HERE IS AN interesting and nuanced analysis of the "Catholic vote" which comes to the conclusion that the "Catholic vote" isn't really very Catholic in its character or stated motives in supporting the embodied moral wasteland that is Trump.
In the aftermath of Donald Trump's decisive presidential win, two sobering trends about politics and religion are becoming clear: Religion doesn't seem to motivate Catholic voters, nor do views about abortion, an issue Catholic Church leaders have made a priority for decades.
Trump's improved numbers with Catholics may put to rest the narrative of an evenly divided Catholic electorate. Yet despite movement toward Catholic majority support of the GOP, the election results paint a picture of an American church more fractured than ever, according to analysts who spoke to the National Catholic Reporter.
Exit polling confirmed a persistent shift of white Catholics toward the Republican Party, with two surveys showing 61% of white Catholic voters voting for Trump. Overall, as many as 58% of Catholic voters opted for Trump in this election, compared to the 50% of Catholics who chose him in 2020 — an eight-point swing. A pre-election poll by NCR also found Catholic voters in swing states, especially white Catholics, favoring Trump.
These numbers extend the trend of Catholics almost always supporting the presidential winner.
But Catholics have not voted as a predictable bloc since the 1960s. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne famously characterized the pattern of Catholic swing voters with his assertion that, "There is no 'Catholic vote.' And yet, it matters."
Now Dionne sees an even "less distinctly Catholic vote than there used to be," he told NCR. "In a lot of ways, white Catholic voters are behaving like other white voters are."
This next passage matches what was and is my major suspicion about both the plurality NOT THE MAJORITY of those who voted, by a very small percentage, voted for Trump, and those who, as in 2016, didn't bother to vote but who had voted for Obama and Biden. I THINK THE PREDOMINANT ISSUE IN THE LOSS OF THE SECOND WOMAN TO HAVE RUN AS THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION IS THAT A DECISIVE PLURALITY OF VOTERS WILL NOT RUN FOR A WOMAN WHO CAN WIN. I would not add the Harris vote to the spoiler vote for Jill Stein in that regard because no one who voted for Stein believed she would win. It was that stupidest of stupid things, a "protest vote" in which the actual candidate didn't matter. You'd have to be as stupid as a Green Party member to vote for Jill Stein believing it would have any other effect other than to elect a Republican-fascist.
Trump's gains among men of all races and ethnicities also tracks with the growing gender gap in Christianity, which reverses a decades-long trend of women being more involved with faith and religion than men. Burge believes that men who are uncomfortable with progressive social issues might find it more acceptable to attribute their beliefs to religion than to racism, xenophobia or homophobia.
But note, their religion didn't come into play when a straight, rich, white man was exposed, in court cases AND BY HIS OWN WORDS as a sexual abuser., a rapist, a crook and all round scoundrel. Such is the quality of such "religion" that ends up doing that.
I have to wonder how much of that can be said of the white evangelicals who also and even more notoriously support the most blatantly and aggressively anti-Christian and clearly culturally and creedally non-Christian president in our history.* One who attacks, brutalizes, calls for violence and discrimination and oppression against the least among us, including widows, orphans and the stranger living among us. One who encouraged hatred of our neighbors, especially if they aren't white and who has heaped false witness on so many it's impossible to come up with even a representative list.
Pope Francis may have inadvertently given some Catholics permission to vote for Trump by equating the two candidates as both "against life" — Harris for her stance on abortion and Trump for his on immigration. The pope urged U.S. Catholics to use their consciences to determine the "lesser of two evils."
Yet neither issue was named as the primary issue of Catholic voters. Instead, like voters as a whole, Catholics put economic concerns at the top of their list.
The article continues on what the media presents as the quintessential "Catholic" issue:
Yet neither issue was named as the primary issue of Catholic voters. Instead, like voters as a whole, Catholics put economic concerns at the top of their list.
