Christian belief in and knowledge of Transubstantiation

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s recent U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey has unearthed evidence of an identity crisis among American Catholics. “More than four-in-ten Catholics in the United States (45%) do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ” (Pew, p. 8).  Among the American public overall, “about half of those polled (52%) say, incorrectly, that Catholicism teaches that the bread and wine used for Communion are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus” (p. 24).

Unlike the discussions surrounding the last major Pew study with significant implications for the Church I have no doubts of the discourse regarding the latest Catholic results. It is very likely the case that only about 55% of Catholics are aware of what the Catholic Church teaches regarding the Real Presence. At the same time, as someone who has been surveying Catholics nationally for nearly a decade I know there is still a deeper story to tell.

There is a gap in Catholics’ knowledge of their Church’s teachings and what their beliefs are. It may be a classic case of source amnesia. Other recent surveys (including CARA’s) indicate six in ten to three-quarters of Catholics believe in the Real Presence. This is most likely among those who attend Mass frequently.  Strangely enough, many Catholics believe what their Church teaches without realizing that their Church teaches it.

Catholics fit into four groups regarding the Real Presence. The first are the Knowledgeable Believers who know what the Church teaches regarding the Eucharist and also express a belief in this teaching. Because majorities of Catholics believe and know of these teachings it is also the case that some percentage of Catholics falls in the group of the Faithfully Unaware. These are truly rebels without a cause who believe in the Real Presence but believe they are doing so (wrongly of course) in opposition to what the Church teaches. It is also the case that some percentage of the Catholic population must be unaware of the Church teaching and also unbelieving in the Real Presence. Although disappointing, there is hope in these “Uns” (unbelieving and unknowing) as these Catholics may come to believe what the Church teaches if they became aware of it. The Church will likely have a more difficult time winning over the Knowledgeable Doubters. These Catholics are aware of what the Church teaches but say they do not believe it.

The only way to know how many Catholics are in each cell of the table below is to ask these two questions in combination (…and if anyone is interested in doing so they could do so in an upcoming CARA Catholic Poll).

The identity crisis unearthed by Pew is by no means limited to Catholics. Another recent survey, the American National Election Study of 2008, shows that other Christians offer up equally mystifying responses to questions regarding the Real Presence.

The ANES asked all Christians (who are citizens of voting age as this is an election study) the Transubstantiation question shown in the table above: Do you believe that when people take Holy Communion, the bread and wine become the body and blood of Jesus Christ, or do you believe that does not happen? 1) Yes, does happen or 2) No, does not happen.  

Seventy-four percent of Catholics surveyed indicated a belief that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Jesus Christ. That is reassuring (and fairly consistent with other surveys regarding this subject). The surprises are in the number of non-Catholic Christians who also state they have this same belief.

Nearly six in ten Protestants (59%) surveyed expressed a belief in Transubstantiation. The Pew survey indicates only 35% of Protestants are aware that the Catholic Church teaches this doctrine. Seven in ten Lutherans express a belief in Transubstantiation and this is not all that surprising considering the teachings within this denomination are sometimes more similar to those of the Catholic Church than those of some other denominations (e.g., “Christ's true body and blood in the Lord's Supper are "hidden under" the earthly forms of bread and wine”).                                                                                             

What is perhaps most surprising is that a majority of all significant sub-groups of non-Catholic Christians in the United States (i.e., those with a sufficient size that the number of interviews allows for an estimate) express a belief regarding the Eucharist that is consistent with Catholic Church teachings. The Pew results also indicate that they do so with little knowledge that the belief they affirm is a teaching of the Catholic Church. Again we may have another case of source amnesia—believing something you once heard but without memory of the source of that belief. The Catholic identity crisis is interesting. I must say the Protestant case even more so. Should the Catholic Church be more concerned that people don’t know what it teaches or surprised that so many non-Catholic Christians believe it—often in opposition the teachings of their own denominations?

How do so many Protestants—including those who identify themselves as “born again” come to believe a Catholic teaching regarding the Eucharist? This teaching was at the heart of anti-Catholic criticisms and caricatures of the Catholic faith for hundreds of years. Other than source amnesia what could this be attributed to? Perhaps another set of Pew survey results provide a clue. Some 59% of Evangelicals say the Bible is the “Word of God, literally true word for word.” If this is the case, many Evangelicals may take a literal reading of the passage such as Matthew 26:26-28 and incorporate this into their beliefs without realizing the literal interpretation is consistent with Catholic teachings that their particular denomination may not agree with (...and there is evidence for this link...).

