Are "Real" Catholics as Conservative as Evangelicals?

The Reply Guys Were Wrong (Mostly)

Here’s a common occurrence for me on social media. I post a graph that’s really basic: how a bunch of religious traditions feel about a controversial political issue. Could be a pathway to citizenship for folks who came here illegally, could be access to an abortion, or maybe a question about gender identity. I have all the traditions listed: white and non-white evangelicals and Catholics, mainline Protestants, Jews, Muslims, atheists, etc. What the data consistently shows — across a wide variety of dependent variables — is that white Catholics are not as socially conservative as white evangelicals.

This makes a lot of anonymous people on Twitter very angry, of course. I’m guessing that many of them are Catholics who believe that Catholicism, correctly measured, will exhibit results similar to their evangelical cousins. The replies are always something like, “No, show us what REAL Catholics believe on this issue.” Which I think is shorthand for: I want you to only compare weekly attending Catholics to weekly attending evangelicals. Their assumption is that if I do that, the statistical differences will disappear.

Well, let’s just put that to the test today, shall we?

The first thing we need to establish is that the reply guys are kind of right in one way: the average white Catholic doesn’t go to church with nearly the same regularity as the average white evangelical.

Back in the halcyon days of the early 1970s, Catholics were more devout than evangelicals — and by a fair amount. About 60% of white Catholics were going to Mass every week in 1972 compared to only 45% of white evangelicals. That’s not a small difference. But it didn’t last long. By 1980, the two lines had clearly crossed around 45%. But then the Catholic line continued to move downward while evangelical attendance rates held steady. By the late 1990s, evangelicals were more likely to be weekly attenders than their Catholic counterparts.

From there, the gap only widened. It was about ten percentage points by 2000 (45% vs. 35%), and the chasm has only increased in the last twenty years. By the 2010s, over half of white evangelicals went to church nearly every week compared to less than 30% of Catholics. In the data from 2024, 57% of white evangelicals were weekly attenders compared to 25% of white Catholics. So not controlling for attendance gives us a much different sample when analyzing evangelicals and Catholics. Keep that in your back pocket for now.

Now, there’s another variable at play here that needs to be considered: political conservatism. Are white Catholics more politically moderate than white evangelicals? The answer is: absolutely.

The graph on the left does not contain an attendance filter, so you’ve got an evangelical sample that is much more religiously active than the Catholic subgroup. There are clear differences in the political ideology of these two groups. I think it’s fair to say that evangelicals have always been more conservative than Catholics, although those gaps just weren’t that big back in the 1970s (less than ten percentage points).

That gap has widened over time in a very noticeable way. You can clearly pick out an inflection point, too: somewhere in the early 2000s the evangelical line began to shoot up while it rose much more slowly for Catholics. Today there’s just a huge ideological difference between the two. Almost two-thirds of white evangelicals identify as politically conservative vs. just 38% of white Catholics.

But remember how evangelicals are much more likely to go to church than Catholics? I controlled for that in the right panel by only including people who indicated that they attended church nearly every week or more. I don’t think this alters the general trend I just described in the “all attendance levels” graph. White evangelicals have always been more ideologically conservative than white Catholics. The gaps between the two lines on the left and the two lines on the right are almost exactly the same magnitude as well.

So let’s test out this idea that Catholics are just as socially conservative as evangelicals by pulling in both things that we’ve learned. I am going to show you three graphs: the entire sample of evangelicals and Catholics, only weekly attenders of those two groups, and finally only weekly attenders who also identify as politically conservative. That way we can control for those differences as much as possible.

Let’s start with a question about abortion. This one asks if respondents think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain an abortion if she wants it for any reason.

In the full sample, a pretty big gap emerges between evangelicals and Catholics on this issue in just the last ten years. Prior to that, evangelicals were about ten points more pro-life than Catholics. After 2012 or so, the Catholic line began to rise. Now, it’s very fair to say that the average white Catholic is twice as likely to support abortion access as the average white evangelical. But remember: we need to control for the fact that Catholics aren’t as likely to go to church and aren’t as conservative. That’s what I did in the next two panels.

If we restrict the sample to weekly attenders, the gap narrows. In fact, until just recently I don’t think we can make a strong claim about which group was more pro-life. But in the last couple of years, weekly attending white Catholics have moved in the direction of permissiveness on abortion while evangelicals haven’t budged. When we control for both ideology and attendance, the lines are basically right on top of each other. The sample sizes aren’t huge here (especially for Catholics), but when we compare just weekly attending conservatives, it’s fair to say that Catholics are neck and neck with evangelicals.

