(ANALYSIS) Is Trump a four-letter word? 

Catholic Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire must think so. This media ministry threatened a defamation lawsuit when an online Commonweal magazine essay described it as conservative with a “varying relationship to Trumpism.” The magazine later deleted that reference, but Word on Fire again threatened legal action over the editor’s note explaining the deletion.

“God or Trump?” Such was the overheated headline on another Commonweal article, by liberal Catholic attorney Thomas Geoghegan. He contended that Catholics in 2024 face that stark choice, between an unchurched Donald Trump, “who violates every commandment,” and churchgoing Catholic Joe Biden, who’d like to “restore the moral character of the United States in which he grew up.” 

READ: Guide To The 2024 US Presidential Candidates

On the other hand, the ardently partisan Catholics for Catholics organization is hailing Trump as “is the ONLY option for Catholics of good conscience.” 

Such anxious crosscurrents and eruptions remind us that Catholic voters may well decide this odd contest between unwelcome nominees. As with Americans in general, Pew Research Center polling shows they give fellow Catholic Biden an unfavorable rating of 64 percent and 57 percent unfavorable toward Trump. 

The media continually ponder Trump's lopsided support from White Protestant evangelicals (minority evangelicals are different).

Ho hum.

They always give Republicans fat margins, whether Mitt Romney, John McCain, George W. Bush, Bob Dole, George H.W. Bush or Ronald Reagan. Evangelical opinion does loom large in Republican primaries, but with general elections the fight for the Catholic vote is the far more important and unpredictable story.

Alongside all the journalistic astonishment over how multitudes of moralistic evangelicals could ever embrace a guy like Trump, how about White Catholics? Trump won 64 percent of their 2016 votes and 57 percent in 2020.  (Did that 7 percent slide hand Biden the White House?) This year, Pew polling finds 61 percent of Trump support from White Catholics as of last month.  

In case of interest, Trump notched a typical 81 percent from Whites who identify as evangelical and 57 percent from white non-evangelical or “mainline” Protestants. Biden scored a disappointing 77 percent with Black Protestants and a typical 69 percent with those lacking any religious affiliation. Responses were too few to yield reliable numbers for smaller religious groupings. 

Now, here’s Pew’s eye-popper: Hispanic Catholics went only 49 percent for Biden and 47 percent for Trump. An equal shocker was the recent New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer poll in six key swing states in which Hispanics overall split 31 percent versus 31 percent. By contrast, Pew says in 2020 Hispanics went 59 percent for Biden. Exit polls reported they gave Hillary Clinton 65 percent in 2016 and Barack Obama 71 percent in 2012. 

Anything like those 2024 Hispanic numbers would doom the Democrat on Nov. 5. 

Hispanics are estimated to reach 14.7 percent of eligible voters, an historic high, this round. The growing numbers of Hispanic Protestants lean more Republican than Catholics. The Hispanic vote will be crucial in Arizona (25 percent of the population) and Nevada (22 percent). 

Looking at swing-state Catholics overall, their populations are small in Georgia and North Carolina but pivotal in Arizona (21 percent), Michigan (18 percent), Nevada (25 percent), New Hampshire (26 percent), Pennsylvania (24 percent) and Wisconsin (25 percent). By the way, the much-discussed Muslim voters are only 1 percdent in Michigan.

Over time, America has experienced political earthquakes: Republicans’ rise to rule the Democrats’ once “Solid South,” Democrats’ 21st century dependence on non-religious voters, and Trump’s working-class gains alongside losses among traditionally Republican suburbanites and elites. Equally influential, and often ignored, is White Catholics’ migration from Democratic loyalty to a consistent GOP majority.

Political scientist Ryan Burge calculates remarkable data. Today’s White Catholics are 10 percent of Democratic voters and 17 percent of Republicans. In the 1970s, the Republican coalition was 19 percent Catholic (White plus Hispanic), increasing to 25 percent in the past decade. In those same years, Catholics fell from a 31 percent plurality of Democrats to 26 percent. White “mainline” Protestants “collapsed” from 46 percent to just 17 percent of Republicans. Non-religious voters — 6 percent of Democrats in the 1970s — were 45 percent of Biden’s 2020 coalition and clearly “the future of the Democratic Party.” 

Here are a few basics: Pew figures 20 percent of Americans, roughly 52 million of voting age, identify as Catholic, of whom one-third are Hispanic (others say more). Unlike in past times, only 28 percent of Catholics attend worship weekly (compared with 40 percent of Protestants). Counting children, as of 2020 the U.S. Religion Census counted as roughly 61.9 million Catholics while the official church total was 67.6 million.

A word about abortion: Cardinal Wilton Gregory of Washington, D.C. lamented that local parishioner Biden, though “sincere,” is a “cafeteria Catholic” who “picks and chooses” what church beliefs to ignore, as on abortion. Though Catholic teaching believes killing in the womb is especially inhumane, this writer recently proposed that the issue will have minimal impact on parishioners’ voting.

On May 13, Pew reported its latest numbers for those want abortion to be illegal in all cases, illegal in most cases, legal in most cases or legal in all cases. Among all Americans it’s 8 percent, 28 percent, 38 percent and 25 percent. Among all Catholics, it’s 8 percent, 31 percent, 37 percent and 21 percent. And among all Hispanics, it’s 12 percent, 26 percent, 35 percent and 2 2 percent.

The similarity in attitudes is striking. In fact, all three populations heavily reject the extremes of all legal (per the Democrats’ 2020 platform) and all illegal (per official Catholic teaching).

Finally, we need to mention Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who reaches double digits in some polls. It’s hard to tell how fellow Catholics might abandon Biden and Trump in favor of an independent whose personal life has been trashed in news articles and a 2015 biography by muckraker Jerry Oppenheimer.

Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.