Zero Catholics, Two Protestants, One Difficult Choice

This election cycle’s primaries have been interesting and contentious. They have also been full of surprises and even unsettling in a couple different ways. But it now looks as though we will have to make a choice in November between two not-so-wonderful Protestant candidates for President – Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

The amount of support that Donald Trump has received from primary voters has been a surprise, as has the continued support for Clinton. Most surprising, and even a bit scary, is the amount of support Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist, has received from millennials.

Based on what we’ve seen so far, the “how-to” manual for winning a presidential nomination in the United States of America seems to be an ongoing work in progress. Never underestimate the power of a wealthy populist who doesn’t need to stick his hand out to fund his campaign when the electorate is angry: That might be one lesson that could be added to the manual this year. Another might be that being honest and trustworthy is not a big deal anymore, and still another might be that socialism still appeals to those under 35. Yet another lesson might be that the path to becoming President of the United States is a really tough road for a Catholic to travel.

Out of the twenty Catholic politicians who have ever seriously campaigned for either the Democratic or Republican presidential nomination – including the record seven Catholics who took part in the current primary – only three, all Democrats, have managed to secure their party’s nomination – Alfred E. Smith (1928), John F. Kennedy (1960), and John Kerry (2004). So it appears that, for at least another four years, JFK will remain the only Catholic ever elected President.

The Catholic Vote

Kennedy won the 1960 election primarily because Catholics voted for him almost as a bloc. Even so, his margin of victory in the popular vote over Nixon was just a slim 120,000 votes out of the almost 70 million that were cast – a mere two-tenths of one percent.

Protestant concerns over a Catholic being the President of the United States and controlled by “the Pope in Rome” were evident early on. Kennedy finally assured the electorate that his being Catholic would not impact his decision-making in a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960, when he stated, “I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters, and the Church does not speak for me.”

Today, fifty-five years later, the chances of another Catholic getting elected President of the United States are probably worse than they were in 1960, a lesson that came across loud and clear early in the current primaries. As pointed out by the Pew Research Center in July 2015:

The current group of Catholic candidates are running at a time when Catholic voters no longer consistently favor Democrats as they have in past elections. Indeed, in recent years, Catholics have become one of the country’s swing voting groups, with presidential candidates from both parties winning majorities of Catholic voters.

But the evolution of the Catholic vote, from voting as a bloc for Democrats to a swing voting group, is not over. Evidence of the continued evolution can be seen in the party affiliations of Catholics in Congress. Out of 535 members in the 114th Congress, there are only twenty-seven Catholic Democrats, but there are eighty-one Catholic Republicans. And even while the “conservative Catholic” subgroup of Catholic voters may be growing, the Catholic Hispanics subgroup that tends to favor Democrats is also growing, so these numbers may shift yet again.

Changing Demographics & Values

Demographically, Catholics have remained a fairly constant 24% of the U.S. population, but the percentage of Protestants in the country has fallen from 67% to 49%, while the number of “Nones” (no religious affiliation) has increased from 2% to around 21%. The increase in the number of Nones mirrors the increase in secularism and moral relativism, and the changing attitudes toward traditional morality and religious truths. For a devout Catholic candidate running for president, Church Doctrine on issues such as abortion, contraception, marriage, homosexuality, and euthanasia are a problem. Catholic moral truths do not sit well with the secular, morally relativistic Nones, so a true Catholic candidate is going to have difficult time appealing to them.

At the same time, if the negative and sometimes even vitriolic comments following articles and essays about the Catholic Church, pedophile priests, and Pope Francis on both right- and left-leaning websites are any indication, the anti-Catholic sentiment that existed in 1960 is still harbored by many Protestants in the country today. The sexual abuse scandal certainly hasn’t helped matters in this regard.

Neither Party Represents Catholics

What’s more, as Mark M. Gray, senior research associate for the Center of Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), noted recently:

One of the challenges Catholic Church leaders face in the United States is that if they were to follow Faithful Citizenship [the USCCB’s updated 2016 statement on political responsibility, “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship”] closely, Catholics would be “homeless” in the two-party system . . . The Church’s stance on issues is divided between both parties. One could argue that Church leaders’ stances on poverty, immigration, the death penalty and climate change are more consistent with the Democratic Party platform. At the same time, stances on abortion, marriage, religious freedom and euthanasia are more consistent with the Republican Party platform. No matter who the two major party nominees are, neither will embody the stances Faithful Citizenship promotes in its entirety.

