the other way to interpret the same data is that the evangelical churches, which are a series of independent congregations, have been much more successful at achieving the departure of their ideologically non-compliant members than have the Catholics, who have a centralized body that regulates their network of churches. The lines diverged mostly about thirty years ago. The Catholics loyal to denominational teaching are a small percentage, meaning that those who diverge are still part of the community. The evangelicals have enforced their litmus tests more rigorously, so weekly attendance and obedience to its political stances is much higher. Those who object have disaffiliated. It's probably possible to show that statistically using total affiliation data over those same thirty years.
Evangelicals are better at "boundary maintenance" than Catholics.
I have something in the queue about this. Catholics were asked "can you believe in X and still be a good Catholic" and the vast majority said yes, even when it's far outside the Church's teachings.
Then again, how much does the boundary maintenance hypothesis apply when you’re already talking about Catholics who are filtered to be weekly attending conservatives? Plus, non-denominationals are a good chunk of evangelicals and they’re one of the few growing categories of religious people in the US. One might guess that at any given time they’re sorting through people who might be more moderate but just haven’t found their way out the door yet. In the meantime, demographics that have been declining all along (like white Catholics) would presumably be retaining the most committed members.
Thanks for input. Nobody is really thrown out of church based on belief. The attrition is voluntary, often without any feedback as to why. Pew and other agencies have surveyed those who became unchurched. High on the list the defectors give to discontinuing their attendance is the linkage of their individual congregation with political idealology other than their own. As a result many evangelical congregations have gotten smaller while megachurches that function more like Ted Talks or prosperity gospel have siphoned off those who left their smaller community churches. Ryan and Prof Archive deal with this extensively. The megachurches have few ideological boundaries. The community churches are left with the people not only most committed to Biblical inerrancy but to positions on gender, reproductive policy, and elements of science that the pastor and Dominant Influencers of those congregations promote. The boundaries are de facto more than imposed.
We Jews have a slightly different variation of this but with much less consequence. Nobody cares about our personal belief, just our behavior. So riding your car to synagogue, marrying outside the Jewish faith, sending children to public school instead of Jewsih school, will make certain congregants feel flagged in a lot of places. They won't be thrown out, but in a lot of places they will not be tapped for a Torah honor or offered a spot on the Board. Many will depart, as our Cpnservative branch learned in the 1980s when they established policies in the 1960s to address interfailth marriage with shunning responses. And we have a particular historical precedent included in parts of OT that reinforce this. After the first exile, many of the prophetic messages indicate that only the most committed, called a shearit or remnant, will return to reestablish sovereignty in Judea. To this day, many synagogues choose Shearith as part of their name.
This idea of Evangelicals being more adept at/zealous about boundary maintenance was one of my key takeaways from your book, even though I can't recall if you used that term specifically.
The Catholic church has so many denominational teachings that loyalty to less than all of them may be enough to create a strong Catholic identity. One could be loyal to many but not all of the teachings, or to fewer while attaching more meaning to those.
As Kurt pointed out, for example, "Catholicism has a well developed teaching on other issues of social concern such as economic justice and the rights of workers". That's a loyalty nexus I wouldn't expect Evangelicals to have, as is liturgical loyalty, such as sincere concern over sacramental validity that Protestants are unlikely to share.
It's not just sorting, it's teaching. If evangelicals were just doing a better job at getting non-compliant members to leave then evangelical churches would be declining. But they are not. White Catholics are declining, mainline are declining, but evangelicals are breaking even. So while I'm sure sorting is happening, there is something beyond that going on. People can actually change their beliefs, not just through the massive power of social media and public propaganda, but also through individual conversations with real people.
Evang. sermons tend to be much longer than Catholic homilies or mainline ones. There's more teaching. And I suspect at evangelical churches more people hang out and talk to each other after the service for longer periods. The higher # of regular attenders at evangelical churches means more of them feel like they are part of a spiritual family. And spiritual families may do some sorting but they also do a lot of teaching and dialogue.
Yes. I interpreted this to mean Catholics keep trying even when they can’t understand “the why” behind certain doctrines or haven’t fully formed their conscience. We might even conclude Evangelicals are better at forming the consciences of their followers, for better or for worse.
