Why are Catholics Democrats?

The Secular Right ^ | October 30, 2009 | David Hume

[Alex Murphy]

Norman Podhortez just came out with a book, Why Are Jews Liberals?. It seems that this as intellectually interesting as writing a book, “Why are blacks Democrats?”, would be. You can tick off specific reasons, but in ethnic terms American liberalism and the Democratic party is a minoritarian coalition. To some extent it has been true since the recruitment of the Irish in the urban North in the early 19th century as allies with the outnumbered partisans of slave power. In fact The American Jewish Identity Survey tells us that once Jews become Christian, they aren’t so liberal. Here are the percentage of Republicans by Jewish subgroup:

Jews by ethnic origin & religion – 13%
Jews by ethnic origin, irreligious – 13%
Jewish by ethnic origin, “Other religion,” which is mostly Christian – 40%

Jews of other religion are also less intelligent than the other two groups, 36% college graduates vs. 57% for Jews who are religious and irreligious.

In any case, if Norman Podhoretz wants Jews to become Republican, he should encourage conversion to Christianity. Specifically, Protestant Christianity. Look what rock-ribbed Republicans Jim Talent and Marvin Olasky became. And don’t even talk about Howard Phillips, he wants to bring back to the inquisition for idolaters and pagans!

But I come not to talk of Jews, but of Catholics. As I said, the rise of the Democratic party as we know it was to a great extent concomitant with the first waves of Irish Catholic immigrants to Northern cities. The historical details of this are well known, so I won’t go into it, but to some extent the ties still are operative. According to the exit polls, last fall Barack Obama won 47% of white Catholics. He only won 34% of white Protestants! This is still a large difference.

Some of this might be accounted for my region and ethnicity (e.g., Italians and Northeasterners are more likely to be Catholic). So I looked in the GSS. There’s a variable “ETHNIC,” which asks where one’s ancestors came from. I wanted to look at a few groups, especially ones where the sample size wasn’t too small, and where there were likely to be Catholics and Protestants. So

1) French, who are those whose ancestors come from French Canada or France

2) German, whose ancestors come from German or Austria

3) British, whose ancestors are from England, Wales or Scotland

4) Mexican, whose ancestors come from Mexico

5) American Indian, whose ancestors come from Mother Earth’s union with Coyote

Some of these groups, such as Germans, had Protestant and Catholic cohorts from the beginning. By contrast, Mexican Americans have a large Protestant contingent through conversion (though some indigenous immigrants from Chiapas were converted in Mexico). American Indians were targeted by both Protestants and Catholics. Finally, though Huguenots have been prominent in the American aristocracy (Franklin Delano Roosvelt’s mother was a Huguenot, as were the ancestors of many Southern low country planters), I assume most Protestant French Americans arrived at their religion through conversion on these shores.

I also limited the sample to 1992 and later to have some contemporary relevance.

Then I compared these classes to two categories, political ideology and political party. I created an “index” of liberalism and Democratic orientation, so that I simply multiplied the frequency in each class by an integer. Ergo:

Index of liberalism = (% liberal) X 2 + (% moderate) X 1 + (% conservative) X 0
Index of Demo orientation = (% Democrat) X 2 + (% Independent) X 1 + (% Republican) X 0

So an index of liberalism of 1 means perfect balance, while below 1 means somewhat conservative, and above 1 means somewhat liberal (2 being all liberal). The same for Democrats. Then I took the ratio of Catholics to Protestants by their indices.

Liberalism Index
	French	German	Mexican	British	American Indian
Protestant	0.88	0.73	0.85	0.68	0.83
Catholic	0.86	0.8	0.96	0.93	0.85
Catholic/Protestant Ratio	0.97	1.1	1.13	1.37	1.02
Democratic Index
	French	German	Mexican	British	American Indian
Protestant	0.9	0.77	1.06	0.77	1.08
Catholic	1.07	0.88	1.32	0.95	1.37
Catholic/Protestant Ratio	1.19	1.13	1.24	1.24	1.26

What you see here is clear: Catholics remain more Democratic than their Protestant brethren. Some of this might be regional, but the effect seems to still show up if I constrain by region (though in some cases it does dampen a fair amount). The sample sizes for American Indians was small, but the party identification difference is outside of 95% confidence intervals.

