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Catholic Church and politics in the United States

Overview of the largest Christian church's influence on American leadership and culture

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In 1776, Catholics comprised less than 1% of the total population of the new nation, though they were a considerably larger proportion of the population in Maryland, which had been founded a haven for Catholics persecuted in England. Growth was slow until the 1840s, when heavy immigration began from Germany and Ireland. After 1880 Catholics arrived from Italy, Poland and elsewhere in Catholic Europe. Migration from Mexico, Puerto Rico and Central America came in the 20th and 21st centuries. The membership is about 68 million members today. Catholic voters now comprise 25% to 27% of the national electorate. 85% of today's Catholics report their faith to be "somewhat" to "very important" to them. From the mid-19th century down to 1964 Catholics were solidly Democratic, sometimes at the 80–90% level. From the 1930s to the 1950s Catholics formed a core part of the New Deal Coalition, with overlapping memberships in the church, labor unions, big city machines, and the working class, all of which promoted liberal policy positions in domestic affairs and anti-communism during the Cold War.

Since the election of the nation's first Catholic president in 1960, Catholics have split about 50–50 between the two major parties in national elections. Beginning with the decline of unions and big city machines, increased suburbanization and with upward mobility into the middle classes, Catholics have drifted away from liberalism of the Democratic Party and toward conservatism on economic issues (such as taxes). Since the end of the Cold War, their strong anti-Communism has faded in importance. On social issues the Catholic Church takes strong positions against abortion and same-sex marriage and has formed coalitions with Protestant evangelicals.

Religious tensions were major issues in the presidential election of 1928 when the Democrats nominated Al Smith, a Catholic who was defeated, and in 1960 when the Democrats also nominated John F. Kennedy, a Catholic who was elected. For the next three elections, a Catholic was nominated for the vice presidency by one of the two major parties (Bill Miller in 1964, Ed Muskie in 1968, Tom Eagleton and then Sargent Shriver in 1972). Each one lost. Geraldine Ferraro continued the tradition in 1984, but she also lost. A Catholic at the top of the ticket, John Kerry, lost the 2004 election to incumbent George W. Bush, a Methodist, who won majority of the Catholic vote. However, majority of the Hispanic Catholic vote voted for both Gore and Kerry The 2012 election was the first where both major party vice presidential candidates were Catholic, Joe Biden and Paul Ryan.

As of January 2023, there are 27 (out of 100) Catholics in the United States Senate, and 122 (out of 435) Catholics in the United States House of Representatives, including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise. In 2008, Joe Biden became the first Catholic to be elected Vice President of the United States. His successor Mike Pence was raised as a Catholic but converted to evangelical Protestantism. In 2020, Biden was elected the second Catholic president of the United States. Two First Ladies (Jacqueline Kennedy and Melania Trump) have been professed Catholics. Incumbent Vice President JD Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, making him the second Catholic to hold the post, and has acknowledged the influence of Catholic theology on his sociopolitical positions, such as his staunch opposition to childlessness, abortion, and same-sex marriage.

19th century

Before 1840, Catholics constituted a small minority and as a result, they played a relatively minor role in early American history. Catholics only constituted a significant community in Maryland and Baltimore became an early center of Catholicism. From the American Revolution until the end of the 18th century, about 1% of the American population (about 30,000) was Catholic. Still, Catholics were among the Founding Fathers and they were also a part of the First Congress; Daniel Carroll serving Maryland's 6th congressional district, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton serving as the first senator from Maryland. Presidential candidates did not seek Catholic votes until Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay did so in 1832.

