Within the struggle between faith and party politics, says Geoffrey Layman, chair of the Department of Political Science on the University of Notre Dame, “American two-party politics is winning. In some ways, partisanship becomes a faith unto itself.”
That’s one among the insights gleaned from a recent report released by Notre Dame researchers exploring a surprisingly complex aspect of Catholic life: how Catholics vote. The report focused on the unique pressures and behaviors of “seamless garment” Catholics in making electoral decisions.
Named for the seamless tunic that Jesus wore when he was crucified, the seamless garment approach urges a “consistent ethic of life” from birth to natural death, first promoted as a whole-life position by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago. The Notre Dame report describes “seamless garment Catholics” (which it abbreviates as S.G.C.s) as those that support the church’s spectrum of sociopolitical beliefs—people each pro-life and pro social justice, opposing abortion and supporting strong social welfare, immigration rights and environmental protections.
Those positions cut across traditional lines of Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative. Which means America’s two-party system leaves S.G.C.s in a bind, as neither party and neither ideology fully represents their beliefs. “It’s an uneasy fit between Catholicism and American party politics,” explains Mr. Layman, one among the report’s lead researchers. “There’s only two parties and every of those parties represents only a segment of Catholic church teachings.”
‘Seamless garment Catholics’ are inclined to discover with one party greater than the opposite in voting: 48 percent identified with the Democratic Party, while only 13 percent identified as Republicans.
The report, titled “Coping with Cross-Pressures: The Seamless Garment in Catholic Political Behavior,” studies the prevalence and demographics of S.G.C.s, the political pressures they’re subject to and the way they address these pressures in voting.
Mr. Layman has spent a decade pondering the problem and two years researching it. He says the report asks: “What number of Catholics truly face this dilemma? What number of actually follow this seamless garment pattern of supporting all of the positions of the church, and never just people who line up with one party or the opposite?”
The reply will not be very many. The variety of Catholics who report supporting the complete range of the church’s political views is small and decreasing. Fewer than 10 percent of U.S. Catholics qualified as S.G.C.s based on their self-reported beliefs in 2016, down from 18 percent in 1988. For Mr. Layman, that is one among the most important surprises of the research: “Really, what we’re talking about are individuals who just follow the teachings of the church, and you’ll expect that to be slightly larger group.”
Also surprising is that seamless garment beliefs are most prevalent amongst religiously committed, young, low-income and Latino Catholics. They’re the most probably to be socially liberal on problems with environment, immigration and social welfare, in line with the report, while still supporting church teaching on abortion.
Latino Catholics are the fastest growing segment within the church, but their increasing numbers will likely not be enough to offset the general decline of seamless garment Catholics, Mr. Layman predicts. A few of this decline derives from the waning moral authority that the church holds for a lot of believers. But much of it also has to do with an increasing pressure to adopt clear political affiliations.
Psychologists say it’s cognitively easier to discover as either a Republican or a Democrat than it’s to navigate the political no-man’s land of maintaining beliefs that defy party lines. Over time, S.G.C.s affiliate with a political party and adopt that party’s political stances, leaving seamless garment beliefs behind. That is one among several coping methods, in line with the report, employed by S.G.C.s when faced with the dilemma of constructing voting decisions amongst real-world political candidates.
The research describes S.G.C.s as being “cross-pressured” by their Catholic identity; that’s, they’re subject to unique and conflicting pressures in making electoral decisions since the teachings of the church encourage each Republican and Democratic positions. To address these cross-pressures, many S.G.C.s may avoid voting altogether or vote for a 3rd party candidate.
Within the 2016 election, 22 percent of S.G.C.s reported not voting in any respect, a significantly larger percentage than the next-highest category of Catholic voters, moderates, of whom 16 percent didn’t vote. Seamless garment Catholics were also twice as likely as Catholic liberals or conservatives to vote for a third-party candidate.
But those seamless garment Catholics who do vote for a conventional party candidate engage in several psychological strategies to rationalize their alternative. One such strategy is attitudinal persuasion, when individuals change their personal beliefs to match that of their preferred candidate or party, in line with the report. One other is selective misperception, which is perceiving a candidate to be more liberal or conservative on a problem than they are surely to feel higher about voting for them.
A 3rd, more conscious strategy is issue prioritization, during which a person can resolve which issue is an important to them and vote along the lines of the party that best represents that one issue. For seamless garment Catholics, this generally means selecting to vote Republican for pro-life initiatives or to vote Democratic in support of social-welfare initiatives.
Interestingly, “issue prioritization” can be expressed on the parish level. The report cites studies which have found many priests have a set of issues that they emphasize of their homilies, which are inclined to deal with either pro-life or pro-social welfare issues, relatively than present the complete range of the church’s beliefs.
This results in a matter Mr. Layman is curious about exploring in the longer term: Are priests in primarily Latino parishes less vulnerable to issue prioritization, resulting in the next concentration of seamless garment Catholics who’re Latino?
Within the meantime, the approaching months will likely be an interesting time to watch the Catholic vote, Mr. Layman says. Despite the cross-pressures of voting as a seamless garment Catholic, the report found that S.G.C.s are inclined to discover with one party greater than the opposite in voting: 48 percent identified with the Democratic Party, while only 13 percent identified as Republicans.
But the general Catholic vote has been closely split for several a long time. Within the 2020 election, one survey showed that 50 percent of Catholic voters went for Donald Trump, while 49 percent supported Joe Biden. With upcoming elections within the House and Senate, Mr. Layman hopes that seamless garment Catholics is usually a moderating influence in political discourse, with their aisle-crossing views helping encourage polite dialogue between parties.
