Catholics Too Tied to Republicans

Some great points by R.R. Reno in the upcoming issue of First Things:

Today theological liberalism is no longer a force in the churches. We have in that sense won, and won decisively. In the Catholic Church, most theological liberals argue for their right to exist rather than assume they will determine the future direction of Christianity.

This is no longer true. Over the last twenty years, the percentage of Americans declaring themselves religiously unaffiliated (the Nones) has grown dramatically, now having reached 20 percent. Moreover, this group has become politically powerful and is now a large and favored constituency in the Democratic party. The Obama campaign calculated that it could energize this base of support (remember the “war on women”) without damaging its electoral chances. For the first time in American politics, a winning party took a tacitly anti-religious stance.

The consequences? First, religiosity now strongly correlates with partisan loyalty. Nones are overwhelmingly Democrat. Regular churchgoers, especially but not exclusively Evangelicals, trend ­Republican. This politicizes religion. Second, religious people are becoming more and more dependent on the Republican party to protect their interests (religious liberty, for example). We could easily become a taken-for-granted base largely irrelevant to the party’s larger policy debate, as African-Americans often are in the Democratic party. Third, religion, especially orthodox Christianity, may end up implicated in the inevitable failures and corruptions of the Republican party. We may be in danger of recapitulating in some ways the disastrous alliances of the Catholic Church with the European right in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Ross Douthat nicely riffs off these to make his own larger point, which is a good reminder:

I think this analysis suggests a positive case, in the American context at least, for a papacy that simultaneously calls U.S. Catholics away from a too-close entanglement with the fortunes and platform of the Republican Party, and that consistently reminds non-Catholics and non-Christians that there is more to Christianity than the particular set of issues that have (understandably) kept many American believers in a right-of-center political orbit. This is, again, something that the last two popes did as well — but if Pope Francis’s public profile continues to come across as more “liberal” than theirs, it might actually play a helpful role in complicating the “partisan captivity” scenario that Reno sketches out.