Ryan, I wonder to what degree geography and urban/rural status might explain the gap as opposed to the intrinsic ideology/doctrine of the two groups. Evangelicals in general are more southern and rural than Catholics, and both factors are indicative of a cultural environment in which even self-identified conservative views could be expected to be less attenuated by other social pressures.
//...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 am disappointed in this analysis substantively or maybe it just doesn't address the questions I have.
Why is the measurement limited to those types of issues? Given Catholicism has a well developed teaching on other issues of social concern such as economic justice and the rights of workers, why not include questions about the minimum wage or the right to have labor unions?
Frankly, if Catholics polled equally as conservative as evangelicals on the issues you reported but not at all conservative on issues of economic justice, then would it really be right to say that Catholics are as conservative as Protestants?
I've added another question to the regression model:
"Some people think that the government in Washington ought to reduce the income differences between the rich and the poor, perhaps by raising the taxes of wealthy families or by giving income assistance to the poor. Others think that the government should not concern itself with reducing this income difference between the rich and the poor. Here is a card with a scale from 1 to 7. Think of a score of 1 as meaning that the government ought to reduce the income differences between rich and poor, and a score of 7 meaning that the government should not concern itself with reducing income differences. What score between 1 and 7 comes closest to the way you feel?"
As you can see, evangelicals are signed negative here, meaning that they don't favor the govt stepping in to correct income inequality. For Catholics, there's no statistically significant relationship.
A very fair article. I admire you for this. It's "good science". It seems that active Catholics are not necessarily orthodox Catholics. A new project would be to see how to identify orthodox Catholics from available data. It isn't just attenance, activity, it seems.
I've actually built an entire widget for a future post that allows the user to toggle on/off a bunch of switches that will make it clear what % of Catholics engage in behaviors/beliefs that are Catholic.
For instance, you will be able to determine what percentage of Catholics go to Mass weekly and go to Confession on a regular basis. Or one without the other.
This is true. Not attributing malice to anyone any place that its undue. However it would be logical and accurate to note that a portion of the Left’s Long March through the Institutions has also happened to Churches. Targets of the long march are only those targets that were deemed worth capturing. The churches that got long-marched were the mainlines (fairly successfully) but the Catholic Church as well (with more mixed headway). Evangelical churches were not the cultural force they are today until at least the 90’s and there is less of an centralized institution to long march. Some Evangelical churches are now being long marched while most would be deemed not worth it/a small prize
I think the key part of evangelical churches not being captured is what you said about the lack of a centralized institution. It is why I and many of my evangelical pastor friends are so passionate about starting new churches. I would rather help make 5 independent churches of 400 than build one independent church of 2000. Because it is best to not put all your eggs in one basket and also because we aren't interested in building our brand - we want to build God's kingdom.
Interesting and compelling post! I have been following the continual and now regular Catholic parish closure announcements across the US. For example, recently the Diocese of St. Cloud (Minnesota) announced that they were merging 113 parishes down to 48. A variety of reasons were cited, such as too many buildings with excessive maintenance costs, declining Catholic population,etc. What struck me was an admission by a church representative who stated that "Some Catholics are turning to other Christian communities that emphasize strong relationships, engaging worship, and openness about faith...” This may tie-in with Ryan Burge's words above: "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."
Catholics are leaving and many are simply going to the (Evangelical) church next door.
Fascinating. I offer an observation and a request.
The Catholic Church in the US can be bifurcated in a number of ways. One is age and one is Hispanic heritage. (We are again a mission church, my former colleagues used to say.) I wonder if adding age as a variable would bring the groups closer together. I also wonder whether younger Latins in general are more liberal or conservative than the general population, given that, among Catholics, age correlates with Hispanic heritage: younger Catholics are more likely to be of Hispanic heritage.
My, request: Nice regression graph and I appreciate the availability of the code, but could you also show the equation? I find that a more meaningful (easier?) way to look at the b coefficients. Thanks.
I wonder how a less strict premarital sex question would fare. I think this runs against a Catholic ethos that babies are good and a slip that brings about a new life is a "happy fault."
I've been wondering if this year's uptick in Catholic converts constitutes, on some level, a warning to Republicans about the midterms. Does the renewed interest in Catholicism reflect a desire to escape the hyper-partisanization of everything?
