Why do some Catholics lean politically conservative?

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It seems to me Catholics in the US were overwhelmingly Democrats from FDR until abortion became a (the?) major plank of the Democrat party platform. Since that was intolerable, many Catholics switched to the Republicans, who took up the pro-life banner, and took whatever else came with the Republican party (which was at least tolerable).
 
twf said:
Two very clear examples are the use of torture and capital punishment. The Catechism now condemns both under all circumstances, yet many here will defend both, relying on their personal interpretation of ancient magisterial texts.
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I’m not sure I have ever seen anybody on CAF defend capital punishment. Might be some have, but it’s not significant. I have never seen anyone defend torture here. The usual argument about that is how to define it. Between imposing a stern look and boiling one in acid, there should be some means of distinguishing the merely unpleasant from real “torture”.

And when people argue those things, I do not consider them “American conservative talking points”. People generally say what they believe and mean it.

What has the Dem party done for the truly poor in the last fifty years that even remotely compares to the Earned Income Credit? Provided free contraceptives and abortifacients. That’s it.

And just how is Trump’s “build a wall with a great big door” different from Pope Francis’ “build bridges not walls”? It isn’t. It’s just that the Dem policy of “open borders” (which is also shared by no few on the right) is aimed at getting votes and cheap labor. Where is the Dem program to improve legal immigration prospects? It doesn’t exist.

Again, I strongly encourage study of the Social Encyclicals. If one does, one will not remain a “progressive” very long.
 
Genesis315 said:
It seems to me Catholics in the US were overwhelmingly Democrats from FDR until abortion became a (the?) major plank of the Democrat party platform. Since that was intolerable, many Catholics switched to the Republicans, who took up the pro-life banner, and took whatever else came with the Republican party (which was at least tolerable).
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I think the shift of US Catholics towards the Republican Party began to happen earlier, during the Nixon years. Catholics were for Kennedy of course, but after he was killed, you had a lot of political demonstration and riot stuff happening, soon accompanied by drugs, hippies, resistance to authority, and it seemed to many like society’s morals were crumbling. I grew up in a heavily Catholic, heavily working-class area that was probably about 50 percent Republican, years before Reagan. Of course, when abortion entered the room, even more Catholics jumped off the Democratic bandwagon, as you note.

I will be honest, I stay Dem out of respect for my parents and an unwillingness to fully align with the “rich people’s party”, but ever since the Clinton administration, I’ve found less and less that I relate to or admire in the Democratic party at the national level. It’s often, though not always, better at a local level. I’m also usually not in love with whoever is running the Republican party at the national level either. Dubya to me was a joke.
 
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Although I would agree that Pope Francis appears to lean left on a lot of issues, that doesn’t mean that church teaching leans left on a lot of issues. In fact reading the catechisms and the early church fathers and understanding the church teachings one could argue the opposite. I think the biggest part that liberal Catholics hold onto Is the notion that the Democrat party supports welfare which is supported through church teaching. Republicans also support welfare, just not the abuse of welfare which is taught from the Bible. Republicans support immigration, just not the abuse of immigration and illegal immigration. Republicans support a lot of things that Democrats support, they just do so in moderation and responsibly.
 
I lean to the conservative side of things because:
  • Abortion is evil, and has become the main sacrament of the Democratic party.
  • They support pretty much all kinds of sexual immorality
  • They have been increasingly promoting socialist ideologies, which I find to be antithetical to Catholic social theory.
  • I don’t believe that handouts are usually the proper way to help people.
  • I believe that the government should be as small as possible, and that anything which becomes handled by the federal government becomes about a hundred times less efficient than it could otherwise be. Since Democrats tend to favor big government, I cannot support them.
  • Just… sooo many other reasons…
 
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Actually, someone defending the death penalty will more frequently reference Pius XII in the 1950s rather than “ancient magisterial texts”.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
I will be honest, I stay Dem out of respect for my parents and an unwillingness to fully align with the “rich people’s party”
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Erm… I don’t know how to tell you this, but the vast majority of the super rich identify as Democrat. The average rich person, the one who has worked and saved their whole life to retire “rich,” is usually Republican, but I believe the majority of the people on the “Nation’s Richest” list claim to be Democrats.
 
