Posted on 08/20/2014 6:25:11 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Yes, non-churchgoing Catholics should be included in those who supported Obama if the same criteria is being used for other people too. And Catholics themselves don’t focus primarily on one’s personal relationship to Jesus to decide if one is Catholic or not. Being a Catholic begins with baptism, usually as an infant, and also has far more to do with family identification and culture for that reason. For over 40 years I lived in a city that’s 77% Catholic (Buffalo, NY), and I can vouch that “lapsed Catholics” tended to consider themselves Catholic, unless they altogether left Catholicism for another belief, including atheism, and despite not “practicing,” at different times in their lives where religion was appropriate (like marriage, “First Communion,” confirmation for teens, and funerals), they turned to the Catholic Church. They also had a Catholic understanding of Christianity, which they tended to bring to life (Buffalo, a highly liberal Democratic place, was and is post-Christian and largely antagonistic to anything more than a moderate amount of faith - anything more is commonly seen as zealotry). And, too, “lapsed Catholics” tend to remain tied to the Catholic Church if they don’t embrace another belief through their family ties. Overall, there is an undeniable connection between heavily Catholic (or Catholic heritage, if you will) areas and voting Democrat, just as there is between heavily evangelical areas and voting Republican.
It’s true that non-church going Catholics voted for Obama but this is precisely why it shouldn’t be said that “Catholics voted for Obama” because this implies that true, real Catholics (the ones who obey all church teaching) also voted for him.
However as you correctly pointed out, so many who really aren’t Catholic consider themselves so, and these did indeed vote for him as well as anything “Democrat” really. Sadly the need for social justice has supplanted all other church teaching in the minds of such people. Many are also big union types.
It’s so difficult to actually demonstrate this division that I’ve given up fighting when people say “Catholics voted for Obama” because ultimately, to a non-Catholic, who’s to say they are wrong? A Catholic like me? It comes across as self-serving, ultimately, to those who are not willing to believe there can be people who claim to be Catholic to their last dying breath. But in reality are not.
Just know though, that to true Catholics the claim and the reality behind it are equally abhorrent.
Well, respectfully, I think you’re missing the point. Say, for instance, if those people only think they’re Catholic, as you say, is that their fault, or are they not getting certain truths from your church? Isn’t it the case that if Nancy Pelosi and Ted Kennedy can be Catholics in good standing, that if they hold similar beliefs they should be able to be, too? Also, there’s your liberal, abortion-supporting nuns and people like Father Pfleger in Chicago. Like Paul wrote, “a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.” To the Catholic Church, Nancy Pelosi is a part of the body of Christ, but Christians who believe the whole Bible and believe in the Gospel, aren’t.
I think a number of things about this column, and the Brown shooting and the aftermath. Above all, I believe what Proverbs says about the Lord hating when, knowingly, the innocent are convicted and the guilty are set free. In the Trayvon Martin case, the media coverage and even some of the government actions taken were so unjust that it almost made it too difficult to sort out the actual facts. I spent a lot of time on the internet talking to people, or trying to, about the facts of the case because I was concerned about all the misinformation being put out.
But also because I’m a Christian and believe the Lord requires me to pursue justice to the best of my ability, I have to say that there is quite a lot of open racism on the right, which comes out whenever something like this happens. I was disappointed to see WorldNetDaily, for example, which I respect quite a lot, also engage in some racism by offering as one choice in a poll on who is to blame in Ferguson, “the little white police department.”
All the racism I see on the right troubles me because in recent years I’ve gotten to know many black people on a personal level and some are good friends. That only happened fairly recently, though, because I lived in Buffalo, NY, most of my life, and it is also is a very segregated place, like St. Louis County is said to be. New York State has the most segregated schools in the country, which also means segregated neighborhoods, and that was my experience. I grew up in one of the suburbs, with just a few black children and no Hispanics that I recall, and until I was 36 (I’m 44 now), I never knew one black or Hispanic person on a personal level. I still might not, but the Lord threw me into such difficulties that I collected public assistance for a time and then went to work in a couple of factory jobs, and also couldn’t afford a car so I needed to take the bus. But I’m very grateful for those difficulties that the Lord had me go through, because otherwise I believe I would now have the type of life which my university education and the life I’d started to live as a lesbian would be expected to lead to.
And from the changes brought by my difficulties I also began to meet and get to know many black people, including some of them closely, as I said. I also have moved to the Bible belt, to one of the most integrated states. In fact, I’m writing right now from a very nice library in the “black section” of town, where both the patrons and staff are a racial mix, and every time I’m here I see white soccer moms with young children, so they can’t be afraid of coming here. And I started coming to this library without knowing at first that the surrounding neighborhood was predominantly black. I take the bus but didn’t pay attention to the scenery, and the side streets the bus goes down would look to a white person from Buffalo to be white suburbs, yet I can confirm now that most people I see living in the area are black. And in all my daily dealings lately with black people, including many at work, I haven’t detected that they want to or do harbor resentment and rage against white people for what happened in Missouri. I would not say that race is no longer an issue here, but the personal relationships between people of different races that most people seem to have certainly discourage both blacks and white from being hostile to friends of a different skin color because of what happened in Missouri. Or another way to put it is that as far as I’ve seen a great many people do just look at things as involving race in one way or another, but that it’s more important to look at people as individuals.
So, as a Christian who has gotten to know and care about a lot of black people, I hope the truth is established in Missouri, but know the Lord will take care of it, and I hope and pray that Christians who are white will also stop tolerating racism, because I know it isn’t right and is a most unchristian way to treat other people.