The exploratory analysis above has its limitations. It is based on two separate surveys and the ANES does not include non-citizens. It is also the case that both survey questions cannot possibly capture all the nuances of the teachings and theology of the Catholic Church on this matter (although both questions are intentionally attempting to reflect these teachings specifically). Despite these limitation it definitely points to a need to explore this issue further.

I have a few more reflections on other aspects of the Pew knowledge study that will follow in the next post…

On What Wave Did Your Ancestors Ride?

Tuesday, October 12 is the 518th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas (at a location in what is now The Bahamas). Although we know Columbus was Catholic there is still some debate of his nationality and ancestry. Most believe that he was from Genoa, in present-day Italy.

The story of Catholicism in America is deeply rooted in waves of immigration that followed well after Columbus. These waves are often remembered today in how American Catholics self-identify their ancestry, which we can measure in polls. For some there is no knowledge or memory of this and these people often just say they are of “American” ancestry. While others still deeply identify with the country of their grandparents or great grandparents, etc.

Yet when one looks at polling data on ancestry for Catholics there are always a few surprises. Perhaps the biggest is that Irish Americans are more likely to be Protestant than Catholic. This has been noted among academics (e.g., “How the Irish Became Protestant in America” by Michael Carroll in Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, Vol. 16, No. 1 and “The Success and Assimilation of Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics in the United States” by Andrew M. Greeley in Sociology and Social Research, Vol. 72, No. 4) but is less well known among the media and general public who often assume that Irish and Catholic are virtually synonymous.

On average, only 35% of Americans who say they are of Irish ancestry self-identify their religion as Catholic. By comparison, nearly half of this group (47%) indicates their religion as Protestant.

It is the case that Americans of Italian ancestry are more likely to be Catholic than any other faith (on average between 1994 and 2008, 65% of Americans of Italian ancestry self-identified as Catholic. Although in the most recent GSS survey, in 2008, only 59% of Italian Americans indicated they are Catholic). However, few Americans may realize that there are almost as many adult Catholics today who say they are of German ancestry as there are who say they are of Italian ancestry (even with only about 17% of those of German ancestry self-identifying as Catholic. More Americans claim German ancestry than any other).

The graph below shows the average percentage of adult Catholics in the United States who identify ancestry with countries that have had significant immigration to the Americas in the last 150 years. Each bar represents a decade average with the orange bar showing the last decade.

Overall, the biggest recent shift has been in the number of adult Catholics who self-identify their ancestry with a Latin American country and specifically with Mexico. We have commented elsewhere about the generational shift in the racial and ethnic composition of the Catholic population. Along with this change, Mexican ancestry has grown larger than Italian or Irish ancestry among American Catholics. In the most recent GSS survey, 69 percent of American adults of Mexican ancestry self-identified as Catholic.

Above photo courtesy of Dominic's pics at Flickr Creative Commons.

There will likely be fewer Catholic baptisms and marriages next year… again.

The August National Vital Statistics Report was just released and it shows fewer Americans (Catholics and non-Catholics) married or had children in 2009 than in 2008. What does it matter? As shown in this post, these two rates are statistically linked to the rate at which the sacraments of baptism and marriage are celebrated in the Catholic Church in the United States. Baptisms and marriages in the Church have declined in number each year since 2001. The crude infant baptism rate (annual number of infant baptisms per 1,000 Catholics) reached a peak during the post-war Baby Boom in 1956 at 36.1. In 2009, this had fallen to only 12.7 infant baptisms per 1,000 Catholics. The crude marriage rate (annual number of marriages celebrated in the Church per 1,000 Catholics) peaked right after World War II at 15.1 in 1947. In 2009, this had fallen to only 2.7 marriages in the Church per 1,000 Catholics.

Despite these trends, the absolute number of Catholics in the United States continues to grow because the number of children born and raised Catholic has been generally sufficient to replace previous generations (life expectancies have risen as well) and other Catholics are added to the population through adult conversion from other faiths and through immigration of Catholics from other countries (even as some who are raised Catholic leave the faith at some point). Since the 1940s, the percentage of the U.S. population self-identifying as Catholic in polls has remained stable at around 22% to 26%.

Yet, it is still of great concern that the absolute number of Catholic infant baptisms continues to dip annually. For example, the number of baptisms, when projected five years into the future, is correlated with entry-level Catholic school enrollment. If baptisms are falling, most likely enrollments will fall at the same pace. Are fewer Catholics choosing to baptize their children? Or are Catholics just having fewer children, as the national trend indicates?  The answer to these questions implies very different potential responses. 

