How the Support of Catholics Helped Donald Trump's Victory [View all]

[trotsky]

http://fortune.com/2016/11/09/donald-trump-election-2016-catholic-vote/

In the election post-mortem and hand-wringing among pollsters, pundits, and prognosticators, many factors will be identified as contributing to Donald Trump’s decisive victory, including race, class, and gender. But one other factor that deserves more attention is religion. In spite of reports indicating that Trump was having “problems” with the Catholic vote, exit polling indicates that he won Catholics by 52% to 45%. This marks a substantial change from the previous two presidential elections when Catholics voted for Obama by margins of 9% in 2008 and 2% in 2012.

In my view, Trump’s turnaround was the result of a deep antipathy to cultural elites who are perceived as not only being tone deaf to Catholic sensibilities, but also as actively antagonistic to them.

Catholic journalist Andrew Sullivan argues in New York Magazine that the “left” had overplayed its hand on cultural issues. Obviously, abortion is a central part of this perceived “overplay,” and even liberal Catholics—many of whom are against abortion but not willing to outlaw it—are taken aback by positions reflected in social media campaigns such as #shoutyourabortion, not to mention Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton’s own defense of late-term pregnancy terminations.

But beyond the incendiary issue of abortion, there are other issues concerning perceived government encroachments on the ability, and right, of religious institutions and communities to operate according to their own deeply held values and commitments. Such debates, ranging from whether religious institutions should support health plans that cover contraception, to the establishment of gender-neutral bathrooms, involve difficult questions concerning how civil society should be structured. Many Catholics, though by no means all, wonder whether in making civil society more inclusive, there is paradoxically less space for traditional forms of religious expression.