I would say for myself, on at least some of those issues there are two good reasons I don’t agree with the left’s way of solving those problems. Of course I care about the poor and environment I just disagree about how to solve the issues.
  1. I don’t think that throwing money at the government is a good or efficent way of solving problems. If you want me to pay extra taxes so that the government can redistribute it to less fortunate people you’ve got another thing coming. The government burocracies are the most inefficient “non profits” there are.
I think that rather than throw money at the government these issues by and large need to be solved by us. I also think that’s what the Bible says. It doesnt say “you had money but didn’t give it to the local homeless shelter so they would feed me” it says “I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat.” It’s on us to serve our neighbors as a community. It isn’t the states job to step in where community is failing. We need to build back up the idea of church communities that help on another.
  1. If you give the state a power it will NEVER EVER EVER give it back to the people. Take healthcare. If the government becomes the sole provider of healthcare and we decide the systems sucks, oh well. It’s too late to go back. The private companies are all closed. It’ll be too late to start over from scratch.
I see a lot of those policies as authoritatian, slowly making us more and more depandant on the government.
 
Yes, I know, but in the average group of “upper middle class” (which to my parents was Rich) doctors, lawyers and managers, the Republicans are vastly in the majority. Conservatives are also usually very interested in devising ways that such people can hold onto wealth.

I don’t pal around with the super-rich, and there are so few of them, they don’t define the demographics of any party.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
Yes, I know, but in the average group of “upper middle class” (which to my parents was Rich) doctors, lawyers and managers, the Republicans are vastly in the majority.
I don’t pal around with the super-rich, and there are so few of them, they don’t define the demographics of any party.
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And yet they influence so much, and do so much more damage than your average “rich” guy.

Honestly, I don’t put most of those groups in the “rich” category. There are some that are, but most are middle class, maybe on the lower cusp of upper middle class.

The point is, I don’t see why the fact that people who work hard and earn a living would turn you away from a group…

Well… I get why the lawyers would… 😛
 
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Genesis315 said:
It seems to me Catholics in the US were overwhelmingly Democrats from FDR until abortion became a (the?) major plank of the Democrat party platform.
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Abortion policy wasn’t the initial cause of Catholics leaving the Democrat Party.

The 2nd and subsequent generations of Catholic immigrants that came over for the industrial revolution moved on out of the Catholic immigrant ghettos and many became doctors, lawyers and accountants. No longer a mostly suppressed minority , and in many areas doing as well as their Protestant neighbors financially, they no longer needed the patronage jobs of the Democratic Party and the Republicans started competing for the votes of Catholics.
 
I respect the complexity of the issue, but a Catholic cannot be Democrat anymore it seems.
Every Democrat, like every American, should support a woman’s right to make her own choices about her body and her health. That is not negotiable and should not change city by city or state by state. -DNC chairman Tom Perez
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RCIAGraduate said:
Hello, how are you? I just want to ask why some Catholics lean conservative or libertarian on many political or policy issues? For example, when I look at the issues outside of certain social issues, it seems like the Catholic position would be very compatible with the left-leaning or progressive view. And I know this sounds childish but the conservative or “right-leaning” agenda seems to be presented in a way that is well “harsh”.
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I would say the reason for this is varied. Most people don’t derive their political views from the religious views, at least not in the US. Sad fact, but true. Don’t take that the wrong way though, that doesn’t mean the right leaning political views are incompatible with Christian doctrine. When we talk about the differences in the left and right with regard to political topics such as welfare, economic policy, judicial issues, etc., is one of pragmatics. Both sides of the political aisle would say we want to help people. The question is what policies do the most good. That is really where the divide lies.
 