The data indicate that almost all self-identified Catholics having children are baptizing those children (most within a year of birth and some in later childhood years). In 2009, the crude birth rate for the United States was 13.8 per 1,000 population whereas the crude Catholic baptism rate was 12.7 per 1,000 Catholics. Historically, these two rates are strongly correlated (R=.984). Most of the decline in Catholic baptisms is attributable to the decline in birth rates from the Baby Boom peak years. 

The Baby Boom was initiated as many young Americans began catching up for events that would have occurred had the Great Depression and World War II not interrupted so many of their lives. For example, demographer Pascal Whelpton calculated that “the babies born during 1950-54 included roughly 1.6 million that had been postponed during the 1940s or earlier, and 0.9 million that were advanced from 1955 or later because of the tendency of women to marry and have their children at younger ages” (see: “Why Did the United States’ Crude Birth Rate Decline During 1957-1962?” in Population Index, Vol. 29, No. 2, p.122). Yet, since this period Catholics and non-Catholics alike have begun to wait longer to marry and there have been other cultural changes that have affected Americans’ ideas of ideal family size.

 

Between 1947 and 1962 the crude baptism rate was 30 or more per 1,000 Catholics in each year. Demographically, these years represent an extraordinary period. Even as the Baby Boom waned, Catholics tended to have higher fertility rates than non-Catholics for a time and this kept the number of baptisms from crashing along with the U.S. crude birth rate. 

But in the 1980s, social scientists began to identify a convergence of Catholic and Protestant fertility rates (see: “Religious Affiliation and the Fertility of Married Couples” William D. Mosher and Gerry E. Hendershot in Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 46, No. 3.). Later in the 1990s among non-Hispanic white women, the Catholic fertility rate began to fall below Protestant levels as some Catholics began waiting longer to marry or decided not to marry at all (“Religion and Fertility in the United States: New Patterns” William D. Mosher, Linda B. Williams, and David P. Johnson in Demography, Vol. 29, No. 2).

There are many potential ‘x-factors’ for the decline in Catholic fertility which, in turn, led to the decline in baptisms.

• It has been observed cross-nationally that female participation in the labor force can affect fertility rates. As the figure above shows, women began entering the workforce at higher rates in the 1960s than in the past. However, the negative correlation between female labor force participation and fertility ‘flipped’ in the late 20th century and is now positive in many advanced industrial and post-industrial democracies (see: “Is Low Fertility a Twenty-First-Century Demographic Crisis?” S. Philip Morgan in Demography, Vol. 40, No. 4).
• The flattening out of the birth and baptism rates in the 1970s and early 1980s also coincided with some of the worst economic times in memory. Although many might argue that the current recession is more severe, it is the case that the Misery Index (unemployment rate plus inflation rate) reached two severe peaks in the 1970s and 1980s that are significantly higher than current readings. These economic troubles may have affected the pocketbooks and psychology of many Americans who in turn decided to put off having children as they did during World War II and the Great Depression. They may be doing so again now, with the nation at war and slowly recovering from a severe recession.
• Concurrent to these socio-economic changes were two very important Supreme Court decisions. The first is Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) where the Court’s majority argued for a national right to marital privacy in the use of contraceptives. The second was Roe v. Wade (1973) where the Court’s majority argued for access to legal abortion with limitations on the basis of a women’s right to privacy. The Church opposed both decisions and its teachings regarding these issues were outlined in Humanae Vitae (1968).

Below, we measure statistically the impact of these potential factors in a series of regressions. The data are annual and thus any regression model will likely have correlated error terms across observations (the crude baptism rate in year t will be similar to this rate in year t-1). This violates some of the core assumptions of statistical regression modeling. To control for the nature of the time series data we have ‘lagged’ the dependent variable one year as a baseline predictor. To the degree that other variables can account for the remaining variance we can potentially understand changes over time.

As the results for Model 1 below indicate, three of these factors have a measurable statistically significant effect on the crude baptism rate in any given year: 1) the crude Catholic marriage rate, 2) the crude U.S. birth rate, and 3) female labor force participation. Ceteris paribus, there are no statistically significant direct effects related to the crude U.S. marriage rate, the Misery Index, or the Griswold or Roe decisions.

Historically, in periods where Americans were having more children in general, where Catholics were marrying in greater number in their parishes, and where women were more active in the labor force, more baptisms per 1,000 Catholics were celebrated nationally. Yet, Model 1 includes a number of factors that are not statistically significant, which in turn create collinearity problems with other variables (predictors being correlated with each other). The most statistically efficient model including the fewest collinearity disturbances is shown in the table below.

