The Conformity Gap: What American Catholics Actually Believe And Practice
(ANALYSIS) There’s a running joke in American religious life that goes something like this: Ask 10 Catholics what the church teaches on a given issue, and you’ll get eleven different answers. It’s meant to be affectionate, a nod to the big-tent nature of a tradition that has managed to hold together nearly a billion people across wildly different cultures, languages, and political contexts. But like most jokes, it contains more than a little truth.
The Catholic Church is one of the most doctrinally specific institutions in the world. The Magisterium — the pope, cardinals and bishops — has issued detailed guidance on everything from the mechanics of salvation to the appropriate use of birth control to how often a faithful Catholic should receive the sacrament of Reconciliation.
These aren’t suggestions. They are, in the church’s own framing, the authoritative teachings of an institution that believes itself to be guided by the Holy Spirit.
And yet, anyone who has spent time around American Catholics knows that the distance between official Church teaching and the lived experience of the average Catholic in the pew can be considerable. This isn’t a new observation — sociologists of religion have been documenting it for decades.
But it raises a genuinely interesting empirical question: just how Catholic, in the doctrinal sense of the word, is the average American Catholic?
This is actually a pretty hard question to answer because most surveys of American religion are “general purpose.” They ask about things like religious attendance because that’s fairly universal across traditions, but they aren’t going to dig into the weeds of specific Catholic beliefs and practices.
However, I managed to stumble upon a dataset called the American Catholic Laity Poll. It was conducted a while ago (2017), but I think it can still offer us insights into the specific practices and beliefs of Catholics.
You can read the rest of this post on Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.