A Micro-scoping View of U.S. Catholic Populations

With the recent release of ASARB data on the size of U.S. religious group memberships and our previous post on this topic I began to think about the multiple ways in which one could think about the "number of Catholics." I am preparing for a presentation next week for an Ave Maria Press webinar (you can sign up here) on the Emerging Models of Pastoral Leadership project. We are looking at a very specific sub-group of Catholics—parish leaders. We define this in the project as all of those on staff, volunteers, council members, and highly active parishioners. The presentation will include results from a national survey of parish leaders regarding their evaluations of their parish and their ministries, as well as their descriptions of how they were called to ministry.

Among parish leaders is a specific group of interest who are defined as Lay Ecclesial Ministers (LEMs). A LEM within a parish is someone with professional training working or volunteering in a ministry at least part-time. How can we understand the size of this group relative to the total Catholic population? How about some charts...

First, let me note these estimates are generated for 2010 and are derived from multiple data sources including CARA (1, 2, 3) and Pew (1, 2). The bars are like a Russian doll with each lower bar generally being a subset of those above it (don't add the bars together!). The largest bar on the chart is the total number of people in the U.S. baptized and raised Catholic. This includes nearly 97 million people in the country today (...and remember, because of immigration some of these individuals were baptized in other countries). Of course some of these individuals no longer self-identify as Catholic and either have no religion or are affiliated with some other faith (although technically they remain baptized Catholic and could return to the Church). Of these 97 million people, nearly 75 million continue to self-identify as Catholic (approximately 24% of the U.S. population).

The next group of bars covers those who are parish-connected. The number for individuals registered with a parish is based on a CARA survey of pastors in U.S. parishes for the Emerging Models project. At 58.3 million this is nearly identical to the ASARB estimate of 58.9 million Catholics adherents, which is "roughly equivalent to those who are known in some way to each parish or mission" (the difference between these counts and what dioceses report in The Official Catholic Directory, 65.4 million, is the adjustment some are making for active Catholics who are not registered. More than 6,500 U.S. parishes indicate they serve a significant number of non-registered parishioners. Most pastors indicate these parishioners are recent immigrants, Hispanics, and young adults). Some 50.6 million Catholics attended Mass at Christmas or Easter in 2010 (...some are not registered with a parish and many in this group overall attended Mass regularly as you will see below).

For those readers interested in New Evangelization you now know the approximate size of three important populations. First, there are the 22.5 million people who were baptized and raised Catholic who no longer self-identify as Catholic. Second, there are the 16.2 million people who self-identify as Catholic but who are not in a household that is registered with a parish (although technically there is no requirement to register with a parish... But it is helpful!). Finally some 23.8 million self-identified Catholics (many not registered with a parish) who do not attend Mass even at Christmas or Easter.

From here on Catholics who are parish-connected and who attend Mass with some regularity come into full view. Some 36.5 million Catholics attend Mass at least once a month (i.e., this total includes those who attend more frequently) and 32.8 million are in a household that gives regularly to a parish offertory collection. We must drill down further to specifically focus only on the 17.9 million Catholic weekly Mass attenders (i.e., those attending every week. This is different from the number of Catholics attending in any given week. This total is not shown on the graph and includes approximately 23.1 million individuals on a typical weekend).

Now down to the question of parish leadership—the number of Catholics who say they are "very involved" with parish life other than attending Mass. This totals just under 3 million or about 168 people per parish in the U.S. (there were 17,782 U.S. parishes in 2010). To give you a better idea of all the populations discussed above per parish see the graph below.

And finally to the group I am currently focusing on in my research, the 50,000 lay Catholics involved in parish ministry (either paid or volunteer... there are an additional 50,0000 in non-ministry parish staff positions) and of these nearly 38,000 are LEMs. Part of the goal of the Emerging Models project is to understand what the pathway is from some 97 million Catholic baptisms to the 38,000 LEMs (there is one LEM in the U.S. for every 2,556 people who were baptized and raised Catholic). Time for me to get back to answering this question... 

Above photo courtesy of _Libby_ at Flickr Creative Commons. 

Don’t Panic: A Statistician’s Guide to Religion Data

As I sat at my desk Tuesday, I felt a great disturbance in my Twitter feed as if tens of thousands of Catholics had suddenly left the faith. The cries of both liberal and conservative Catholic bloggers rang out demanding their bishops act to stem the tide of the mass exodus (“Latin Masses only, ordain women, stop giving sanctuary to immigrants, the death penalty is not that bad, is celibacy really necessary?, be nice to Paul Ryan”… it’s like a match game you figure out who would likely be calling for what).

I had known the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB) would soon be releasing their decennial estimates for the number of religious adherents by county. When these were posted on The Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) website it did not take long for journalists, commentators, and bloggers to react. The surprise for many was that “The number of Catholics decreased by five percent” in the last decade. As Catholic Culture noted, “The census estimates the number of Catholics in 2010 at 58.9 million; the latest edition of The Official Catholic Directory, using figures provided by dioceses, puts the number at 68.3 million.”