He was 18. Old enough to enlist and be sent into harm's way. Just like many other 18 year old have been. I don't see her going on about their deaths. The brave young men we've lost protecting our freedom, protecting the rights of the rioters and looters and those making fools of themselves over a dead thug. Those brave young men weren't children. Neither was this thug.
White Catholics vote in roughly the same way as White Mainline (non-Evangelical) Protestants. They were a little less for McCain and a little more for Romney, but neither group actually favored Obama. In other words, Catholics who've been here a while have assimilated and vote pretty much the same way as their Protestant neighbors do.
Seeing the son you raised turn into violent thug.
As *old line*, *mainstream* Protestants do. Evangelicals are MUCH more conservative.
Yes, but years ago there weren’t that many Evangelicals living where Catholics did. All that came as something of a surprise when Carter got elected in the 70s. Of course a lot has changed since then — people moved around more, Evangelicals became a more prominent part of American life — but basically, where I live, Catholics came to mirror the views of the largely mainstream non-Evangelical Protestants they lived among. So opinions like the writer’s aren’t a Catholic so much as an American, or if you like, a “Blue state” thing.
And I have one more thought to add as well. For awhile now I’ve been wondering if the divide between Catholics and other Christians has anything to do with racial segregation in our country. It doesn’t need to be said that most black people aren’t Catholic and there are relatively few Catholics in the U.S. who are. As I said, I come from Buffalo, which is 77% Catholic and highly segregated, and if you look at heavily Catholic areas racial segregation also seems high. The Northeast in general has been reported to have the most segregated schools, and is highly Catholic. Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, all well-known for their “ghettoes” but also highly Catholic and highly segregated. This incident happened in St. Louis County, which is the highly Catholic part of a state that isn’t highly Catholic. And Obama won St. Louis County yet it’s said to be highly segregated. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, another highly Catholic area, some white citizens are trying to break away from it in order to form a city that’s mostly white for the sake of schools.
The questions I’ve had, then, is if the divide between Catholics and other Christians has contributed to racial segregation, and if so, how has it and how much has it. I’m an evangelical Christian who believes that the Catholic Church is in the wrong on a number of things, but my beliefs on Catholic doctrine aren’t the way in which these questions came up for me. During the 2012 election, some liberals starting talking about racism in the South as Rick Santorum started winning there, and the liberals talking about it included people at the Guardian, who seemed to think that racism in America was a Southern thing. I did some digging then and found the U.K. itself is over 90% white, and also started looking at Northern racism, and how much of it exists in strongly Democratic states. Now more recently I’ve looked at segregation in highly Catholic areas, that also happen to be strongly Democratic areas.
Yes.
There’s a fluff story floating around that goes through the 50 states naming the top four religious traditions. Pretty much any state where mainstream Protestants and Catholics are over-represented (compared with national averages) leans Democrat to varying degrees.
Like it or not, America’s Progressive tradition is an outgrowth of Protestant Christian spiritual ‘Great Awakenings’. Catholicism, by definition, doesn’t leave much room for a spiritually-based change in social outlook.
I listen to Catholic radio quite a bit and the other day it was Patrick Madrid, I believe, who said that probably during the 70’s most of the American Catholic leadership were Democrats. It would not surprise me, though, if many today were also. And the Catholic Church has also embraced the world much more than evangelicals have, although with evangelicals that’s changing for the worse now, too. Catholicism rejects Genesis as history and believes in evolution, and instead of the Bible as moral guide it has believed in looking at things to determine right and wrong. So if a Hollywood movie carries antichristian messages and values throughout it but manages to have a worldly good defeats evil message, the Catholic church will approve of it. You are also hard-pressed to find spiritual counseling because one’s problems are thought to be psychological in nature, and the spiritual is only thought of as a last resort, if that. Catholics are also not a tiny minority in America but the largest denomination and in a great many places the largest by numbers when Christians are considered according to Catholics, mainline Protestants, and evangelicals.
One recent poll dealt with what cities were most and least Bible-minded, and that heavily corresponded to Republican and Democratic areas.
If ‘Bible-minded’ means evangelical, yes indeed.
The reality is that we’ve reached a point where only a very specific belief in Biblical morality can even yield common sense. The culture no longer conveys any such sense indirectly.
The culture simply worships mere naked power without thought of transcendent right and wrong.
According to survey, they asked people if they had read the Bible in the last week, and if they strongly believed that the principles in the Bible were true. Based on that, the South was the most Bibleminded, and I believe something like the top ten were all there. The Northeast was the was the worst, with some cities at 10% and they had most if not all of the top ten least Bibleminded. New York City, maybe the most influential city in the world, was at 18.8% (I just went and refreshed my memory on this). Next on the least Bibleminded was the West, and the Barna group report on the study says there was an “outlier” with Cedar Rapids, Iowa, also scoring extremely low. Looking at the religious profile of the city, though, the low score isn’t surprising: Catholic 40.8%, United Methodist 13.1 , Evangelical Lutheran Church of America 9.9, Lutheran Church 5.6, Presbyterian Church (USA) 5.0.
Without knowing the study’s methodology, New York City may not be as low as expected because of the high concentration of religious Jews.
Would reading the Koran count?
She assumes “facts” not in evidence, ignores or down plays other “facts” that don't fit the narrative she apparently desires.
We don't know whether or not the officer is guilty of inappropriate use of force. That is a decision belonging only to the jury who hears the case.
She is violating one of the first principles of civil rights: the presumption of innocence. The officer and the dead man are both presumed innocent at this point.
Rumor and counter rumor are not evidence. I'll wait for the real trial, not this media circus.
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