The people in Ryan’s comment section are mostly catholic converts arguing how its actually more conservative and based than protestants. So they joined bc they want the conservative nature of the pre-modern Church. Thats not most catholics but a large portion of the young recent converts
Sorry Ryan, but I am so tired of reports like this that are fixated on abortion and sexual activity as if all other data points and issues barely matter. What about the fights between the GOP vs certainly Leo and Francis but also even John Paul and Benedict about ecology, a path to citizenship for migrants, living wage, and unjust wars? Sheesh I just got a notification from the NYT about Leo on AI while I was typing that last sentence! We don’t need rehashes like this, we need good data about how rank and file Catholics (maybe even especially ones who are halfway alienated from their local parishes) are responding to Leo about these other things. If you don’t have good data to report couldn’t you at least go meta to throw some light on this lack being a problem?
I've added another question to the regression model:
"Some people think that the government in Washington ought to reduce the income differences between the rich and the poor, perhaps by raising the taxes of wealthy families or by giving income assistance to the poor. Others think that the government should not concern itself with reducing this income difference between the rich and the poor. Here is a card with a scale from 1 to 7. Think of a score of 1 as meaning that the government ought to reduce the income differences between rich and poor, and a score of 7 meaning that the government should not concern itself with reducing income differences. What score between 1 and 7 comes closest to the way you feel?"
As you can see, evangelicals are signed negative here, meaning that they don't favor the govt stepping in to correct income inequality. For Catholics, there's no statistically significant relationship.
"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."
Case in point: former US Rep Bart Stupak, who was a pro-life Democrat.
Survey data offers the appearance of precision, but only if you squint. For example, take this statement from today's post: "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)." Your longitudinal data stretch back to the 1980s when being "conservative" (free trade, cosmopolitanism, religious but more Jerry Farwell than Lance Wallnau) was very different from the NatCon conservationism that defines so much of our "conservative" political landscape. These ideological differences must be taken into account. You assume a constant that just isn't there. See Laura Field, Furious Minds or Matthew Continetti, The Right.
"The one that really blows me away is the question about premarital sex... 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 wonder how much having had to confront clerical abuse – especially to reassure clerical-abuse victims they were victims, not perpetrators, of sexual sin – may have influenced this number. Clerical abuse scandals most notoriously involve minors, but some (like the Rupnik scandal) involve full-grown men and women. Count of wrongs per act doesn't go down with abuse – acts of abuse are even wronger than ordinary sin is – but count of wrongs per person can, in edge cases where the parties involved cannot be held equally responsible. But even counting wrongs per person accounting for these unfortunate edge cases should leave a conservative Catholic answering that premarital sex is almost always wrong. So I wonder what the numbers are when "almost always" is included.
(If, on the other hand, enough Catholics surveyed reason something like "It's not *always* wrong, because it's not wrong *forever*, only till you confess it, after which the wrong disappears" – which is not how I *think* Catholic teaching on repentance is supposed to work? – maybe the "almost always" numbers would add no insight.)
Are there any data or analyses that would indicate general differences between Catholics and evangelicals in how they have reacted to reliable reports of clerical abuse? I would guess that any behavior that seems to be an attempt to cover-up or otherwise minimize abusive behavior would elicit a stronger negative reaction.
Thank you, as always, for the deep dive. I would also like to see more about the movement between the evangelical and Catholic churches. For instance, are these "real" Carholics more likely to be converts from evangelical churches?
Interesting article. I wish some of the questions could be expanded to include knowing a person that is xx, for example LGBTQ+. If you are against same sex marriage, do you actually know anyone like that? And I will continue to object to the term ‘pro-life’ if abortion is the only context and doesn’t include access to care that can help keep born people alive.
the other way to interpret the same data is that the evangelical churches, which are a series of independent congregations, have been much more successful at achieving the departure of their ideologically non-compliant members than have the Catholics, who have a centralized body that regulates their network of churches. The lines diverged mostly about thirty years ago. The Catholics loyal to denominational teaching are a small percentage, meaning that those who diverge are still part of the community. The evangelicals have enforced their litmus tests more rigorously, so weekly attendance and obedience to its political stances is much higher. Those who object have disaffiliated. It's probably possible to show that statistically using total affiliation data over those same thirty years.
This is good thought, Richard.
Evangelicals are better at "boundary maintenance" than Catholics.
