On Religion
Santorum’s Catholicism Proves a Draw to Evangelicals
Rick Santorum spoke at a rally at the First Redeemer Church in Cumming, Ga., in February. Mr. Santorum, a Catholic, enjoys strong support from Evangelicals in his bid for the Republican nomination for president.
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: March 23, 2012
Carissa Wilson began paying attention to Rick Santorum last fall, when her high school class in American government was assigned to watch several of the Republican presidential debates. About three weeks ago, she attended a campaign speech that Mr. Santorum delivered at her school near Dayton, Ohio. The next day, March 6, Miss Wilson cast the first vote of her life, balloting for Mr. Santorum in the Ohio presidential primary.
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It hardly mattered to Miss Wilson that she is an evangelical Protestant — raised as a Baptist, attending a nondenominational church and in her senior year at Dayton Christian School — and that Mr. Santorum is a Roman Catholic. In her thoughts and action, she typifies a cultural and religious phenomenon in the 2012 election: the unprecedented appeal of a Catholic candidate to evangelical voters.
“I was never particularly concerned with his faith,” Miss Wilson said in a phone interview this week. “I was concerned with how it was manifested in his policies. I’m very on track with his views on abortion, his stance on embryonic stem cells. I love that he takes risks, that he says what he believes in.”
What Miss Wilson — who, at 17, was allowed to vote in Ohio’s primary because she will be 18 by the general election — describes in a matter-of-fact way is actually part of a seismic shift. After more than a century of widespread antipathy between Catholics and evangelical Christians, a Catholic with Italian immigrant roots from the industrial Northeast has emerged as the favored presidential candidate among evangelicals, even in states he lost over all, like Ohio and Illinois. On the eve of Louisiana’s primary on Saturday, Mr. Santorum had won a plurality of the evangelical vote in 9 of 16 states, according to exit polls by Edison Research.
“Santorum represents a game-changer,” said D. Michael Lindsay, the president of Gordon College, a Christian school near Boston, and an expert in evangelical voting patterns. “His candidacy has the potential to reshape conservative political alignment, securing once and for all evangelical support for a conservative Catholic in public life.”
Mr. Santorum has, in fact, performed far better with evangelical Christians than with Catholics, who have preferred Mitt Romney, a Mormon, in virtually every state. Through a critical reading of the data, Mr. Santorum’s base of evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics could be seen by cynics as a coalition of zealots, held together by intolerance. By another way of thinking, however, his candidacy offers proof of a growing tolerance on the part of evangelical Christians, a willingness to shed ancestral religious prejudices.
It is worth remembering how viciously evangelical Protestants opposed Catholics early in the 20th century on issues like immigration and Prohibition. When Al Smith became the first Catholic to run for president in 1928, he was subjected to arguably the most bigoted attacks of any presidential candidate in history, accused of harboring secret plans to ban the Bible and end democracy in obeisance to the pope.
In 1960, when John F. Kennedy became the next Catholic to seek the presidency, such prominent evangelical ministers as the Revs. Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale privately strategized over how to defeat him. Kennedy ultimately had to deliver a speech endorsing the separation of church and state, and by inference declaring his independence from the pope, to quell fears about his Catholicism.
While evangelical Christians’ opposition to Catholicism has declined since then, virulent remnants do remain. In the 2008 campaign, Senator John McCain had to renounce the support of a megachurch pastor, the Rev. John Hagee, who had a history of disparaging Catholicism, as he did in one 2003 sermon, as “the apostate church,” the “mother of harlots” and “this mother-child cult.” The Lutheran synod that Representative Michele Bachmann, who ran for president this time around, belongs to states in its doctrines that “the papacy is the Antichrist.”
Against this history, Mr. Santorum has benefited both from his personal qualities and broader demographical and theological shifts within the evangelical community. As a senator, he established a track record on issues like abortion, religious freedom and sexual trafficking that put him in frequent alliance with evangelical Christians.
The road had also been paved for Mr. Santorum by evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics, who for decades had tried to define common theological and political ground. In 1994, a panel led by the evangelical activist Charles Colson and the Catholic writer Richard John Neuhaus wrote a manifesto titled “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” While acknowledging the divides in ritual and dogma, the document presented them as allies against “a widespread secularization” that “increasingly descends into a moral, intellectual and spiritual nihilism.”
Such top-down efforts coincided with shifts in grass-roots religious life. “In the last 30 years, you’ve had a lot of breaking down of denominational lines within the evangelical community,” said William Martin, a sociologist at Rice University who has specialized in evangelical Christianity. “You had the growth of megachurches that don’t emphasize denomination or doctrine the way evangelicals once did. Catholics benefit from that. And the fear of modernity and relativism that has come with globalization has been a spur to fundamentalism of various sorts.”
The plate tectonics of social mobility also figure into the Santorum surprise, note scholars like the political scientist John C. Green of the University of Akron. In the post-World War II years, many Catholics moved out of insular urban neighborhoods while many evangelicals left their rural and small-town homes for the suburbs and exurbs. In subdivisions, in office parks, in colleges, the young people of the two religions began to encounter one another as benign acquaintances rather than alien enemies.
It is no coincidence, then, that a Santorum voter like Carissa Wilson has grown up in the suburban sprawl between two cities with strong Catholic heritages, Dayton and Cincinnati. Like the Michigan autoworkers in 1980 who made a break with Democratic tradition to vote for Ronald Reagan, Miss Wilson just may be the embodiment of a new wave.