A Pope Who Doubts? - The Role of Certainty in the Lives of Catholics

This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below.

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One more thing - the audiobook version of The American Religious Landscape: Facts, Trends, and the Future just released. I have FIVE codes to download the book for free. I will send those out to the next five people who become paid subscribers to this newsletter. So, let this serve as your nudge to do that.

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Given the events in the Catholic calendar this May, I felt compelled to watch Conclave, the 2024 film about the papal election. It's visually stunning and tightly constructed. One thing it captures well is the depth of ideological divides within the Church—understandable, considering there are 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide. Among the cardinals, the primary tension is between traditionalists and modernists. While each side has a leading candidate, the film doesn’t dwell on theological debate. Instead, the second half pivots toward scandal and intrigue.

One scene stuck with me—a short monologue delivered by Ralph Fiennes, who plays the Dean of the College of Cardinals. As he prepares his colleagues for the first vote, he says:

‘Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" he cried out in his agony at the ninth hour on the cross. Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand-in-hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery. And therefore, no need for faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a Pope who doubts. And let him grant us a Pope who sins and asks for forgiveness and who carries on.’

It’s a compelling speech that tries to make clear that there are two factions in Catholicism - the true believers and the doubters. It’s certainly not easy at all to generate such a clear distinction between groups just using survey data, but the General Social Survey does include a specific question about belief in God. It provides six possible response options from believing in God without any doubts to a completely atheistic view of God.

I think it’s helpful to just visualize how the four types of American Christian groups answered that question in the last couple of years.

For each of the groups, the most popular option is that they believe in God without a doubt. That’s the case for 85% of evangelicals and 82% of Black Protestants. In fact, it’s pretty stunning to me how those two groups look almost exactly the same on this question. None of the categories differ by more than three percentage points. Which is especially notable given the fact that evangelicals and Black Protestants couldn’t be further apart when they step into the ballot box.

The two groups on the right side of the graph (mainline Protestants and Catholics) share a lot of similarities on this question, too. In each case about 55% say that they have a certain belief in God. That’s nearly thirty points lower than evangelicals and Black Protestants. A really big chunk chose the second most certain option, as well. For both groups, about 80% fit in one of those top two categories. So, from this angle it does look like American Catholicism does have a significant faction who have no doubt about God’s existence and those who are less sure.

Let me show you that ‘certain belief’ percentage over the last 34 years.

My big takeaway? How little these percentages have changed since the late 1980s. I mean, look at the top two groups (evangelicals and Black Protestants). In 1988, both were right around 80%. Both percentages do rise throughout the 1990s, but the evangelical line has been stuck right around 83% since 2000. For Black Protestants, the share with a certain belief kept going up and peaked in the mid-2000s at just below 90%. But in the most recent data, these groups are about the same - about 83% have a certain belief in God.

Then you have the bottom half of the graph with Catholics and mainline Protestants. They have had a huge share who believed in God without a doubt, and since 2000 or so their lines have run in near parallel. But I do want to flag something for you - a sure belief in God among Catholics was essentially the same between 1988 and 2006 - right around 65%. Since then, it’s dropped significantly in the last 15 years - losing about ten percentage points. Both groups are at 55% today.

So that helps situate Catholic beliefs within the broader Christian landscape, but I wanted to pivot now to describing how these two types of Catholics (those with a certain belief in God and everyone else) differ on a bunch of other metrics, too. Let me start by showing you how Mass attendance has shifted for these two categories of Catholics.

The very first thing that jumped out to me when I made this graph was the huge drop in weekly attendance among Catholics who say that they have a sure belief in God. In 1988, half of them were weekly attenders and now that’s declined to just about a third. That’s really stunning to me, honestly. I would have guessed that we would have seen a pretty steady religious activity among those most certain Catholics, but that’s not the story we find in this data. Even among Catholics with the most religious belief, religious behavior has taken a big nosedive.

