As one might expect in an election year, Zogby made an obvious application to Catholic voters. “They're voting as veterans, as members of an ethnic group or a union, or according to the region they live in as their primary identity,” he told an audience at the Catholic University of America. Only farther down the line, he said, do Catholics “vote as Catholics.”
This tendency to put secular identity ahead of religious identity expresses itself in various ways. Something I recently wrote about President Bush, the pope, and the United Nation elicited an angry response from a reader who demanded to know how “our saintly pope” could possibly side with the wicked UN against an American President.
It also works the other way. Whenever I make the obvious point that Democratic stands on issues like abortion, human cloning, and homosexual unions conflict with Catholic moral teaching, I can count on letters and e-mails from angry Catholic Democrats calling me a Republican stooge.
While there are a number of reasons for the state of affairs Zogby was describing, the fundamental reason pretty clearly has to do with the cultural assimilation of American Catholics. And, although assimilation accelerated greatly in the last half-century or so, it's hardly new.
Back in 1916 the Harvard philosopher George Santayana published an article in The New Republic bearing the provocative title “The Alleged Catholic Danger.” In fact, Santayana wrote, contrary to secular liberal anxieties in his day, Catholics posed no threat to American secular values precisely because those values eventually would work as a “solvent” to dissolve the very distinctiveness of Catholics that liberals found so abrasive.
Obviously, it's not a bad thing for Catholics to subscribe to many secular values. For instance, according to Zogby, American Catholics today expect a high degree of accountability on the part of Church leaders. That, one readily agrees, is as it should be.
Clearly troubling, though, are findings like these: only 29% of Catholics between the ages of 18 and 29 think Jesus rose bodily from the dead; and only 48% of this age group believe there is something special about the Catholic Church that is not found in other faiths. Not to put too fine a point on it, it's hardly clear in what meaningful sense people who think that way can be called Catholics any longer.
The current realities of American politics reflect the same set of phenomena. Consider the prominence of “pro-choice” Catholic politicians. A large and growing problem for the Church for three decades, this now may be heading for a dramatic escalation as the Democratic Party moves to choose one of this breed, Sen. John Kerry, as its presidential candidate, while bishops here and there begin taking steps to address the issue of scandal.
Beyond the politicians are the voters. By now, the pattern is clear. Catholics who go to church weekly or more often tend to vote for candidates who take traditional stands on social issues. Culturally assimilated Catholics who seldom or never go to church tend to vote for candidates on the opposite side of these same issues. As both parties are aware, the yawning gulf between these two groups of Catholics may be a crucial factor in November.
Russell Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, D.C. You can email him at RShaw10290@aol.com.
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