Your GetReligionistas have been paying attention to the “born-again Catholic” debates for a long time (click here for a selection of posts).
Thus, we know this conflict didn’t originate with Vice President Mike Pence.
I’m old enough to remember when Southern Baptist (at that time) Jimmy Carter yanked the term “born again” out of religion textbooks and into American political discourse. Many reporters were confused about the term than and many still are.
I think some of the confusion is also linked to the rise of the charismatic renewal movement in Roman Catholicism. I mean, anyone who has her or his hands up in the air while praying in an unknown tongue for someone to be healed has to be “born again,” right? You mean terms like “evangelical,” “charismatic,” Pentecostal” and “born again” have actual content and definitions linked to church history?
Throw in the “Evangelicals & Catholics Together” movement — with doctrinal conservatives finding common ground on moral and social issues (think marriage and the right to life) — and some reporters began assuming that Catholics were “evangelical” or “born again” if they VOTED that way.
So there is confusion out there, However, in this week’s dose of Ryan Burge information, it’s easy to see that the confusion now points to some interesting stories. The confusion may have content, if that makes any sense. There is so much content in Burge’s new essay — “The Curious Case of Born-Again Catholics” — at the Religion in Public blog that I don’t know what to feature here.
Why not start with the reality that people are starting to pin this label on themselves?
What do we do with these people? I tried to put my thoughts down last year in a post titled: Do you have to be Protestant to be born-again? Short answer: I don’t know. But, this “problem” of evangelical Catholics is just not going away. So … I took a deep dive into born-again Catholics. How many are there? Why do they say they are born-again? Do they just not know what that means? Or are they starting to see born-again as a political label more than a religious one? As always I turn to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.
So look at the chart at the top of this post.
In 2008, during the election of Barack Obama, the share of Catholics who said that they were “born-again or evangelical” was at its low point: just 8.9%. However, from there we see a steady and unbroken rise, when it reaches its apex in 2016 at 16.4%. That’s an 85% increase in the number of born-again Catholics. …
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this figure was the lowest during Obama’s first election and at its peak during Trump’s victory in 2016. Since then, there’s been a modest decline: currently ~15% of Catholics believe that they are “born-again or evangelical,” down about a percentage point.
So, why are we seeing this change?
Burge explores several angles to the question, including educational levels, race, gender and generational differences.
But you know, sooner or later, politics has to show up.
I calculated the share of Catholics who identified as Democrats, Independents, and Republicans by born-again status for all eight waves of the CCES. That is displayed in the stacked bar charts below. A few things jump out to me on the “born-again” side. In both 2008 and 2016, the share of Catholics who identified as Democrats jumped significantly. However, note what has happened in the 2018 sample of born-again Catholics: 43.6% identify as Republicans — that’s the highest recorded number. It seems that this group of born-again Catholics is starting to coalesce around a specific type of political/religious identity. The partisanship of non born-again Catholic is much more stable over time. This group is 35-40% Democrat, about 30% Independent, and 30% Republican. The big jump however was in 2008 when 53.1% of non born-again Catholics identified with the Democrats. However, I am not convinced at this point that the born-again label is something that Republican Catholics seem to grab on to in recent surveys. In fact, the vote choice of the two types of Catholics was basically the same in 2016.
Ah, what about levels of church attendance? Maybe this — #GASP — has something to do with religion?
… For both Republicans and Democrats the more frequently they attend church the more likely they are to identify as born-again. The model predicts that a Catholic who never attends is only about 5% likely to identify as born-again, while about a quarter of Catholics who attend multiple times a week would identify as a “born-again or evangelical” Christian. The other noteworthy thing here is how small the differences in estimates are for the Republicans and Democrats. The lines never deviate more than 4% and at the top end of the attendance scale, there’s no statistical difference in the estimates for Republican and Democratic Catholics. It seems that the rise in born-again Catholics is based more on religion than politics.
I have to be honest, I spend a little bit too much time thinking about how people answer religion questions. But, this one has me just a bit stumped. The results of the regression analysis push me towards a conclusion: I think that the American public may see the term “born-again or evangelical” as more a label of religious devoutness, regardless of tradition, rather than a type of religious conversion. That is: “born-again” may be a shortcut for “really religious.” This interpretation is reinforced by the fact that 45% of born-again Catholics say that they attend church at least once a week, compared to just 25% of not born-again Catholics.
Fascinating. By all means, read it all.