Specific hypotheses? For Mexican Americans there are many reasons that Catholics are more likely to be Democrats. They’re probably a higher proportion of immigrants, and less assimilated and integrated into American society than Protestants. Protestants are mostly converts, and conversion will presumably be more likely for those who engage and interface with the majority Protestant society more often. The other groups are a bit more confused. The people of British origin are ancestrally mostly Protestant. Those who are Catholic today, whether through intermarriage or conversion, are different politically from those who remain Protestant. I suspect it has to do with a bias in terms of the type of person who would convert to a minority religion, or marry into a minority religion (Orestes Brownson was a nut). In regards to the Germans, only a minority of Protestant Germans are Lutheran (though some German immigrants were likely of Reformed persuasion, these would be a minority), rather, they’re well distributed across Protestant denominations. This suggests to me a high degree of assimilation and integration. By contrast, the Roman Catholic German population was an organized redoubt of anti-assimilationist fervor down to World War I, a fact which drove Irish American Roman Catholic clerics such as John Ireland crazy. As for the French Americans, I suspect that a more thorough process occurred with them that is occurring with Mexican Americans. I have read that the minority of Japanese Americans who adhere to the Buddhist Church in America are somewhat more ostentatious in maintaining their Japanese cultural traditions (e.g., language) than their co-ethnics who have converted to Christianity. I see no reason why this wouldn’t be true of Catholics (the majority of people of Irish descent today in the United States are Protestant, but I suspect they’re less obviously “Irish” in their cultural markers in part because of their religious break from tradition). Despite modern America’s Protestantization of Catholicism, just a few generations ago being of a non-Protestant faith was profoundly alienating from the mainstream (see Catholicism and American Freedom: A History).

I’m not presenting this to suggest that Catholics are inherently liberal or Democratic. The differences are not that extreme, though they seem robust and significant. But it is somewhat ironic in light of the role of Roman Catholic intellectuals at the highest reaches of the conservative movement, particularly at publications such as National Review. No, as I said, I suspect that Catholic adherence to the Left party out of the expected range of their demographic otherwise is a function of their minority status. Similarly, the small number of French Protestants who remained after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes were suspiciously well represented among French radicals involved in the Revolution which overthrew the ancien regime which had oppressed and marginalized them so. Obviously there’s nothing necessarily revolutionary about French Protestantism, rather, Catholicism was the customary and traditional religion of the French nation, and so it bespoke a streak of nonconformity to remain true to the Calvinist faith in France after the cessation of toleration for said faith.

[Trapped Behind Enemy Lines]

Well...anyone can play with numbers.

My guess is that if you could somehow factor out hispanics and nominal Catholics (CINOs) from the Catholic voting base, MR probabably got closer to 70% of the Catholic vote, around the same level he got from white evangelical voters.

[ansel12]

More silliness, are they voting democrat because of economics or what? Other than seeming to express some sort of desperation, your efforts are silly.

[ansel12]

Only baptized members of the Catholic denomination who are Catholics, are counted as Catholics, and Catholic isn’t a race, and it didn’t just start voting democrat recently, it is the way they have always voted.

[dead]

Is that how the Catholic vote turned California permanently democrat, is that why the democrats pray for Catholic immigration to conquer Texas?

No. That would be your Mexicans. Overwhelmingly Catholic, those Mexicans.

[ex-snook]

"your efforts are silly."

Why do you consider this silly? "And the GOP has nominated a Catholic for President exactly zero times in our entire history."

[Trapped Behind Enemy Lines]

White Catholics have been voting consistently GOP since the days of JFK as have white voters in general.

[ansel12]

It’s the economy, stupid.

So the economic argument is dismissed, and now you shift to saying Catholics vote pro-abortion and pro-gay, because the GOP hasn't nominated a Catholic for president.

One of the few times in history that the Catholic vote went republican, was in 2004, how does that fit into your new theory?

[ansel12]

White Catholics have been voting consistently GOP since the days of JFK as have white voters in general.

Racial purity concerns of some Catholics aside.