Confusion… did the Catholic Church really get smaller in the last decade? If you believe that I have a wager I’d like to discuss with you! We’ve gone over this topic before. To really understand what is going on some clarification on definitions needs to be made.

The ASARB data counts “adherents” and although it is referred to as a census it really isn’t in the traditional sense. Do you remember filling out your form? No you don’t because the adherents counted in the study are reported by the religious groups studied. A Catholic adherent “is roughly equivalent to those who are known in some way to each parish or mission.” The ASARB study considers the remainder of individuals in any county (as measured by U.S. Census totals), not counted by a religious group, to be “unclaimed.” Many of these people are religious and some are Catholic—the Church is just unaware of their presence. They may attend Mass only occasionally and are likely not registered with a parish. Does this make them non-Catholic? No (and they have not “ex-communicated” themselves either!). In fact these people still self-identify as Catholic and do many Catholic things.

The ASRAB study basically measures church-connected membership. This is not the definition used by the Catholic Church or social scientists more broadly. For the Church, being Catholic is defined by baptism. For social scientists we consider self-identification to be the base definition.

With that said there is a lot of consistency between numbers reported in the The Official Catholic Directory (OCD) and ASARB. Why? Because the Church provides both estimates based on what they know using parish registration numbers, October Mass attendance head counts, giving to Church collections, sacramental numbers, etc.

The OCD and ASARB only differ by an average of 2.4% within states. Why are ASARB’s numbers lower overall? ASARB’s 2010 estimates for Catholics in Georgia and Texas are potentially problematic. ASARB estimates there were 596,384 Catholic adherents in Georgia and 4,673,500 in Texas. By comparison the OCD estimated 977,287 in Georgia and 6,896,051 in Texas. A majority of the disparity between the two national estimates for 2010 is based on different estimates for these two states. What numbers would I go with? Not ASARB’s. Surveys using self-identification indicate the Church’s estimates in the OCD were (and continue to be) closer to the reality for Church-connected Catholics. 

Is it possible that the number of Church-affiliated Catholics declined from 2000 to 2010? Not if the measure being used is Mass attendance. The rate at which Catholics attend has remained unchanged as the number of self-identified Catholics in the U.S. grew by 8%. However, it is the case that parish registration has dropped be about 8 percentage points in the last decade. So if the Church is reporting Catholic numbers from registration rolls alone then technically a drop in adherents is possible but unlikely (…and using registration is neither a valid or accurate measurement of activity!).

So just how many Catholics are there in the United States? Currently there are about 77 million and in 2010 it was estimated to be nearly 75 million. Think I’m just being too optimistic? Here are Pew’s recent estimates for 2010 based on self-identification in surveys and census data.

 

The Catholic population has been about 23% to 25% of the total U.S. population since the end of World War II and is expected to continue to account for this much of the population or perhaps even a bit more in the future. As the population grows, so do the total number of Catholics. I don’t know of any serious social scientist (who cared about their reputation) that would argue that the number of self-identified Catholics in the U.S. declined in the last decade (...even as immigration of many Catholics from Mexico may have shifted negative and the Church has welcomed some “reverts”). It may be possible that the number of Church-connected (registered, weekly attending) Catholics declined, but I again I wouldn’t bet on it.

The Church counts from the OCD and ASARB tend to underestimate the self-identified Catholic population by an average of 26%. There are two recent diocesan examples where I can specifically demonstrate the effects of relying on Church-connected counts. In Albany, CARA recently conducted a telephone survey of more than 3,500 randomly selected adults in the Diocese. Of these 34% self-identified their religion as Catholic. Extrapolating to the population this means there were more than 475,000 Catholics in the Diocese of Albany even as only 334,055 are reported in the OCD and 346,013 are estimated using the ASARB data for 2010. The Diocese of Camden recently commissioned a telephone survey (regrettably not with CARA!). This survey is a bit more unreliable as it only includes 612 randomly selected adults of which 34% self-identified as Catholic (...thus it likely has just over 200 Catholic respondents resulting in a margin of error of +/-6.8 percentage points for this sub-group). Extrapolating from this survey, one would estimate there to be about 474,000 Catholics in the Diocese which is similar to the OCD number of 505,504. But ASARB only estimates there to have been 387,872 Catholic adherents in Camden in 2010.

It's not that Church-connected counts are “wrong.” They simply measure something other than the total number of Catholics. Instead, these estimate only active (regular attending) and parish-connected (registered) Catholics. In fact, when these counts are used in conjunction with the self-identified Catholic estimates provided by surveys one has a very good understanding of the numbers that might be a target for New Evangelization and outreach.

[Note: the difference between ASARB/OCD counts and survey estimates for self-identified are not “former Catholics.” This is an entirely different group... and phenomenon.]