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Thanks for posting the words of St. John Chrysostom, they are well spoken and make much sense.
 
ProdglArchitect said:
Honestly, I don’t put most of those groups in the “rich” category. There are some that are, but most are middle class, maybe on the lower cusp of upper middle class.
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You may have grown up in a very different social strata than I did. I always want to laugh out loud when I see some 21-year-old who went to private school or even a “good” public school and is living with his family in a $700,000 house protesting that he’s “not rich”. My mother had to count out dimes to buy hamburger and stretch it till Friday. These people I mention are “rich” to me and will always be “rich”.

I used to work with a minority guy who had been raised by a single mother in a housing project in the American South. He thought my family and I were “rich” because mom and dad owned a tiny house that they paid a 30 year mortgage on.

It’s all relative.
 
I came from a largely democratic Catholic family, on both my mothers side and my fathers side and as the years went by I slowly watched my family switch from democrat to republican.

I think for the most part is the democrats have moved so far left, I wouldn’t even call them decmorats anymore but socialists or at least democratic socialists.

A huge portion of the reason, besides the overwhelming big government agenda, are the moral issues. The democratic party sides with so many evils that go against the Catholic church, I think it would be very difficult for a Catholic to vote to put a democrat in office.
 
To give people the benefit of the doubt, not supporting Democrats could easily translate or be interpreted as into voting GOP and I say this as a registered (though not particularly active as well as generally relatively left-leaning) member, voting for the GOP ain’t no walk in the park.
 
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A few major reasons I can think of in American politics are:
  1. Democrats tend to be pro-choice, barring the relatively weak pro-life Democrats. Since abortion is arguably the gravest evil our country legally permits, many Catholics are turned off by the Democratic Party and go to the party that at least still has some pro-life leanings.
  2. There’s a general, somewhat well-founded, fear that the left care very little about the religious liberty of many Christians. Our religious beliefs should be “private”, but when in the public, we shouldn’t practice those beliefs especially if it violates their principles. That was part of what made the Masterpiece Cake case so concerning to many Christians. Ultimately, it paints the picture that by supporting the left, we may end up making our ability to practice our religion more difficult, especially if we’re in an affected industry.
  3. Contrary to a lot of the left’s accusations that the right don’t care about the poor, the right claim that their policies are, in the long run, better for the poor. Catholics who believe the right’s rhetoric will understandably take their side.
Now, does this all warrant being Republican first and Catholic second? No, it doesn’t, but it does offer a few reasons why many Catholics lean Republican or, at the very least, are beginning to feel disconnected from the Democratic party.
 
ProdglArchitect said:
I lean to the conservative side of things because:
  • Abortion is evil , and has become the main sacrament of the Democratic party.
  • They support pretty much all kinds of sexual immorality
  • They have been increasingly promoting socialist ideologies, which I find to be antithetical to Catholic social theory.
  • I don’t believe that handouts are usually the proper way to help people.
  • I believe that the government should be as small as possible, and that anything which becomes handled by the federal government becomes about a hundred times less efficient than it could otherwise be. Since Democrats tend to favor big government, I cannot support them.
  • Just… sooo many other reasons…
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Same for me.
With respect to helping the poor, I don’t believe that the policies put in place by the Democratic party over the past 50 years have actually helped poor people. In fact, I would argue that the problem has been perpetuated, starting with Johnson’s Great Society programs.

I’m a firm believer in keeping the government out of most things other than preventing chaos. It should be up to all of us at the individual level to be helping our fellow humans. Unfortunately, my ability to do what I believe would most help my fellow human beings is lessened due to the governments intervention (taxation and spending).

While I’ve voted both democrat and republican in previous elections, neither party meets my current expectations and I long for a strong third party to appear.

Question: Is is better to give a hungry person fish to eat (a one-time offering), or a fishing pole so that he can learn to fish on his own and provide for himself on a continuing basis?
 
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