What about Catholics with a less certain belief in God? Well, they’ve never really attended Mass that much. The most popular level of attendance for this group has been yearly for the last four decades. In each wave of the survey, between 35% and 40% chose this option. There’s also been a decline in weekly attenders, too. It was 23% in 1988 and now that’s about ten points lower. In 2022, a Catholic with a certain belief in God was about three times more likely to attend Mass weekly than one who wasn’t so sure of God’s existence.

But I do think this graph does a good job of showing how religious belief is not always closely linked to religious behavior. I mean, the fact that less than half of Catholics with a certain belief in God attend Mass at least once a month makes that clear. An individual can score very high on one dimension of religion and not so high on another one.

Of course, I am a political scientist, so I was convinced that this categorization of Catholics into these two camps would track pretty closely with other metrics like partisanship. Here’s the party affiliation of each of these two categories over time.

The basic ordering of each of these categories is the same for both graphs - Democrats are the largest group, followed by Republicans and then Independents. But note something here - look at the share of ‘certain’ Catholics who align with the Democrats. In 1988, it was just about 50%. Then it was 45% by 2008. There was a noticeable rise during the Obama years, but then a huge drop in the last couple of surveys. Now, just 35% of Catholics with a sure belief in God align with the Democrats and the same share are Republicans. That’s a really big shift in just the last dozen years.

What about the Catholics who don’t believe in God without a doubt? Well, there was a small partisan gap in 1988 but that’s not true anymore. In 2000, about 47% of this type of Catholic said that they were Democrats and only 30% were Republicans. Since that time, the Democratic share has stayed right around the same spot. Meanwhile, the percentage who are Republican has crept up to about 37%.

When I made this graph, I thought that was the end of the discussion. The “certain” Catholics are more politically conservative and favor Republicans on election day. Meanwhile, the Catholics who have more doubts are just the opposite - liberals who support Democrats. But then I dug one layer deeper into a series of questions about specific policy issues and I realized that the distinction here is not clearly between left and right. It’s way more nuanced than that.

On the headline social issues like homosexuality and abortion, I think that the general left/right divide does continue to show up. For instance, only a third of “certain” Catholics favor a woman’s right to choose an abortion for any reason compared to 77% of Catholics who have a bit more doubts. When asked about two people of the same gender having sex with each other, a Catholic who is certain of God’s existence is four times more likely to think it’s wrong. Additionally, there’s a 27 point spread in support for same-sex marriage in the expected direction. Looking at just these three questions, it’s fair to say that the “certain” Catholics are more culturally conservative.

But then look at the question about capital punishment. Given what I just described, you would expect that the Catholics who believe in God without a doubt would adopt the conservative position, but that’s not really the case. In fact, they are evenly split on this topic. Meanwhile, the Catholics who have more doubts about God’s existence are much more likely to support the death penalty - 69% were in favor. When asked if immigrants take jobs from Americans, the ‘certain’ Catholics were 7 points less likely to agree than those with doubts. And on the question of whether it’s the government’s job to help people pay for medical care, there’s no real difference between the two groups.

Near the end of the movie Conclave, there’s a terrorist act in Vatican City and one of the leading conservative candidates, Cardinal Tedesco, gives a fiery speech against relativism. He states (PDF), “A relativism that sees all faiths and passing fancies accorded equal weight, so that now, when we look around us, we see the homeland of the Holy Roman Catholic Church dotted with the mosques and minarets of Muhammad!” He ends his diatribe by shouting, “We need a leader who will find the strength to fight these animals!”

It’s easy to see the traditionalists as falling in line with our modern conception of politics, that they are against abortion, same-sex marriage, and immigration. But the data tells a much more complicated story. Yes, traditionalists tend to be more socially conservative, but they surely don’t check every box of the American Republican party. They don’t express a great deal of opposition to immigration and they are open to the government helping the sick.

In other words, the Hollywood conception of the beliefs and values of those in the highest positions of the Catholic Church does not always accurately reflect what is happening in parish pews across the United States.

Code for this post can be found here.