How do Catholics vote outside the US? Especially in the UK

[AngelusDomini]

I’m a Catholic in the UK. I try to email local candidates to find out their position on certain issues. I’ve changed my voting preference according to which candidate seems closer to CST.

 

[EmilyAlexandra]

Surely there must be polling data in the U.K. that breaks respondents down by religious affiliation.

There is, but the data is not very useful, as it relies on self-identification. There was evidence, for example, that Catholic voters strongly support Brexit. This surprised me, as the Catholic Church has generally been very supportive of the European project, to the extent that some of the more fanatical Protestants believe that it is actually some sort of plot by the Vatican. Also, one has to remember that a huge proportion of people in the Catholic churches in the UK today are in fact EU migrants. Although many of these people would not have acquired British citizenship and therefore would not have been entitled to vote in the referendum, you would imagine that this would have an influence on those who were able to vote, as so many British, Irish, and Commonwealth Catholics in the UK today have friends from the EU or are even married to people from the EU. So, looking a little more closely at the polling, it turns out that the reason why Catholics are apparently so strongly in favour of Brexit is because there are a lot of people who self-identify as Catholics in the very deprived areas of the north of England where Brexit received strong support. I am interested in the opinions of people who actually believe and practise the Catholic faith, rather than polling that simply reflects a correlation between social deprivation and self-identifying as Catholic for historical or cultural reasons.

@EmilyAlexandra, please take this in the friendly way I intend it, but so many of your posts and questions seem to imply that Catholics share some kind of collective hive mind, like a hive of bees or something. “What would a Catholic think about this? What would a Catholic say about that?” There are Catholics all over the political spectrum. People are still individuals. Look at this forum we’re both posting on. The vast majority of posters are Catholics and disagreements are constant.

Yes, and that is why I wondered what arguments are going on among Catholics outside the US. On this forum, it seems that Catholics in the US have the most extraordinarily bitter disagreements over politics. The only comparable experience in the UK is the referendum campaign and its fallout. The strength of feeling on both sides was like nothing else I have experienced in this country, except perhaps when the topic of Margaret Thatcher comes up. I was just trying to get some sense of whether Catholics in other countries are also torn apart by the culture war mentality that I see expressed here.

 

[RolandThompsonGunner]

On this forum, it seems that Catholics in the US have the most extraordinarily bitter disagreements over politics.

Probably just reflects the bitter political polarization in the US generally at the moment rather than anything uniquely catholic.

Also, I hope you aren’t offended. I really enjoy your posting and find that you’re consistently thoughtful and charitable. It’s just sometimes it seems there’s an assumption that there is a single Catholic stance on every issue. If you got ten Catholics in a room and asked “what’s your opinion on X?” you’re likely to get eleven opinions. On many issues anyway; on some there will be broad agreement.

I may be picking up on something that isn’t there. :man_shrugging:t2:

 

[HomeschoolDad]

Unless it would be Poland, there’s not a country I know of, other than the United States, where abortion is a political issue that influences elections. That is precisely how pro-choice people would like it to be here, but hate to burst anyone’s bubble, as long as I am living and have enough consciousness to get my hands on a ballot, my vote will always be determined by the likelihood of stopping as many abortions as possible.

Just step back for a moment, and imagine what kind of justices a President Hillary Rodham Clinton would have appointed — especially if she’d had a Democratic Senate — instead of Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. “Conservative” justices have to be very nuanced and dissembling almost to the point of lying, when they are asked about abortion and Roe v Wade. “Liberal” justices are very straightforward about the matter, no guesswork needed.

 

[Xarto]

I too am a republican and look forward to unification, however I am Catholic first. I cannot in good conscience support them with their pro-abortion stance, pushing transgender for minors (undermining parents to do so) and their continuing support of the IRA. Every party is Left now, seems to be the fashion these days.

 

[Xarto]

I wouldn’t hesitate to use the word terrorist to describe the pIRA, rIRA, cIRA etc. The only way we will ever have unification is by ballot.

 

[Montrose]

Your response above was to Xarto’s question about pro-abortion and trans agenda.
Are you saying you approve of abortion and a trans agenda or have I misunderstood?

 

[Dan_Defender]

I vote Conservative federally and Liberal provincially (BC)… but I do NOT identify with either parties.

I feel the same way. And maybe most voters in Canada are like us, that is why both parties are rather centrist, whereas in the US because most people are so committed to one party the parties are such polar opposites.

 

[ATraveller]

At the same time, it has consistently voted (often by a very large margin) for the Labor Party, which is centre-left and somewhat equivalent to the US Democrats. Largely this is because the electorate is predominantly working class, from the Germans and Austrians who first migrated to this area in the late 19th century, to the Polish after WW2, and then to the Vietnamese in the 1970s.

