agree with the Church teaching and attributed "invincible ignorance" to those who in conscience disagreed. Although the Vatican did not give ground on its principles, there was a pastoral "live-and-let-live" mode which, in effect, acknowledged internal disagreement and hoped for conversion over time.
Where the heck is that Church? And where is the Church that has acknowledged with other Christians that we are saved by grace through faith, not by our own righteousness? Some Catholics and some Evangelicals seem to be going against their own teachings in this respect and much to the detriment of Christianity.
On the NCR website lay Catholics despair of their voices being heard. I believe those in disagreement with the U.S. bishops are holy as well. These are the people who have married and raised children and thereby engaged in a differing kind of asceticism. No bishop will ever stay up nightly with a chronically ill infant and minister to other children during the day. No bishop will ever train for labor,give birth or nurse a child--or indeed, bury one. Women,mothers and men who are biological fathers have a very different experience of piety, sacrifice and self-emptying.
One of the things you learn when you raise children is that while God has no limits, you the human parent have quite a few. Part of a blessed family life involves acknowledging what you as a parent and marital partner can and cannot do, and what needs commending to the wisdom of God.
The bishops as teachers in the Church should be willing to serve the servants of God and listen to Catholic women's stories of their own prayerful discernments--made together with their husbands, in light of their own physical, emotional and spiritual limitations.
As I recall, the last bishop who listened to women, Archbishop Rembert Weakland, said he learned a lot--although the Vatican was quite critical of the undertaking. But in his autobiography Archbishop Weakland said he had learned the most from African-American women and Latinas. Ever the optimist,he commended the transcripts to Catholics for study.
What kind of a Church do we have now in which listening to Catholic women at-large is viewed as an insubordinate, even heretical act?
The wisdom of many a bishop has been not to denounce but rather to inspire. May the U.S. Catholic bishops revisit inspiration and turn away from apparent indifference to the voices of Catholic women.
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