I have something in the queue about this. Catholics were asked "can you believe in X and still be a good Catholic" and the vast majority said yes, even when it's far outside the Church's teachings.
Could you also test it by comparing Evangelical clergy/leadership and Catholic clergy/leadership on these same questions? Or has that been done?
Then again, how much does the boundary maintenance hypothesis apply when you’re already talking about Catholics who are filtered to be weekly attending conservatives? Plus, non-denominationals are a good chunk of evangelicals and they’re one of the few growing categories of religious people in the US. One might guess that at any given time they’re sorting through people who might be more moderate but just haven’t found their way out the door yet. In the meantime, demographics that have been declining all along (like white Catholics) would presumably be retaining the most committed members.
Thanks for input. Nobody is really thrown out of church based on belief. The attrition is voluntary, often without any feedback as to why. Pew and other agencies have surveyed those who became unchurched. High on the list the defectors give to discontinuing their attendance is the linkage of their individual congregation with political idealology other than their own. As a result many evangelical congregations have gotten smaller while megachurches that function more like Ted Talks or prosperity gospel have siphoned off those who left their smaller community churches. Ryan and Prof Archive deal with this extensively. The megachurches have few ideological boundaries. The community churches are left with the people not only most committed to Biblical inerrancy but to positions on gender, reproductive policy, and elements of science that the pastor and Dominant Influencers of those congregations promote. The boundaries are de facto more than imposed.
We Jews have a slightly different variation of this but with much less consequence. Nobody cares about our personal belief, just our behavior. So riding your car to synagogue, marrying outside the Jewish faith, sending children to public school instead of Jewsih school, will make certain congregants feel flagged in a lot of places. They won't be thrown out, but in a lot of places they will not be tapped for a Torah honor or offered a spot on the Board. Many will depart, as our Cpnservative branch learned in the 1980s when they established policies in the 1960s to address interfailth marriage with shunning responses. And we have a particular historical precedent included in parts of OT that reinforce this. After the first exile, many of the prophetic messages indicate that only the most committed, called a shearit or remnant, will return to reestablish sovereignty in Judea. To this day, many synagogues choose Shearith as part of their name.
This idea of Evangelicals being more adept at/zealous about boundary maintenance was one of my key takeaways from your book, even though I can't recall if you used that term specifically.
The Catholic church has so many denominational teachings that loyalty to less than all of them may be enough to create a strong Catholic identity. One could be loyal to many but not all of the teachings, or to fewer while attaching more meaning to those.
As Kurt pointed out, for example, "Catholicism has a well developed teaching on other issues of social concern such as economic justice and the rights of workers". That's a loyalty nexus I wouldn't expect Evangelicals to have, as is liturgical loyalty, such as sincere concern over sacramental validity that Protestants are unlikely to share.
It's not just sorting, it's teaching. If evangelicals were just doing a better job at getting non-compliant members to leave then evangelical churches would be declining. But they are not. White Catholics are declining, mainline are declining, but evangelicals are breaking even. So while I'm sure sorting is happening, there is something beyond that going on. People can actually change their beliefs, not just through the massive power of social media and public propaganda, but also through individual conversations with real people.
Evang. sermons tend to be much longer than Catholic homilies or mainline ones. There's more teaching. And I suspect at evangelical churches more people hang out and talk to each other after the service for longer periods. The higher # of regular attenders at evangelical churches means more of them feel like they are part of a spiritual family. And spiritual families may do some sorting but they also do a lot of teaching and dialogue.
Yes. I interpreted this to mean Catholics keep trying even when they can’t understand “the why” behind certain doctrines or haven’t fully formed their conscience. We might even conclude Evangelicals are better at forming the consciences of their followers, for better or for worse.
If "Guys on Twitter are wrong" isn't my favorite genre of Graphs about Religion posts, it is up there.
Ryan, I wonder to what degree geography and urban/rural status might explain the gap as opposed to the intrinsic ideology/doctrine of the two groups. Evangelicals in general are more southern and rural than Catholics, and both factors are indicative of a cultural environment in which even self-identified conservative views could be expected to be less attenuated by other social pressures.
I ran the model with controls for both south/non-south and urban/rural:
https://i.imgur.com/x9RTroh.png
In short - nothing changes in the results.
