Religious Roots of Political Orientations: Variations Among American Catholic Parishioners

Social scientists have formulated several theories or prototheories to account for party identification, political ideology, and issue positions of Americans and, by extension, of American Catholics. These include ethnic assimilation and communalism, social class, regional political culture, political generations, and recently gender. At the same time, some scholars have argued that religious values profoundly affect these political variables. But their measures have never been convincing or their findings strong. This paper formulates a new measure of foundational religious beliefs and, controlling for measures of other theoretically relevant variables, estimates the impact of such beliefs on political variables. Data are drawn from the 2,667 registered Catholic parishioners included in the Notre Dame Study of Catholic Parish Life. The overall model appears modestly powerful, but individual findings are of interest. Interpreting results through theories of partisanship, this paper argues that the traditional measure of partisanship resonates to social structural characteristics of Catholics but that newer theories of partisanship may be better predicted by a measure of foundational religious beliefs. Political ideology and many "cultural politics" issues are responsive to foundational religious beliefs. Positions on more traditional public policy concerns--for example, defense spending, equal opportunity--are better predicted by demographic variables, but even these issues respond to religious values.