Numerous commentators during Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate pointed to the eerie symmetry between the two VP nominees: both are 58, both are married (to their first and only wives) with three kids, including one son apiece currently serving in the Marines, both studied law, and each weighs precisely 208 pounds. But it’s their similarity in their religious upbringing and how that diverged that tells us something critical about how Catholicism—and the larger religious landscape—has evolved over the past few decades.
Both Pence and Kaine were raised in Midwest, middle-class, observant Irish-Catholic families. Pence started out as a Democrat, voting for Jimmy Carter in 1980, but like many other more conservative-minded Catholics switched alliances to the Republican Party, voting for Ronald Reagan in 1984. The Jesuit-educated Kaine, meanwhile, was attracted to Liberation Theology’s “blending of Catholicism and socialism,” influenced by his time volunteering in Honduras when US-backed right-wing dictators were engaged in vicious internecine conflicts with Communist-backed forces.
It’s no coincidence that Catholic defection to the Republican Party during the Reagan era coincided with the start of John Paul II’s papacy. John Paul’s emphasis on opposition to abortion as a core Catholic value—and his warnings about a pro-choice “culture of death“—perfectly meshed with the Republican Party’s use of abortion as a wedge issue. But even before John Paul, the U.S. bishops’ conference had, in 1976, meddled in electoral politics when they pronounced themselves “encouraged” by Gerald Ford’s abortion views while they were “disappointed” by Carter’s.
The U.S. bishops’ conference nevertheless retained a significant center-left faction throughout the 1980s. These bishops continued to emphasize social justice concerns like the abuses of capitalism and militarism in Central America, structural poverty, and the prevention of nuclear war, while remaining moderate on the question of whether Catholics needed to aggressively assert opposition to abortion in public policy.
But even during the 1980s the church was already splitting into a “Pence wing” and a “Kaine wing.” That’s why it’s a misinterpretation to assert, as Emma Green did in The Atlantic, that divisions within Catholicism are driven by our currently polarized political system, that “partisan divisions have arguably made Catholicism less vibrant”:
Over time, the Democratic Party has become almost exclusively pro-choice: Even by 1992, the Catholic, pro-life Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey Sr. was shut out of speaking at Bill Clinton’s Democratic National Convention, and allegedly because of his efforts to restrict abortion in Pennsylvania.
This sense of ideological homelessness is arguably responsible for the loss of distinctive Catholic identity among politicians voters—and for division within the Church itself.
Catholicism didn’t become less “distinctive”—in terms of having the coherent political identity Catholics had in the days of JFK—because the political system forced it on them. Catholics’ divergence into conservative and liberal factions was created by the church itself, initially by the nonsensical Humanae Vitae encyclical. The church’s decision to ban birth control despite the recommendation of Catholic theologians and committed lay people taught Catholics that the Vatican was more concerned about power and male privilege than either theology or Catholics’ actual lived experience of their religion.
Is it any wonder then that, when Roe v. Wade legalized abortion and the church insisted that Catholics opposed the decision, a significant number of Catholics similarly ignored them, having decided that on matters of sexuality the hierarchy wasn’t to be trusted? It’s that split within Catholicism that freed up Catholics to affiliate with whatever political party best met their priorities: social justice issues for left-leaning Catholics and sexual restraint, law-and-order, and a muscular national defense for right-leaning Catholics.
And, as Jack Jenkins notes at Think Progress:
…if this sort of dissenting spirit was unique among modern American Catholics, one could plausibly argue that the United States has created an environment that bifurcates Catholics in unusual ways. But it’s not: In 2014, a global survey conducted by Univision found that most of the planet’s Catholics disagree with the church on birth control, abortion rights, divorce, and priestly celibacy.
But of course what really divides the left and right isn’t just their views on hot-button issues. Increasingly it’s the question of exactly what it means to express those views in the public square. And on that question, sometime in the 1990s conservative Catholics began to sound more like evangelicals, asserting not just their right but their duty to impose their religiously-based views on others. And indeed for a time Pence considered himself an “Evangelical Catholic” before finally making the transition to full-on evangelicalism.
And it’s that divergence that was on full display Tuesday evening when the candidates were asked to discuss “a time that you have struggled to balance your personal faith and the public policy decision.” Kaine discussed his difficulty in applying the death penalty when he was governor of Virginia, despite his faith-based opposition:
I try to practice my religion in a very devout way and follow the teachings of my church in my own personal life. But I do not believe in this nation—a First Amendment nation where we do not raise any religion over the other and we allow people to worship as they please, that the doctrines of any one religion should be mandated for everyone.
Pence, however, asserted that he doesn’t “struggle” to balance faith and public policy like Kaine because the later springs from the former, and discussed how his pro-life stance infuses his policy decisions:
…for me … the sanctity of life proceeds out of the belief that ancient principle that where God says before you were formed in the womb I knew you. … So for me, my faith informs my life. I try and spend a little time on my knees every day. But it all for me begins with cherishing the dignity, the worth, the value of every human life.
After attacking Kaine for being on a ticket that supports “partial-birth” and publicly funded abortions—and slyly suggesting that he compromised his faith principles to do so—Pence asserted:
People need to understand—we can come together as a nation. We can create a culture of life. … A society can be judged by how it deals with its most vulnerable: the aged, the infirm, the disabled and the unborn.
This last line is straight from John Paul, demonstrating the extraordinary cross-pollination that occurred between the pope and the Christian right on the issue of abortion. But it’s the first part of this formulation that should attract notice. It was George W. Bush, when he was running for president, who talked about “creating a culture of life.” But in Bush’s formulation it was to assert that he wouldn’t back the kind of draconian laws, that Pence has supported as governor of Indiana, designed to decrease access to abortion; that he would instead try to change “hearts and minds.” This, of course, was meant as a reassurance to independent, suburban women that he wouldn’t undermine the fundamentals of Roe.
Pence, on the other hand, would “create a culture of life” by force—not just by supporting adoption, which he mentioned—but by making it impossible for women to access legal abortion, which he didn’t. But he has signed laws requiring abortion waiting periods, imposing new building codes on clinics in an attempt to shut them down (which the Supreme Court found illegal in Texas), and just recently, requiring “burials” for aborted fetuses that one abortion activist told me could add $2,000 to the cost of a $400 abortion.
It was left for Kaine to argue the “faith by example” position of Bush:
That’s what we ought to be doing in public life: living our lives of faith or motivation with enthusiasm and excitement, convincing each other, dialoguing with each other about important moral issues of the day. But on fundamental issues of morality, we should let women make their own decisions.
And it’s the evolution of Pence, from Catholic Democrat to conservative Catholic Republican, to evangelical—who puts the holy rite of controlling women’s reproduction at the center of his belief system—that perfectly illustrates the divergent and increasingly irreconcilable paths and priorities of progressive and conservative people of faith in the United States.