//...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 am disappointed in this analysis substantively or maybe it just doesn't address the questions I have.
Why is the measurement limited to those types of issues? Given Catholicism has a well developed teaching on other issues of social concern such as economic justice and the rights of workers, why not include questions about the minimum wage or the right to have labor unions?
Frankly, if Catholics polled equally as conservative as evangelicals on the issues you reported but not at all conservative on issues of economic justice, then would it really be right to say that Catholics are as conservative as Protestants?
I've added another question to the regression model:
"Some people think that the government in Washington ought to reduce the income differences between the rich and the poor, perhaps by raising the taxes of wealthy families or by giving income assistance to the poor. Others think that the government should not concern itself with reducing this income difference between the rich and the poor. Here is a card with a scale from 1 to 7. Think of a score of 1 as meaning that the government ought to reduce the income differences between rich and poor, and a score of 7 meaning that the government should not concern itself with reducing income differences. What score between 1 and 7 comes closest to the way you feel?"
It's at the top of the graph here:
https://i.imgur.com/i9Lgthw.png
As you can see, evangelicals are signed negative here, meaning that they don't favor the govt stepping in to correct income inequality. For Catholics, there's no statistically significant relationship.
A very fair article. I admire you for this. It's "good science". It seems that active Catholics are not necessarily orthodox Catholics. A new project would be to see how to identify orthodox Catholics from available data. It isn't just attenance, activity, it seems.
I've actually built an entire widget for a future post that allows the user to toggle on/off a bunch of switches that will make it clear what % of Catholics engage in behaviors/beliefs that are Catholic.
For instance, you will be able to determine what percentage of Catholics go to Mass weekly and go to Confession on a regular basis. Or one without the other.
Here's a teaser: https://i.imgur.com/BRlSTtj.png
Great!
This is true. Not attributing malice to anyone any place that its undue. However it would be logical and accurate to note that a portion of the Left’s Long March through the Institutions has also happened to Churches. Targets of the long march are only those targets that were deemed worth capturing. The churches that got long-marched were the mainlines (fairly successfully) but the Catholic Church as well (with more mixed headway). Evangelical churches were not the cultural force they are today until at least the 90’s and there is less of an centralized institution to long march. Some Evangelical churches are now being long marched while most would be deemed not worth it/a small prize
I think the key part of evangelical churches not being captured is what you said about the lack of a centralized institution. It is why I and many of my evangelical pastor friends are so passionate about starting new churches. I would rather help make 5 independent churches of 400 than build one independent church of 2000. Because it is best to not put all your eggs in one basket and also because we aren't interested in building our brand - we want to build God's kingdom.
I bet a comparison between Catholics that attend the extraordinary form vs ordinary form would show some stark differences in result.
We Christians resist analysis by behavior because we insist on being judged by the ideas in our head and we are all hypocrites.
Interesting and compelling post! I have been following the continual and now regular Catholic parish closure announcements across the US. For example, recently the Diocese of St. Cloud (Minnesota) announced that they were merging 113 parishes down to 48. A variety of reasons were cited, such as too many buildings with excessive maintenance costs, declining Catholic population,etc. What struck me was an admission by a church representative who stated that "Some Catholics are turning to other Christian communities that emphasize strong relationships, engaging worship, and openness about faith...” This may tie-in with Ryan Burge's words above: "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."
Catholics are leaving and many are simply going to the (Evangelical) church next door.
Fascinating. I offer an observation and a request.
The Catholic Church in the US can be bifurcated in a number of ways. One is age and one is Hispanic heritage. (We are again a mission church, my former colleagues used to say.) I wonder if adding age as a variable would bring the groups closer together. I also wonder whether younger Latins in general are more liberal or conservative than the general population, given that, among Catholics, age correlates with Hispanic heritage: younger Catholics are more likely to be of Hispanic heritage.
My, request: Nice regression graph and I appreciate the availability of the code, but could you also show the equation? I find that a more meaningful (easier?) way to look at the b coefficients. Thanks.
The coefficient table is here:
https://i.imgur.com/NdC0vwq.png
I wonder how a less strict premarital sex question would fare. I think this runs against a Catholic ethos that babies are good and a slip that brings about a new life is a "happy fault."