 

The strongest factor identified is still the overall U.S. crude birth rate. Thus, it is possible that some of the independent variables which have no direct effect on the crude baptism rate may affect this indirectly through their influence on the overall number of births per 1,000 population in the United States. We test for this in Model 3 below. Once again we control for the time series nature of the data by lagging the dependent variable. Only one factor other than this lagged variable emerges as statistically significant: the dummy variable measuring the Griswold v. Connecticut decision. This is negative representing a sustained decline in U.S. fertility overall following this Supreme Court decision.

Once again potential collinearity issues indicate the removal of some of the variables may be necessary. The most efficient model is shown below.

In 1964, just a year prior to the Griswold decision and four years before Humanae Vitae, a Harris survey asked a national sample of adult Catholics the following question: “Right now, Catholics are forbidden by the Church from using artificial birth control devices. Would you like to see the Catholic Church decide to allow Catholics to use birth control devices (contraceptives) or would you oppose that?” Fifty-two percent of the respondents said the Church should allow use, 13% said the Church should not, and 33% were not sure. 

Following the Griswold decision, surveys show that the attitudes of Catholics and non-Catholics were generally accepting of contraceptive use. American Catholics Today (D'Antonio, Davidson, Hoge, and Gautier; 2007), shows that there has been little change over time in the percentage of Catholics who believe Church leaders should have the final say about the morality of contraceptive use. Older Catholics are generally more likely than younger Catholics to look to Church leaders on this issue. However, even among those born before 1941, only one in five believe Church leaders alone should have the final say on contraceptive use.

In the wake of these historical events, Catholics and non-Catholics alike began to redefine their notions of a 'ideal' family size. In the 1972 General Social Survey (GSS), 58% of adult Catholics said that they thought the “ideal number of children for a family to have” was three or more (or “as many as one wants”). Response to this question received a GSS series low of 36% in 1998 and has since rebounded to 43% in the most recent GSS of 2008 (In most years the number of non-Catholics responding as such have been very similar).

The decline in the Catholic marriage rate is another story altogether. This is a case where there is not as strong a link to the overall crude marriage rate in the United States (R=.816). Although Catholics have been and are just as likely to marry (and divorce) as non-Catholics in the United States (see: “Marriage in the Catholic Church: A Survey of U.S. Catholics”) there has been a declining number of celebrations of the sacrament of marriage in the Church.  Many Catholics are still marrying but choosing to do so in greater numbers outside of the Church, in a civil ceremony or in another house of worship (without convalidation).

The number of marriages celebrated in the Church per 1,000 Catholics exceeded 10.0 in each year from 1943 to 1952 (the crude marriage rare for the U.S. did the same until 1951). At this point, the post-war Marriage Boom that precedes the Baby Boom began to slow. In 1958, the number of marriages celebrated in the Church per 1,000 Catholics began to consistently fall below the number of marriages overall in the U.S. per 1,000 of the population. As each decade has passed the gap has widened. In 2007, there were 6.8 marriages per 1,000 residents of the United States. By comparison, there were only 2.7 marriages celebrated in the Church per 1,000 Catholics in that same year.

The ‘x-factors’ for marriage decline emerged in the late-1950s and have gained strength as years have passed. The data are far more limited to test potential hypotheses. Many may assume it has something to do with rates of inter-faith marriage—Catholics marrying non-Catholics (In these situations a Catholic spouse presumably must negotiate with a non-Catholic spouse for where the marriage ceremony will take place). Yet, there has been no real identifiable increase in inter-faith marriages in recent years. These peaked within the Church between 1975 and 1980 (above 35%). The percentage of marriages celebrated in the Church between a Catholic and non-Catholic spouse has been below 30% since 2002.

There is no indication that marriages outside of the Church involving Catholics are becoming more likely to involve a non-Catholic spouse. Data for these are difficult to obtain, as they could be celebrated in a variety of other religious settings or in a secular venue. Surveys regularly ask about the religion of spouses at the time of the poll. However, these cannot tell us what faith they were in at marriage (and these marriages could have been celebrated this year or 40 years ago). According to the General Social Survey an average of 20% of Catholics were married to a non-Catholic spouse in the 1970s. In the 1980s this figure was 21% followed by 24% in the 1990s and 23% in the 2000s. Differences between decades are within survey margins of error for the Catholic sub-group. Thus, there is no significant measurable increase overall in the percentage of U.S. Catholics who say they are married to a non-Catholic.

The fact remains there is a very real measurable decline in the percentage of Catholics choosing to marry in the Church, along with fewer baptisms each year. Given past trends and the current state of the economy, 2010 is unlikely to be a year in which the number of celebrations of these sacraments increases.