The Protestant vote has only gone democrat 3 times, while the Catholic vote has only gone republican about 5 times.

Race isn't the factor, and the denomination is not based on race, and we are importing millions of Catholics.

[ansel12]

Even Hispanics move to voting more pro-life conservative, when they switch from the Catholic denomination, to attending a different denomination.

[ex-snook]

A bunch of reasons why Catholics vote Democrat, read them all, include also why should they voted for Romney or McCain?

[ansel12]

Your passion in defending and even promoting the democrat voter, is something to see, it is all over the board, even contradictory, but in the end, all your arguments do seem geared to defending voting pro-abortion, pro-gay, pro-government democrat.

[Vaquero]

I know Buffalo....spent months there in the late 60s....it would be as you say.

[Trapped Behind Enemy Lines]

Race IS the factor. All things being equal. If Demographics had not changed dramatically since 1980, Romney would have won in a landslide in 2012 just simply by carrying the white vote by 20%. As whites continue shrink in the electoracte, so do GOP fortunes. The Democrats have won the popular vote in the last 5 out of six elections, no doubt largely to changing demographics, and an electorate more interested in getting free stuff and less concerned about higher taxes and deficit spending.

[x]

WHITE Catholics voted for MR over BHO by 59% to 40% in the last election. Nearly identical to the overall white population.

True.

Voting behavior in the US is more determined by racial ID and than it is by religious ID.

Or by geography as well. White Catholics and non-evangelical White Protestants vote mostly the same way. White Catholics went a little more for Romney last time and a little more for Obama the time before that, but by and large in areas without large evangelical or fundamentalist populations, Catholics vote like their Protestant neighbors.

What throws things off is first of all the non-White vote. Latinos are a larger percentage of the Catholic population than Blacks are of the Protestant population so this skews Catholic numbers to the Democrats. Secondly, White Evangelical Protestants -- especially Southerners -- have been voting much more heavily for Republicans than the rest of the country in recent decades so this skews the Protestant numbers to the Democrats.

If there's anything more to it than that, it's that groups that consider or once considered themselves to be outsiders trend a little more to the left than groups the consider or consider themselves to be the mainstream. That's true of African-Americans, Jews, Latinos, and Asians in the US, Catholics in Britain and Australia, and Protestants in France.

There is still in some Catholics a feeling of being or having been outsiders that makes Catholics a little more likely to vote Democrat than Protestants living in the same area and under the same circumstances. Given that we all have our quirks, is it really worth making a big deal about that?

[ansel12]

The Catholic denomination isn’t a race, it is a church denomination.

A denomination that has almost always voted democrat, a denomination that only recently got large numbers of non-whites, a denomination that is being imported by the millions.

Even in 2012, ignoring the history and 2008, the new defense of importing millions of more Catholics is that the white portion moved right in a year of almost economic depression, and in a year when the failed democrat incumbent was being labelled as in a “War against the Catholic church”, that isn’t much to cling to, and it is meaningless anyway, because all that matters is how Catholics vote, the effect of the Catholic vote on American politics.

When Catholics, whether white or Hispanic switch to a non-Catholic denomination, they start voting against the democrats, even the Hispanic non-Catholic-Christian vote, is close to a 50/50 vote.

[ex-snook]

FYI I have never voted for a Democrat for President. The last 5 elections I voted third party and intend to do it again. Both of them have exported our economy and we have a recession. I was hoping Palin, Paul or Cruz would champion American nationalism but that isn’t happening.

I think you mean well but you are misinformed about Catholics. I’ll pray for you.

[A CA Guy]

Many are not, but the ignorant or ones connected to union jobs and their families often are for the money IMO.

[ansel12]

So you don’t vote republican either, most Catholics don’t, and haven’t during the history of America.

[metmom]

I’m still back on occasion to visit as I still have family there and follow the goings on there.

It hasn’t changed at all.

[ansel12]

The Catholic vote is pretty much the same it has always been.

The left counts on importing millions of Catholic voters from the most Catholic nations in the world, and Catholics don’t seem to care.

Here we are on a conservative political site, and we get all kinds of acrobatics to prevent discussing a left voting major church denomination and what it is doing to our conservative goals.