The Other McCain

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Trump Getting 50% of the Catholic Vote

Posted on | September 17, 2020 | 1 Comment

The abortion issue is hurting Biden:

Catholic voters have an opportunity in November to help elect only the second Catholic president in U.S. history in former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, but already the more devout followers are lining up behind President Trump.
Gone are the days when nearly 80% of Catholic voters united to push Irish-Catholic Democrat John F. Kennedy into the White House in 1960. Catholic voters today are split on the 2020 candidates, even though Mr. Biden is a lifelong Mass-attending Catholic, and Mr. Trump is a Presbyterian.
A Pew Research Center poll released last month found that 50% of registered Catholic voters plan to vote for Mr. Trump, while 49% back Mr. Biden.
“The Catholic vote is not a monolithic vote in America,” said Brian Burch, president of the conservative CatholicVote. “We’ve moved away from that kind of tribal, if-he’s-a-Catholic-therefore-I-trust-him view. There are other reasons inside our own church for that as well. It’s not enough to merely say you’re Catholic.”
While Mr. Biden is known for his regular church attendance — he and his wife Jill Biden worship at St. Joseph on the Brandywine in Greenville, Delaware — polls show his supporters within the church tend to be less fastidious in their Sunday habits.
“The more you go to Mass and the more you self-describe as following the church’s teachings, the more likely you are to be voting for Trump,” said EWTN executive editor Matthew Bunson. “If you go to Mass less often and disagree with key teachings, you’re more likely to support Biden.”
About 18% of Catholics say they accept all the church’s teachings, versus 38% who say they accept most of them, and 29% who say they do not accept some key teachings, according to a February EWTN News/RealClearOpinion poll.
“Among Catholics who do practice the faith in a substantive way, yes, there’s been a dramatic shift over the last several decades away from the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party, and I think it’s been especially pronounced under President Trump,” Mr. Burch said.
He cited not only the abortion issue, on which Mr. Trump has been widely described as the most pro-life president ever, but his appeals to “this notion of the importance of place, of country, of patriotism, of family, of meaningful work,” as well as his political grit in the face of opposition.
“His policies are demonstrative proof of his pro-life credentials, but more important, and I increasingly hear this from Catholics, are his fortitude and courage,” Mr. Burch said. “Many Republican administrations in the past have paid lip service to the issue, and while they might be sympathetic to our cause, when things got difficult, they abandoned ship.”
Both camps are making plays for Catholic voters, and for good reason: Not only do they make up 22% of the U.S. electorate, but in nine of the last 10 presidential elections, Catholics voted with the winner, Mr. Bunson said.

Most Americans who identify as “Catholic” are what might be called cultural Catholics — usually people of Irish, Italian or Polish ancestry — who don’t regularly attend services and certainly don’t practice Catholic teachings, or otherwise they’d have six or eight kids. The fact that self-identified Catholic women do not, on average, have significantly more children than other American women tells you all you need to know about the decline of faith. If religious belief does not manifest itself as a behavioral difference from non-believers, then the salt has lost its savour.

To be pro-life is not merely to be anti-abortion. Catholic teaching explicitly condemns artificial contraception, and it is therefore to be expected that self-described Catholics would have far more numerous offspring than non-Catholics. The self-evident failure of Catholics in America to “practice what they preach” is at least as much of a scandal as pedophile priests, and these two scandals are not unrelated. Both are evidence of institutional corruption and being “conformed to this world.”




 

Category: Catholics, Donald Trump, Joe Biden

Comments

One Response to “Trump Getting 50% of the Catholic Vote”

  1. 18 September 2020 – Dark Brightness
    September 17th, 2020 @ 3:18 pm

    […] Most Americans who identify as “Catholic” are what might be called cultural Catholics — usually people of Irish, Italian or Polish ancestry — who don’t regularly attend services and certainly don’t practice Catholic teachings, or otherwise they’d have six or eight kids. The fact that self-identified Catholic women do not, on average, have significantly more children than other American women tells you all you need to know about the decline of faith. If religious belief does not manifest itself as a behavioral difference from non-believers, then the salt has lost its savour. […]