Relevant No More? The Catholic/Protestant Divide in American Electoral Politics.

By Mark D. Brewer. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003. 180p. $55.00.

In his book, Mark D. Brewer makes three arguments. The first is that Roman Catholics in the United States tend to identify with the Democratic Party, and to vote for Democratic candidates. The second is that this behavior distinguishes Catholics from Protestants in such significant ways that the Catholic/Protestant divide continues to be an important factor in electoral politics. Both of these arguments are well supported, and if the author had contented himself with them, then Relevant No More? would have made a useful, though not pathbreaking, contribution to the literature on religion and politics in the United States. The problem is that Brewer insists on making a third claim over and over again. His third claim is that the first two arguments disprove a widely held “conventional wisdom” that Catholics have abandoned or deserted the Democratic Party in recent decades, rendering talk of a Catholic/Protestant split outdated and irrelevant. This final claim is impossible to sustain, and the author's stubborn insistence on it ends up weakening the book considerably.

Nevertheless, along the way, Brewer does an admirable job of establishing that the Catholic/Protestant split is still relevant in U.S. politics. He offers page after page of clearly presented analysis of voting patterns of all kinds that show convincingly that Catholics still lean Democratic in electoral politics, and that this leaning distinguishes them clearly from their Protestant neighbors. There are charts depicting presidential voting, House voting, and party identification for the period 1952–2002, and similar charts displaying the same data grouped by decade. Sure enough, for this entire fifty-year period, without a single exception, Catholics have supported Democratic presidential and congressional candidates in higher percentages than Protestant voters did, and Catholics have consistently identified with the Democratic Party in higher percentages than Protestants have. To be sure, the magnitude of some of these differentials has declined in recent years, but the differentials are obvious and quite impressive in their consistency.

A large part of the book is devoted to the potential effects of other alternative variables that might be underlying the central findings, and that might be rendering spurious the apparent Catholic/Protestant split. Brewer looks at a long list of variables and finds them all wanting: race, gender, age, Hispanic ethnicity, frequency of church attendance, “religious salience,” and the mainline/evangelical divide in American Protestantism. Some of these variables interact with the basic Catholic/Protestant split in interesting ways, but not a one of them, in methodological terms, takes away from the straightforward conclusion that Brewer articulates repeatedly in the volume: “the electoral behavior of Catholics in the United States continues to differ from that of Protestants. Catholics remain more likely than Protestants to support the Democratic Party” (p. 132).

I have no criticism to make of the analysis in these terms. The statistics are clearly presented and the alternative explanations tested seem to be the appropriate ones. The book ends with another recapitulation of its central empirical claims, and I for one came away quite convinced. What I did not come away with, however, was surprise. Brewer's conclusions were pretty much consistent with what I took to be the case before I opened the book. On the basis of my reading over the years of analysts like Andrew Greeley and Henry Kenski, I would not have characterized a finding that Catholics exhibit an enduring, if somewhat receding, commitment to the Democratic Party as particularly controversial.

Brewer offers just such a characterization, however. He argues repeatedly that analysts of American electoral behavior have assumed an “exodus, desertion, abandonment” on the part of Catholics in regard to the Democratic Party (p. 45). By the end of the book, however, including a careful review of its footnotes, I found myself asking who it is exactly that the author thinks believes this so-called “conventional wisdom.” Greeley? No. Kenski and William Lockwood? No. Mary Bendyma and Ted Jelen? Well, no. As Brewer himself acknowledges, these are some of the most prominent students of Catholic voting behavior, and they have been publishing widely (one is tempted to say conclusively) on the subject for years. If they do not represent conventional wisdom on this subject, then who does? Who is it that has been purveying this notion of dramatic “exodus,” wholesale “abandonment,” epoch-making “desertion.” My reading of the literature on religious affiliation and voting behavior is that no one has actually been making such sweeping claims, and that instead, Brewer has constructed a straw man in order to lend his competently reached, but not particularly surprising, conclusions greater weight than they deserve.

It is true that various analysts have said that the Catholic tilt toward the Democratic Party has been less pronounced in recent years than it was in the past. Other analysts (including me, as cited in this book) have argued that this relative decline has rendered Catholic voters more available to Republican candidates than they were in the past, and that Catholics have played crucial roles in short-lived but successful Republican electoral coalitions (e.g., 1972 and 1980). Some analysts have even argued that all of this has resulted in a blurring of the clear political and cultural lines between New Deal Catholics and traditional Protestant Republicans. But an abandonment of the Democratic Party by Catholics? An end to the relevance of the Catholic/Protestant split in American electoral politics? None of these analysts have made such claims because they all know that such claims are not supported by the evidence. Instead of debunking “conventional wisdom,” I am afraid that Brewer has taken nuanced claims concerning subtle but significant shifts in U.S. voting behavior and made caricatures of them.

In an admirably clear paragraph near the end of Relevant No More? the author asks, “Have American Catholics abandoned the Democratic Party?” The answer to this question, he concludes, is no. “Certainly there has been some decline in Catholic support for the Democrats over the last thirty years,” he continues, “as many analysts have noted. However, Catholics have certainly not abandoned or deserted the Democratic Party” (p. 135). Put in such clear terms, backed up by such persuasive analysis, and buttressed by ample citation of Greeley and the rest, this conclusion sounds to me an awful lot like what one might call “conventional wisdom.”