I've been wondering if this year's uptick in Catholic converts constitutes, on some level, a warning to Republicans about the midterms. Does the renewed interest in Catholicism reflect a desire to escape the hyper-partisanization of everything?
The people in Ryan’s comment section are mostly catholic converts arguing how its actually more conservative and based than protestants. So they joined bc they want the conservative nature of the pre-modern Church. Thats not most catholics but a large portion of the young recent converts
His twitter comments I mean
Sorry Ryan, but I am so tired of reports like this that are fixated on abortion and sexual activity as if all other data points and issues barely matter. What about the fights between the GOP vs certainly Leo and Francis but also even John Paul and Benedict about ecology, a path to citizenship for migrants, living wage, and unjust wars? Sheesh I just got a notification from the NYT about Leo on AI while I was typing that last sentence! We don’t need rehashes like this, we need good data about how rank and file Catholics (maybe even especially ones who are halfway alienated from their local parishes) are responding to Leo about these other things. If you don’t have good data to report couldn’t you at least go meta to throw some light on this lack being a problem?
I've added another question to the regression model:
"Some people think that the government in Washington ought to reduce the income differences between the rich and the poor, perhaps by raising the taxes of wealthy families or by giving income assistance to the poor. Others think that the government should not concern itself with reducing this income difference between the rich and the poor. Here is a card with a scale from 1 to 7. Think of a score of 1 as meaning that the government ought to reduce the income differences between rich and poor, and a score of 7 meaning that the government should not concern itself with reducing income differences. What score between 1 and 7 comes closest to the way you feel?"
It's at the top of the graph here:
https://i.imgur.com/i9Lgthw.png
As you can see, evangelicals are signed negative here, meaning that they don't favor the govt stepping in to correct income inequality. For Catholics, there's no statistically significant relationship.
"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."
Case in point: former US Rep Bart Stupak, who was a pro-life Democrat.
https://logosandliberty.substack.com/p/the-seamless-garment-vs-the-sausage
Survey data offers the appearance of precision, but only if you squint. For example, take this statement from today's post: "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)." Your longitudinal data stretch back to the 1980s when being "conservative" (free trade, cosmopolitanism, religious but more Jerry Farwell than Lance Wallnau) was very different from the NatCon conservationism that defines so much of our "conservative" political landscape. These ideological differences must be taken into account. You assume a constant that just isn't there. See Laura Field, Furious Minds or Matthew Continetti, The Right.
"The one that really blows me away is the question about premarital sex... 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 wonder how much having had to confront clerical abuse – especially to reassure clerical-abuse victims they were victims, not perpetrators, of sexual sin – may have influenced this number. Clerical abuse scandals most notoriously involve minors, but some (like the Rupnik scandal) involve full-grown men and women. Count of wrongs per act doesn't go down with abuse – acts of abuse are even wronger than ordinary sin is – but count of wrongs per person can, in edge cases where the parties involved cannot be held equally responsible. But even counting wrongs per person accounting for these unfortunate edge cases should leave a conservative Catholic answering that premarital sex is almost always wrong. So I wonder what the numbers are when "almost always" is included.
(If, on the other hand, enough Catholics surveyed reason something like "It's not *always* wrong, because it's not wrong *forever*, only till you confess it, after which the wrong disappears" – which is not how I *think* Catholic teaching on repentance is supposed to work? – maybe the "almost always" numbers would add no insight.)
Are there any data or analyses that would indicate general differences between Catholics and evangelicals in how they have reacted to reliable reports of clerical abuse? I would guess that any behavior that seems to be an attempt to cover-up or otherwise minimize abusive behavior would elicit a stronger negative reaction.
Thank you, as always, for the deep dive. I would also like to see more about the movement between the evangelical and Catholic churches. For instance, are these "real" Carholics more likely to be converts from evangelical churches?
I've written this one:
https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/are-catholic-converts-more-hard-core?utm_source=publication-search
Ah so Catholics, on average, are more morally degenerate than Protestants.
Perusing your profile, I strongly recommend you take a remedial course on Jesus’s commandments, the first one of which is “Love one another”.
Interesting article. I wish some of the questions could be expanded to include knowing a person that is xx, for example LGBTQ+. If you are against same sex marriage, do you actually know anyone like that? And I will continue to object to the term ‘pro-life’ if abortion is the only context and doesn’t include access to care that can help keep born people alive.