Okay, so let’s switch to a different dependent variable: same-sex marriage. The question is simply: Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Homosexual couples should have the right to marry one another. This is the share who strongly agree or agree.

The reason the lines look funny on the left-hand side is that the question was asked for the first time in 1988 and then not again until 2004, so I interpolated the trend line to fill the gap. Again, the top graph exhibits a strong divergence between white Catholics and white evangelicals, with Catholics being a whole lot more likely to support same-sex marriage. In fact, the average Catholic today is twice as supportive as the average evangelical (69% vs. 34%).

When we just look at weekly attenders, the overall level of agreement is lower but the gap between the two groups persists. For weekly attending Catholics, agreement reached 50% around 2016 or so and has stayed there consistently in the last decade. For evangelical weekly attenders, it’s never risen above 30% and shows signs of retreat in the last couple of years — down to 18% in 2024.

What happens if we just look at weekly attending conservatives? Well, for evangelicals, support is almost non-existent: just 9% in 2024. For Catholics in the same category, it’s much higher: 40%. Although the sample that fits this criteria is very small, so there’s a lot of uncertainty in the estimate.

One more question I wanted to highlight: If a man and a woman have sexual relations before marriage, do you think it is always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all? This is the share who indicated that premarital sex is always wrong.

This is where a huge difference emerges. In 1972, 40% of Catholics said that premarital sex was always wrong. Today, that is down to just 7%. For evangelicals, there’s been a dip too, though it’s much smaller (from 58% in 1972 to 45% in 2024). Of course, that includes a whole lot of folks who say that they are Baptist or Catholic but don’t go to church that much.

The second graph is only weekly attenders, and the same pattern repeats. The drop for evangelicals is almost exactly the same: twelve percentage points between 1972 and 2024. For weekly Mass-attending white Catholics, a majority said that premarital sex was always wrong back in 1972. Today, that’s down to just 21%.

Even in the most restrictive sample of weekly attending political conservatives, there’s a chasm between white evangelicals and white Catholics. But what’s different here is that the trajectory of both lines is basically flat. About 70% of evangelicals thought premarital sex was always wrong. It was around 45% for Catholics.

Of course, there’s one more way to test this: a regression. I just threw in the most basic controls — gender, age, attendance, and ideology. The key thing to know here is the reference category: anyone who is white but does not identify as evangelical or Catholic. So the coefficients below are compared to that benchmark.

The further left the point estimates, the more conservative the view on these three social issues. On abortion access, an evangelical is about 10 percentage points more likely to oppose a woman’s right to an abortion than a Catholic. When it comes to same-sex marriage, an evangelical is also much more likely to disagree with the practice compared to a similar Catholic. And remember — we are controlling for the things that should matter most here, particularly their level of church attendance and their political ideology. So this is apples to apples, as best as we can manage.

The one that really blows me away is the question about premarital sex. Compared to white folks who aren’t evangelical and aren’t Catholic, evangelical respondents have a much more conservative sexual ethic. But look at the Catholic coefficient — it’s actually positive. That means the average Catholic is actually more permissive of premarital sex than the average white person who is neither evangelical nor Catholic. That’s staggering.

I think this is the best test I can devise to really compare devout, conservative Catholics to evangelicals in the same segment of the population. I just can’t look at these results and say that “real” Catholics are just as socially conservative as “real” evangelicals. They aren’t — empirically speaking — as conservative on these three core issues that I think do a good job of tapping morality questions.

The reply guys on Twitter aren’t entirely wrong to push back. Comparing all evangelicals to all Catholics really is an apples-to-oranges exercise given the massive differences in attendance rates and political ideology between the two groups. That’s a fair methodological critique. But when you actually do the work of controlling for those things — and I think this regression does that about as well as observational data allows — the differences don’t disappear. They persist, and on some issues they’re quite large.

What I take away from all of this is that evangelical identity carries something that can’t be fully explained by how often you show up or how conservative you vote. There’s a theological and cultural foundation to evangelicalism that shapes how adherents think about the body, sexuality, and the family in ways that Catholic identity simply doesn’t replicate — even among the most devout and politically conservative Catholics. The Church may teach the same things on paper, but the people in the pews aren’t internalizing them the same way. And that gap between official teaching and lived belief is, frankly, one of the most interesting stories in American religion right now.

Code for this post can be found here.

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Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.