That’s the two party system for you.
I remember the UK once wanted to have AV/Instant-runoff voting like Australia because somehow that would end the duopoly. If anything, it looks like AV entrenches the two party system.
It would make more sense if the Australian House of Commons used STV instead of the Senate.

 

[EmilyAlexandra]

it is considered very poor form to discuss our voting choices. It is something we just dont do.

I think most people I know in the UK are quite happy to advertise how they vote. The exception would be the Brexit referendum. A lot of people were very cautious about letting on how they voted unless they were in the company of people who could be relied upon to have voted the same way. I am sure that some people I know voted one way and now claim to have voted the other way!

As a Catholic I vote for the most prolife candidate ,before an election our bishop asks us to use our Catholic conscience to do so.

I guess you are also able to weigh different issues? One factor I often take into account is how likely it is that a candidate will get a chance to implement their policies. For example, the Liberal Democrats have consistently had some pretty good policies on constitutional reform, but the only party that has really made meaningful progress in this area is the Labour Party, mostly because they got 13 years in power with a majority in the House of Commons, whereas the Lib Dems got five years in coalition with the Tories.

As for voting for a pro-life candidate, I have honestly tried to find a pro-life candidate to vote for in the past. When I have found a pro-life candidate, there have generally been two problems: (1) they’ve always been running as the candidate of a far-right party that also promotes horrible policies like ending immigration/repatriating the non-white population (including British citizens!), reintroducing hanging and flogging and establishing a penal colony of South Georgia, repealing the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (the law that prevents the police from fitting people up for crimes they didn’t commit), etc, and (2) they have no chance of succeeding, both because they will never be elected and because even if they were to be elected, one pro-life backbencher is not enough to reverse over 50 years of consensus in both houses of Parliament.

Therefore, I choose to pick the ethical battles where I think politicians are more likely to make a difference, e.g. ending child poverty, reforming prisons, overseas development.

Of course, if one lives in a constituency where one of the mainstream parties has a pro-life candidate, that is a different matter. E.g., if you live in North East Somerset, you could vote for Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is pro-life and is a mainstream politician with some influence.

 

[EmilyAlexandra]

Largely this is because the electorate is predominantly working class

Yes, this is what I have also found. An area of the UK with a large Catholic population (or, for that matter, a large Muslim population or a large Hindu population) tends to mean an area with a lot of immigrants/diaspora communities and hence, usually, more working-class voters. An oddity of the situation in the UK is that some communities apparently vote essentially along ethnic lines. For example, I understand that in Leicester the Gujarati community tends to be Labour and there’s another Indian community that tends to be Tory. George Galloway also did a pretty good job of basically mobilising the Muslim vote wherever he stood. His luck finally ran out, and he made a bizarre speech comparing himself to a lion and the Labour Party to a hyena dancing on his grave.

On a side note, I for one am glad that the death penalty is a thing of the past and mostly a non-issue in Europe.

I could not agree more. From time to time somebody pops up in the UK suggesting that we should bring it back, but there’s no appetite for it among serious politicians, and it would doubtless be found incompatible with both our own Human Rights Acts and the European Convention on Human Rights (thankfully the Tories seem to have shelved threats to take us out of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights). Our current home secretary not only gave assurances that she does not currently support reintroducing capital punishment, but actually tried to claim that she had never supported reintroducing capital punishment, despite having publicly stated that this was her position!

(I’m personally not convinced one can call oneself authentically pro-life when one advocates hard repressive policies against migrants).

I feel similarly about some of our more outspokenly Christian politicians in the UK. They may support some Christian views, such as being against abortion, but many of their other positions seem plainly un-Christian. For example, Ann Widdecombe, who is pro-life, but also oversaw a policy that pregnant female prisoners had to give birth shackled to a hospital bed. She also supports reintroducing the death penalty and promotes gay conversion therapy.

 

[PickyPicky]

thankfully the Tories seem to have shelved threats to take us out of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights

Hopefully rather than thankfully, I think. Don’t count your chickens. Anti-ECHR is such an easy drum to beat, so easily picked up by the Daily Mail, can be made so appealing in those former Red Wall seats. Let’s keep hoping!

 

[umamibella]

I think most people I know in the UK are quite happy to advertise how they vote. The exception would be the Brexit referendum. A lot of people were very cautious about letting on how they voted unless they were in the company of people who could be relied upon to have voted the same way. I am sure that some people I know voted one way and now claim to have voted the other way!

Australians seem to like to swing depending on who is up for PM and what their policies and platforms involve. If they did not, we would always have the same party in office

 

[EmilyAlexandra]

This bears out a familiar theme: the reason for their choice of party is based on ethnicity and culture rather than religion.