Catholics and urban America

The role of Catholics in American culture and elections dramatically changed as a result of the mass immigration of Catholics from Europe, especially those of Irish and German descent. By 1840, there were about 600,000 Catholics in the United States. In the 1840s, 200,000 Irish immigrated to escape poverty. The Great Famine of Ireland which lasted from 1845 to 1852 caused the Irish population in America to number 962,000, the number doubled in the next ten years. Even larger numbers of immigrants came from traditionally Catholic regions of Germany and traditionally Catholic regions of other parts of Europe. Because most of these new arrivals lived in ethnic communities, they typically joined the local Catholic church that was in communion with Rome through the local diocese; how many of them cut their ties with the Catholic Church is a matter of speculation. The Irish Catholics took controlling positions in the Catholic Church, labor unions, and Democratic organizations in the big cities, thus forming overlapping centers of strength. The sudden new arrival of so many Catholics, charges of political corruption, and fears of papal interference caused anti-Catholicism to grow, including the short-lived Know Nothings party in the 1850s which demanded a purification of elections and statutes from Catholic influence.

Many Catholics served in the Civil War armies, they served in both the North and the South, and the bishops rejected the antiwar and anti-draft sentiments of some Catholics. The rapid rise of the Irish out of poverty, and the continuing growth in membership, especially in industrial and urban areas, made the church the largest denomination in the U.S. Distrusting public schools which were dominated by Protestants, Catholics built their own network of parochial elementary schools (and, later, they built high schools), as well as colleges, and public funding of parochial schools was a controversial issue. As the Bennett Law episode in 1890 in Wisconsin demonstrated, Catholics were willing to cooperate politically with German Lutherans to protect their parochial schools. A distinct Catholic vote existed, however; in the late 19th century, 75% of Irish and German Catholics in America voted for Democratic presidential candidates. The Irish increasingly controlled the Democratic party machinery in major cities.

Religious lines were sharply drawn in the North in the Third Party System that lasted from the 1850s to the 1890s. In the South, the Catholics voted the same as Protestants, with race as the main dividing line. Methodists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Scandinavian Lutherans and other Protestant pietists in the North were tightly linked to the GOP. In sharp contrast, liturgical groups, especially the Catholics, Episcopalians, and German Lutherans, looked to the Democratic Party for protection from pietistic moralism, especially prohibition. While both parties cut across economic class structures, the Democrats were supported more heavily by its lower tiers.

Cultural issues, especially prohibition and foreign language schools, became important because of the sharp religious divisions in the electorate. In the North, about 50% of the voters were pietistic Protestants who believed that the government should be used to reduce the pervasiveness of social sins, such as drinking. Liturgical churches comprised over a quarter of the vote and they wanted the government to stay out of personal morality issues. Prohibition debates and referendums heated up elections in most states over a period of decades, as national prohibition was finally passed in 1918 (and it was repealed in 1932), serving as a major issue between the wet Democrats and the dry GOP.

Source: Paul Kleppner, The Third Electoral System 1853-1892 (1979) p. 182

Labor union movement

The Catholic Church exercised a prominent role in shaping America's labor movement. From the onset of significant immigration in the 1840s, the church in the United States was predominantly urban, with both its leaders and congregants usually of the laboring classes. Over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, nativism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-unionism coalesced in Republican elections, and Catholics gravitated toward unions and the Democratic Party.

The Knights of Labor was the earliest labor organization in the United States, and in the 1880s, this was the largest labor union in the United States. It is estimated that at least half its membership was Catholic (including Terence Powderly, its president from 1881 onward).

In Rerum novarum (1891), Pope Leo XIII criticized the concentration of wealth and power, spoke out against the abuses that workers faced and demanded that workers should be granted certain rights and safety regulations. He upheld the right of voluntary association, specifically commending labor unions. At the same time, he reiterated the church's defense of private property, condemned socialism, and emphasized the need for Catholics to form and join unions that were not compromised by secular and revolutionary ideologies.

Rerum novarum provided new impetus for Church leaders to establish a variety of social services for the working class element that predominated the lay membership. That included the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Council, and support for priests involved in labor issues at local factories.

Rerum novarum also provided new impetus for Catholics to become more active in the labor movement. Its exhortation to form specifically Catholic labor unions was widely interpreted as irrelevant to the pluralist context of the United States. While atheism underpinned many European unions and stimulated Catholic unionists to form separate labor federations, the religious neutrality of unions in the U.S. provided no such impetus. Irish Catholics often dominated unions, and they exerted influence across organized labor. Catholic union members and leaders played important roles in steering American unions away from socialism.

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