An argument can be made that Mr. Gray is wrong about the Democratic Party platform being closer to Church Teaching on poverty, the death penalty, and even on climate change than the GOP Platform, but the perception amongst voters is that this is so. When it comes to poverty, for instance, a good case can be made that the GOP supports the Catholic concepts of solidarity and subsidiarity, while the Democrats support government largess. Both parties also agree that the death penalty should only be used in the case of extremely heinous crimes, and both parties also support recycling and conservation efforts, but they do part ways when it comes to the role the government should play in energy. It’s really only on immigration that the Democrats are closer to Catholic Teaching, but an argument can be made that the Democrats only take the position they do on immigration because it is in their best interests to do so.

The old perception that the Democrats are “for the working man (and woman)” while Republicans support “big business” and don’t care a wit for the poor is also still alive and well. But as David Roney also pointed out in his April 10 essay here at Catholic Stand, “Neither viable political party in the United States is inherently or identifiably Catholic.”

So, just as Democratic candidate John Kerry could not count on “the Catholic vote” in 2004, none of the seven Catholic candidates during this primary was able to count on the Catholic vote either. And one by one they withdrew from the race.

But worse still, and even somewhat shocking, is that according to CARA, for a sizeable 59% of Catholics today, a candidate’s faith matters “not at all.” That bears repeating: For almost 6 out of 10 Catholics a candidate’s faith is not important.

So once again there won’t be a Catholic candidate for President on the ballot in November. Even more disappointing, however, is that neither of the two likely Protestant candidates possesses the qualifications or character traits that many people would like to see in a presidential candidate.

Trump or Clinton

Rachel Lu, in her March 1 Crisis Magazine piece “A Trump Nomination Means Victory for Clinton in November,” made a strong case for not voting for Donald Trump if he is the GOP nominee, even though she conceded that this would mean Clinton will win the election. She was not alone in her call to reject Trump. On March 7, Robert George and George Weigel also called on Catholics to “reject his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination by supporting a genuinely reformist candidate” in “An Appeal to Our Fellow Catholics” in the National Review. In both cases however, there were other GOP candidates still in the race.

But in a follow-up piece on May 9, when it had become a foregone conclusion that Trump would be the GOP nominee, Lu wrote:

There are likely no good outcomes at this point, but people are sure to disagree on which are the worst. In weighing these questions, we should be careful not to oversimplify ethical questions in pursuit of a false sense of clarity. A vote for a third party is not really a vote for Clinton. A vote for Trump remains, first and foremost, a vote for Trump, with all that that entails. On the other hand, if many conservatives refuse to vote for Trump, a Clinton presidency is that much more likely. This is genuinely a hard situation, and there is no easy escape.

Since Trump recently stated that, while he is still prolife, he would favor allowing abortions in cases of rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother, Trump’s prolife position has taken a hit. But he’s also made it clear he would still support a bill that severely restricts access to abortions, so this is at least a step in the right direction for every true Christian who values life.

At the same time, how any Catholic could vote for Hillary Clinton—who is absolutely pro-abortion, pro-same-sex marriage, and pro-euthanasia—is beyond comprehension. In fact, how any Catholic can vote for any Democrat, given the party’s platform on abortion, same-sex marriage, and euthanasia, is mind-boggling.

So Catholics are faced with a difficult choice. But I disagree with Lu’s contention that voting for a third party candidate is not a vote for Clinton. A combination of enough people staying home and not voting, or voting for some third party candidate, more than likely would result in Hillary Clinton grabbing the gold ring. We need only look at the 2008 and 2012 elections to see what happens when voters decide to protest by not voting.

So what to do? The Updated USCCB “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship” says:

When all candidates hold a position that promotes an intrinsically evil act, the conscientious voter faces a dilemma. The voter may decide to take the extraordinary step of not voting for any candidate or, after careful deliberation, may decide to vote for the candidate deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods.

Congress and the SCOTUS

Trump may be an “awful human being,” as Lu says, but the same can also be said of Hillary Clinton. Neither candidate represents truly Catholic values. So this election is a “lesser of two evils” election. And who we elect to Congress may well be just as important as who we elect to be the next POTUS. So a decision to stay home in November and not vote at all could not only result in Clinton winning the election, but it could also once again tip the balance of power in Congress back to the left.

One thing too is certain: The next POTUS will be nominating at least one (and maybe more than one) Supreme Court Justice. Trump has said he will nominate a conservative judge, and based on the list of 11 potential SCOTUS nominees he recently released this does appear to be the case. We also know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Clinton will certainly nominate socially progressive, activist judges who will continue to attempt to re-write our Constitution, further degrade our Judeo-Christian culture and values, and take us further down the road to becoming a Socialist Democracy where “freedom of worship” will gradually replace “freedom of religion” – an important and distinct difference. So this November, if Trump is the GOP nominee, he will get my vote as the lesser of two evils.

I would like to see the Chicago Cubs win the World Series before I die and I’d like to see a devout Catholic President of the United States in my lifetime as well. But I think my first wish is more likely to come true than my second.