It is possible that readers from outside the UK and Ireland may not be aware that the full name of the Conservative Party is actually the Conservative and Unionist Party. It also may not be clear that the Union to which the name refers was originally the Union between Great Britain and Ireland, not the Union between England and Scotland or even the Union between England and Wales. From 1912 until 1965, the Unionist Party was de facto the Scottish branch of the Conservative Party. More recently, the Conservative Party attempted an electoral alliance with the Ulster Unionist Party. It’s not hard to see why Irish nationalists and republicans would not support the Conservative Party.

As you will obviously know, the reunification of an independent Ireland was formerly a Labour policy. However, as the party is a wholly British party, it now takes the view that it would be inappropriate to have a policy on Northern Ireland, as this would violate the terms of the Downing Street Declaration and the Good Friday Agreement. There are many within the party who are personally in favour of Irish reunification, but I don’t think that we can pursue this as a policy aim if we do not have a presence on the island of Ireland.

I have always assumed that loyalism is to Unionism as republicanism is to nationalism. To my mind, a Unionist is merely somebody who supports the Union between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, whereas a loyalist is somebody who feels a close sense of identification with a somewhat fanatical brand of Protestantism (specifically Presbyterianism), the British monarchy from the time of the Glorious Revolution, and the Orange Order and similar organisations. Ironically, there is something distinctly un-British about Ulster loyalists. In my head, the word “loyalist” is almost invariably followed by the word “paramilitaries”, but that may be unfair.

I would agree with this. I am reasonably confident of seeing the reunification of Ireland in my lifetime. If current demographic trends continue, there will be a nationalist/republican majority in Northern Ireland. Also, younger people are apparently increasingly rejecting sectarian identities and instead embracing a shared Northern Irish identity, which is regarded as a subset of Irish rather than a subset of British. This presumably has something to do with secularisation. I have noted that over my lifetime we no longer use “Catholic” as shorthand for “nationalist/republican” or “Protestant” as shorthand for “Unionist/loyalist” (yes, I am aware that there have always been Protestant nationalists and, to a much lesser extent, Catholic Unionists).

 

[Lea101]

I am curious to know how Catholics tend to vote outside the United States, as this is not a subject I have seen covered much on here.

Abortion isn’t a political issue here, since it has been legal for a long time and no party is necessarily pro life. There are pro life and pro choice individuals across the parties but it isn’t part of their platform.

Pro life groups aren’t fighting to make it illegal anyway, they tackle this issue through pro life centres.

As for other issues like lgbtq issues etc, there’s also no relevant party who’s pro or anti lgbtq. Again there’s some people who may have voiced support in vague ways, but it isn’t part of their platform as well. Although recently, discrimination against lgbtq individuals are brought to the surface. But this is something even Catholics agree on, so it’s not an issue at all, as the government still acknowledge religious freedom.

The parties mostly stick to promises on how they’ll use the money and how they support families and businesses, so it’s more about voting as a citizen, not as a Catholic.

 

[PickyPicky]

It is possible that readers from outside the UK and Ireland may not be aware that the full name of the Conservative Party is actually the Conservative and Unionist Party. It also may not be clear that the Union to which the name refers was originally the Union between Great Britain and Ireland

Even though the Conservative and Unionist government has just put a customs barrier between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Irish re-union seems to me to be (happily) not so far off.

 

[Kaninchen]

His luck finally ran out, and he made a bizarre speech comparing himself to a lion and the Labour Party to a hyena dancing on his grave.

He’s back and working with Michael Gove and even more dodgy characters (apparently) to try to sabotage the SNP.

 

[PickyPicky]

He’s back and working with Michael Gove and even more dodgy characters (apparently) to try to sabotage the SNP.

Galloway is? Good gracious. Gove is unseemly but surely George would be an unseemliness too far?

 

[Kaninchen]

Gove is unseemly but surely George would be an unseemly too far?

They’re both wedded to a future reached through a kind of trial by nihilism so, in a sense, they’re natural allies - like all those old ‘Living Marxism’/‘Spiked’ Trots who’ve embraced reaction and Boris Johnson.

 

[0Scarlett_nidiyilii]

It might have something to do with that the US is a nation of malcontents.
Immigrants come here because they don’t like how things are being run in their native land.
Also, American Protestantism seems to be a different phenomenon than Protestantism in other parts of the world. We have lots of offshoots from the mainline denominations and lots of tiny independent churches that “stand-alone”.
And US is mostly a Protestant nation, but culturally there is a degree of cross pollination of ideas between the Catholics and Protestants.