Catholicism and Politics

The relationship between faith and politics generally, and Catholicism and US elections specifically, is too complex to adequately summarize in a blog post, and I don’t pretend to have the expertise necessary to do so. But a 20,000 mile view of the terrain, I might be able to do.  A couple Catholic friends of mine sat down Sunday evening and talked about this relationship, and here’s what I walked away with:

Basically, it seems that US Catholics ally with a certain political party based on that party’s views on the “Big Issues.” To clarify what I mean, imagine two Catholic-friendly candidates running against each other. Both of these candidates are solidly pro-life, neither want to force healthcare workers to assist in abortions against their will, neither support torture, etc.  Outside of the issues of abortion and torture, though, the two candidates resemble the modern Democratic and Republican parties.  This sort of election would require each of us to form some real opinion on what we thought the government’s role ought to be in education, or healthcare, or labor rights, or foreign aid, etc.  There would be no “wrong” vote, but it would take some thoughtful contemplation over whose approach was better.

We don’t live in that society.  Instead, we’ve spent years living in a society in which faithful Catholics were allied with only one party.  In the past, this meant that we were Democratic, because the Republicans were fiercely anti-Catholic and against Catholic immigration.  Remember the accusation that the Democratic Party was the party of “Rum, Rebellion, and Romanism” back in 1884.  Since Republicans didn’t want us (and even hated and feared us) we were Democrats.  The DNC was unafraid to nominate a Catholic, Al Smith, to run for president against Hoover in 1928.  And in 1960, Kennedy ran and won, winning a now-shocking 80% of Catholic votes.  For about a century, the Democratic Party had been the party of choice for Catholics

These days, the opposite is true.  We’re Republicans, because of abortion. For much of our history, it’s been hard for Catholics to support one of the two major parties, because they were on the wrong side of a Big Issue. The unfortunate consequence of this, though, is that we tend to fall in lock-step with the party of choice on the “small issues.” That is, on those areas where the right choice is a prudential judgment, our consciences are often shaped by our favored political party. There are a lot of reasons for this:

1. The small issues don’t matter — To use the extreme example, if you’re a German voter in the 1930s, you’re not basing your ballot for or against Hitler off of your feelings on his proposed Autobahn.  If one of the two candidates supports the legalized killing of infants, his ideas about tax reform don’t matter. You’re voting for the one who doesn’t support legalized killing.  
2. Since the small issues don’t matter, we don’t think about them — We generally don’t have a very well thought-out position on the prudential judgments of the day, even on the ones we think are very important.  A lot of American Catholics are troubled by the state of the healthcare system, by the crisis of poverty here and abroad, and so on.  But because we never have to stand in a voting booth and choose based on that issue, we give practical solutions to the problem less thought.
3. We stop trusting the other side — Quite sanely, if Candidate (or Party) X either is pro-legalized killing, or perhaps worse, is “personally opposed” to killing children, but doesn’t have the good sense to think it should be outlawed, we find that Candidate untrustworthy.  Perhaps they’re evil, or stupid, or terribly naive; perhaps they just have a “different” (stupid, evil, or naive) system of morality.  At the very least, we can say that their judgment is terribly flawed on the major issues.  As a result, since this Candidate or Political Party isn’t trustworthy on the big things, we’re unlikely to trust them on the small one.  It makes sense: it’s the converse of what Matthew 25:23: “You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things.”  From a Catholic perspective, if someone gets the question of abortion so radically wrong, there’s no reason to think he’s any better on the question of, say, tort reform.
4. As a result, we trust our favored party — Because we haven’t given the small issues a whole lot of thought (generally speaking), our default position is to trust the party which is trustworthy on big things to be trustworthy on small things.  So when the DNC was the only party for Catholics, we tended to take Democratic views on issues from immigration to labor rights to caring for the poor — that is, we didn’t just agree that those issues were important, but we trusted the Democrats to be the party to fix them. Faithful Catholics today tend to agree with the Republican party on many of these same issues, disagreeing with their forebears.  The Church’s stance hasn’t changed.  Instead, the Catholic-friendly party has.

There’s not an easy answer to this question.  On the one hand, Catholics can’t support the Democratic Party, as long as the Democratic Party supports abortion.  On the other hand, Catholics can’t blindly trust the Republican Party, or they’re putting themselves in real peril.  The only solution seems to be to keep eyes wide open, be willing to throw away the occasional vote on a quixotic third-party candidate, and pray for the return of our country and the DNC to Christian morality.