Ed Kilgore’s interesting post over at Progressive Revival about evangelicals being more pro-life than Catholics has stirred some interesting debate.
Kilgore is puzzled but offers a few theories:
1) Evangelicals are “are radically alienated from contemporary American culture, and view legalized abortion (along with premarital sex, open gay/lesbian lifestyles, and TV/Hollywood “trash culture”) as a symbol of a depraved society.”
2) “framing” of the abortion issue–particular its treament as fundamentally a matter of the reproductive rights of women, or of personal privacy–that underlies the pro-choice argument is simply uncompelling to many white evangelicals…. American evangelicals have become strongly averse to the libertarian traditions of church-state separation and protection of individual conscience that once was a central feature of their own belief system.
Ross Douthat at the Atlantic Monthly responded by suggesting that people who describe themselves as evangelical are simply more intense in their religous feelings than are Catholics, a broad label that includes mass-attenders and nominal Catholics.
Some evidence for Douthat’s theory can be found in the Pew Religion Landscape survey: 58% of Catholics who attend mass weekly — the most intense Catholics — want abortion to be illegal all or most of the time. That compares to 61% for evangelicals generally and 73% for evangelicals who attend weekkly. So intense Catholics have about the same views as generic evangeliclals.
I have three more theories to throw on the pile:
1) Homilies vs. Sermons — While the Catholic Church has been articulate in writing about its opposition to abortion, most Catholics don’t sit around reading encyclicals. The question is: does their parish priest preach about the evils of abortion as persuasively, emphatically and frequently as as a evangelical minister? Evangelicalism in general emphasizes the sermon more than Catholicism does, so I’m guessing that the typical evangelical simply hears the case against abortion more frequently and persuasively than does the typical Catholic..
2) The Evangelical Bundle — Though this is eroding, my sense is that being an evangelical meant you were signing on to a particular bundle of conservative ideas. You were getting the car, fully loaded. Being an evangelical meant (at various points) opposing the Panama Canal treaty, gay marriage, Democrats and abortion. To truly feel fully part of the church community, you were better off signing on for the whole package. Because the Catholic Church cannot be considered uniformly conservative or liberal, Catholics felt like they could pick and choose more.
3) Contraception — This theory has even less basis in fact than the first two but… The Catholic Church’s position against birth control was so rapidly and pervasively rejected by rank and file Catholics that it undermined the Church’s authority on “sexual” issues in general. Or, to stated it more conservatively, if you don’t care about losing the potential of a life because of a condom, why should we be surprised that you don’t care about losing a one-week-old life through an abortion?
posted August 7, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Anyone who is involved in the abortion debate on the pro-life side would dispute the contention that it is dominated by evangelicals. The modern Right to Life movement that started after Roe in 1973 was dominated by Catholics and most groups today have more Catholics than evangelicals. Some evangelical pro-life advocates today won’t join Right to Life groups because they wrongly believe it is a Catholic organization rather than an ecumenical one. Most evangelicals have gotten involved in groups like crisis pregnancy centers and those tend to be more evangelical than Catholic in nature. But the whole of the pro-life movement, speaking as someone who writes daily about it to more than 250,000 people, is BOTH Catholic and evangelical and they/we work together very well I would say. That, of course, doesn’t include the large number of nontraditional pro-life people — ranging from athetists and agnostics to Democrats and libertarians.
posted August 7, 2008 at 4:31 pm
I think this is false statement, becuase Catholic are hardcore anti abortion. Now do catholic maybe vote more then on onbe issues, maybe but abortion is murder in catholic point of view for sure.
posted August 7, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Now do catholic maybe vote more then on onbe issues, maybe but abortion is murder in catholic point of view for sure.
And yet I know Catholics who support a woman’s right to choose.
posted August 8, 2008 at 12:59 pm
“And yet I know Catholics who support a woman’s right to choose.”
And that makes all the difference. It goes back to point #2 of the essay. To a large degree, when you join the evangelicals, you are signing up for the whole package – anti-gay, anti-abortion, etc. – and high policial involvement. As a rule, the evangelcals want to bring US law into conformity with Biblical law so there is a lot of activity on the part of the evangelicals within the political arena to get laws passed and judges rulings to agree with the Biblical precepts that they follow. On the other hand, Catholics tend to take a more personal approach to religion. We believe that abortion is wrong, that it is indeed murder of an innocent, and will speak out against it when the subject comes up. We also work quite diligently for adoption and finding alternatives to abortion. However, we see this as a moral issue and a matter of faith, not as much a matter of law. Most Catholics want to maintain the separation of church and state so that the government doesn’t get involved with the church – and the other side of that is that we don’t want the church to get involved in the government. So we aren’t as active in trying to get laws passed to enforce our religious beliefs. As devout Catholics, we work toward the day when all children will be wanted and abortion is legal but extremely rare.
posted August 8, 2008 at 8:22 pm
I spent 10 years teaching in a Catholic elementary school. I’ll guess that most of the teachers I worked with were probably pro-life, but I know they were for birth control…not just the “natural” form approved of by the church. Of the teachers that had children, none had more than 3. I am very sure they hadn’t stopped having sex with their husbands. However I also think they would vote for a candidate who may or may not be pro-choice, looking at the other items on a candidates platform, and not counting him/her out because of their stance on the abortion rights.
posted October 8, 2008 at 2:27 pm
I am a Christian and personally I am against abortion, but it isn’t my right to force my beliefs on people like the right wing seems quite willing to do. This seems quite contradictory to what Jesus did.
Jesus NEVER forced his beliefs on anyone, but the right wing wants to force their beliefs on everyone.