Abortion not galvanizing voters
Voters sent a contradictory message on the issue of abortion. In the 10 states where abortion was literally on the ballot in the form of state constitutional amendments, measures that protected or expanded abortion access won in seven states. It would also have prevailed in an eighth, Florida — where the amendment won support from 57% of voters, but Florida requires a 60% threshold, rather than a simple majority, to amend its constitution.
In the states where abortion expansion initiatives failed, Catholic dioceses and other organizations had poured millions of dollars into opposition groups. Yet in four of the seven states where voters expanded abortion access, majorities also voted for Trump.
"A lot of people went to the ballot box and voted for Trump and to increase abortion access," said Burge.
And at least some of these pro-choice Trump voters were Catholic. Polls consistently show, as did NCR's, that a majority of Catholics support legal abortion in all or most cases.
"Despite everything the bishops have tried to do to make abortion the Catholic issue, the public opinion polls show Catholics are pretty much the same as everybody else on abortion," Jesuit Fr. Thomas Reese observed in a post-election event sponsored by Georgetown University.
I am ever more skeptical that a population that lives in a media saturated, post-literate, post rational, post-truth state can maintain a democracy and our country and, increasingly, tottering democracies around the world seem to be experiencing the same thing. I would add the poisonous extreme notion of libertarian liberty mixed in with that as a powerful help for those already with power, through wealth, through race, through gender, to lord it over everyone else. Such a "democracy" may have elections, even elections that accurately measure the vote of those who are permitted and encouraged to vote and be an oppressive, subjugating oligarchy, as the antebellum South was and so many other states were, in reality. That should certainly not be a surprise, just about every one of the most oppressive dictatorships and oligarchies in the modern world go through an exercise of voting and they never change their character. As I've pointed out, that's what the United States was, by law, by court decision, before the Voting Rights Act was passed and implemented, only to have the Constitutional order destroy that one thing that, along with the 19th Amendment, made the country, for the first time, something approaching a real democracy.
It certainly doesn't surprise me that Catholics don't vote and act on the basis of Catholic social teaching and the Gospels, following those costs those who follow them. I am not surprised that as white Catholics become more affluent and mainstream that they fall for the same corruptions as have characterized American politics, law and society for most of our history. If the bishops, cardinals, even Pope Francis had those foremost in mind they would be shocked at the morals of most Catholics, those making the most gaudy display of their Catholicism among the most immoral of their "faith."
I have less and less faith in the official Catholic Church as I have more confidence in the dissidents, those who belong to Catholic radical and progressive groups, those who hold unofficial, vernacular masses and Eucharists, the Roman Catholic Women Priests movement. I have a lot more faith in the missionary Church in the third world than I do the Church anywhere in the affluent world. That is not the majority of the Catholic Church in America who I don't have any more hope or faith in than I do the Southern Baptists, the Mormons or those who go to variety-show, night-club "churches."
Another thing is that the "Roevember" that some Democrats pinned their hopes on with all their hearts was largely an illusion, when it came to rationally voting for the candidate who would codify Women's ownership of their bodies and appoint Supreme Court "justices" who would not strip half the country of their bodily autonomy. They cared more about the price of eggs, or some other vague ambiguity, over restoring Women's most basic right. And it wasn't because that was not an issue that the Harris campaign side-tracked or deemphisized. The "girl-dad vote" that imagined large numbers of men with daughters would vote for the safety and even lives of their daughters doesn't seem to have counted for much. That shouldn't be a surprise, men with daughters allowed the homicidal status-quo on birth control and abortion to stand for far more than a century, even after Women could vote but didn't comprise the majority of voters.
American's by a reliable plurality, are a nation of egoists and narcissists, something that comes with the post-Christianity that pervades American culture, INCLUDING INSIDE THE "FAITH COMMUNITY". I read Jeremiah and, as I've said, it seems all too true of America in this century. I think we are about to find out if we are going to suffer the kinds of consequences that Jeremiah predicted his People were about to experience and which did happen. I'll be reading the Lamentations on Thanksgiving and the following days till Advent starts.
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