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03 August 2022

U.S. Catholic Demographics And Politics

The Roman Catholic church is the largest religious denomination in the U.S. and is the plurality Christian denomination in most U.S. states. Where it is not the plurality Christian denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention is the most common plurality denomination (Kentucky, Virginia, Georgia, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Alaska, Arkansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama), with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (North and South Dakota), the main Mormon denomination (Idaho and Utah), and the Methodists (Delaware) each being the plurality denomination in one or two other states.

The Roman Catholic church in the U.S. is a mix of non-Hispanic whites, mostly descendants of Southern European and Irish immigrants in the late 19th century and early 20th century, and recent immigrants, mostly Latino, but also a not insignificant number of recent black and Asian immigrants and their children. 

White Catholics have a lot in common demographically and politically with mainline White Protestants and lean Republican. As in almost all Christian denominations, Catholics who attend church every week tend to be more conservative than those who attend less often.

Some Catholic doctrines (e.g. opposition to abortion) line up with the Republican party in the U.S., while others (e.g. opposition to the death penalty, support for aid to the poor, and a compassionate stance towards immigrants) line up with the Democratic party in the U.S. 

The Catholics as a whole are a swing demographic in U.S. politics and make up a disproportionate share of political moderates and swing voters in the U.S.

The share of people in the U.S. who are Catholic remained almost constant in a period when all other Christian denominations were making up a declining share of Americans, mostly due to Hispanic immigration.

Non-white Catholics are a younger and growing share of U.S. Catholics, but are also leaving the faith after spending more time in the U.S., and in generations after the first generation of immigration, at a higher rate than non-Hispanic white Catholics as they assimilate to the larger U.S. culture. So, it isn't clear that the U.S. Catholic church will become majority non-white in the near future. Currently, a minority of U.S. Hispanics are Catholic, as the share of U.S. Hispanics who are Protestant and not religious has grown (despite a lull in net Latin American immigration since the financial crisis in the U.S.).

According to a more recent Pew Forum report which examined American religiosity in 2014 and compared it to 2007, there were 50.9 million adult Catholics as of 2014 (excluding children under 18), forming about 20.8% of the U.S. population, down from 54.3 million and 23.9% in 2007. 
Pew also found that the Catholic population is aging, forming a higher percentage of the elderly population than the young, and retention rates are also worse among the young. 
About 41% of those "young" raised Catholic have left the faith (as opposed to 32% overall), about half of these to the unaffiliated population and the rest to evangelical, other Protestant faith communities, and non-Christian faith. Conversions to Catholicism are rare, with 89% of current Catholics being raised in the religion; 8% of current Catholics are ex-Protestants, 2% were raised unaffiliated, and 1% in other religions (Orthodox Christian, Mormon or other nontrinitarian, Buddhist, Muslim, etc.), with Jews and Hindus least likely to become Catholic of all the religious groups surveyed. Overall, Catholicism has by far the worst net conversion balance of any major religious group, with a high conversion rate out of the faith and a low rate into it; by contrast, most other religions have in- and out-conversion rates that roughly balance, whether high or low. 
This is credited to the more liberal stance of the church since Vatican II, where conversion to Catholicism is no longer encouraged, and the de-emphasizing of basic Catholic religious beliefs in Catholic education. Still, according to the 2015 Pew Research Center, "the Catholic share of the population has been relatively stable over the long term, according to a variety of other surveys. 
By race, 59% of Catholics are non-Hispanic white, 34% Hispanic, 3% black, 3% Asian, and 2% mixed or Native American. Conversely, 19% of non-Hispanic whites were Catholic in 2014 (down from 22% in 2007), whereas 55% of Hispanics were (versus 58% in 2007). In 2015, Hispanics were 38%, while blacks and Asians were at 3% each. 
Because conversion away from Catholicism as well as dropping out of religion completely is presently occurring much more quickly among Hispanics than among Euro-American whites, Black (2.9% of US Catholic population) and Asian-American Catholics, it is doubtful they will outnumber the latter three categories of Catholics in the foreseeable future. Pew Research Center predicts that by 2050 (when the Hispanic population will be 128 million), only 40% of "third generation Latinos" will be Catholic, with 22% becoming Protestant, 24% becoming unaffiliated, and the remainder, other. This corresponds to a sharp decline in the Catholic percentage among self-identified Democrats, who are more likely to be nonwhite than Republicans. In one study, three authors found that around 10% of US Catholics are "Secularists," "meaning that their religious identification is purely nominal."

From Wikipedia.

According to the same Wikipedia source, about 10% of Americans are ex-Catholics.

The number of U.S. Catholic nuns and priests, both of whom are overwhelmingly white, is declining rapidly, although the nuns are, on average, older and reducing at twice as great a percentage rate. Over the next twenty years, on average, about 2,000 nuns a year will die, but only 20 new nuns will take holy orders each year, while the number of priests will decline at a rate of about 300 a year over the next twenty years on average at the current rate. The number of U.S. priests will be greater than the number of U.S. nuns for the first time in recent history sometime around the year 2025. There is currently about one Catholic priest in the U.S. for every 2,000 U.S. Catholics, a lower ratio of clergy to church adherents than almost any other U.S. Christian denomination.

Since many important U.S. Catholic institutions, like hospitals and schools, are controlled by orders of Catholic nuns, the declining number of nuns leaves those nuns who remain with extraordinary secular power over institutions built up by previous generations of nuns in their orders.

Half of Catholics do believe, or are unsure that, transubstantiation (i.e. that the bread and wine in communion are transformed in the mass service into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ) is their church's doctrine (it is), but only 31% believe that this is true. 

The facts supporting the analysis above include the following ones:

According to a recent study, less than 1% of nuns in America are under 40 and the average sister is 80 years old. In 2022, there were reportedly fewer than 42,000 nuns in America, which is a 76% decline over 50 years. At the rate sisters are disappearing, one estimate said that there will be fewer than 1,000 nuns left in the United States by 2042, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.

From ABC News (2022).

The total number of nuns, also called religious sisters, in the United States has fallen from roughly 180,000 in 1965 to about 50,000 in 2014 – a 72% drop over those 50 yearsaccording to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University. While the total number of priests (diocesan and religious) also has fallen over that period, it has done so at a much slower rate (from about 59,000 to 38,000, a 35% drop).
Globally, the number of nuns also is declining, but not nearly as fast as it is in the U.S. In 1970, U.S. nuns represented about 16% of the world’s religious sisters; now, American nuns are about 7% of the global total (just over 700,000), also according to CARA.

From Pew (2014). 

Hispanics now account for 40% of all U.S. Catholics, and a solid majority of school-age Catholics. Yet Hispanic Americans are strikingly underrepresented in Catholic schools and in the priesthood — accounting for less than 19% of Catholic school enrollment and only about 3% of U.S.-based priests. . . .
[T]he median age for Hispanic Catholics in the U.S. is 29, compared to 55 for white non-Hispanic Catholics.
While the Hispanic population in the U.S. is sure to grow, the extent of the Catholic Church’s hold on them is uncertain. Last year, the Pew Research Center reported that U.S. Hispanics are no longer a majority-Catholic group, with 47% of them calling themselves Catholic, down from 57% in 2009. The number identifying as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” increased from 16% to 23%; those identifying as Protestant rose from 23% to 26%.
From the Associated Press (2020).






From Pew (as of 2017).


From Pew (as of 2019).

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