The New “Catholic Vote”: The Quiet Rise of the None/Others

In 1960, more than 20% of eligible voters self-identified as Catholic. Of those who went to the polls, eight in ten voted for the Catholic Democratic Party candidate John F. Kennedy (82% as measured in the ANES and 78% by Gallup). Kennedy would not have won without this strong level of support among those who shared his faith. Catholics voted largely as a block again in 1964 for Lyndon Johnson and the legend of the “Catholic Vote” was born. But Catholics have never really voted together like this again since. It is the case that most presidential election winners have carried a Catholic majority. Thus, although there has not been a fairly unified Catholic vote since 1964, it has still been true that winning a majority of the vote of Catholics has still been very important.

Given this apparent electoral reality, many have wondered (including me) why President Obama’s administration would make a series of decisions that could lead to the appearance of bias against the Church that would potentially damage his support among some Catholics in an election year.  Here is the widely-noted track record:

• In January 2012 the administration announced a new mandate requiring employers (and later their insurance companies; although many self-insure) to provide and fully pay for prescribed birth control, “morning after” pills, and medical sterilization for employees without a religious exemption that would include institutions such as Catholic universities, charities, or hospitals.
• The administration’s 2012 budget defunded the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (for 2014 and beyond) that has provided tuition vouchers for many low income students who attend Catholic schools.
• In 2011, the administration defunded a Catholic Charities program that provided assistance to victims of human trafficking in finding food and shelter because it would not refer victims to providers of abortion and contraceptives.
• In a series of 2011 decisions the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that some Catholic college campuses are not significantly religious to be exempt from labor rules. The NLRB argues that these campuses operate “as a secular educational institution.”

Why would an incumbent who needs the vote of Catholics to be re-elected create a record like this? Surprisingly, just looking at the polling data and the electoral math, President Obama doesn’t need to win the Catholic vote or the Protestant vote for that matter! How could this be? Quietly, another solid Democratic Party voting block has grown in size and importance in recent years that has a similar electoral effect to the Catholic-JFK vote. So much so that President Obama could lose both the Catholic and Protestant vote to the Republican nominee—even lose badly—and still win re-election. What the Catholic vote was to Kennedy, a new “None/Other vote” is to President Obama.

“Nones” are people without a religious affiliation (this does not mean they are all atheists or agnostics... they may even consider themselves to be religious or spiritual in some way—just not connected to any religious group). “Others” are a survey research catch-all category of people who have non-Christian religious affiliations. Twenty years ago the combined None/Other vote amounted to less than 10 percent of the population and the voting electorate. Today, the None/Other population percentage has risen to 22 percent (… and is expected to continue to grow in the future). This makes it nearly equivalent in size to the U.S. Catholic population percentage.

Democrats have not needed a majority of the Protestant vote (using the Exit Poll summary coding of “Protestant” which includes non-Catholic Christians) for quite some time and they have not had it either. In three recent national elections Democrats have obtained majorities of the Catholic vote (2002, 2006, and 2008) along with high percentages of the None/Other vote.

In 2012, a tipping point may have been reached. The None/Other vote is now sufficient in size and support for the Democratic Party where President Obama could lose the Catholic vote and still have a good chance of winning re-election. Why can’t Republicans just attempt to take some of the None/Other voters away from Democrats like any other portion of the electorate? It’s a bit of a zero-sum game and it all revolves around social issues on which None/Others generally disagree with Catholics and other Christians (as measured in the General Social Survey 2006-2010. I've aggregated to maximize the number of respondents and minimize margins of error for sub-groups).

For example, Nones and Others (defined in the figures below as religious, non-Christian) are significantly more likely than Catholics and other Christians to support abortion on demand. Just more than a third of Catholics and other Christians support this compared to about six in ten None/Others.

The None/Others are also largely supportive of same-sex marriage—registering support above 60%, whereas minorities of Catholics and other Christians agree with this proposition.

 

Only about a quarter of Catholics and other Christians strongly support government funding for embryonic stem cell research, whereas about half of None/Others do.

In a more general sense it is also the case that Christians are more conservative than non-Christians. Only 19% of Nones and 20% of those with non-Christian religious affiliations describe themselves as “slightly” to “strongly” conservative. A third of Catholics (33%) respond as such. The most conservative sub-group are other Christians of which 42% self-identify as a conservative.

Is there any common ground between these groups? If one moves away from political ideology and “culture war” issues and towards questions about government intervention to assist the poor or concern for the environment there are fewer differences. For example, about a three in ten of each group says they believe the federal government has a responsibility—more so than the individual or both the government and individuals—to improve the standard of living of all poor Americans.

 

As shown in the figure below, very similar minority percentages in each group say they are “very concerned” about the environment. Despite President Obama's recent focus on this issue, I doubt “green energy” is going to have much traction among any segment of the electorate in this campaign. I do not have a recent survey data on gas prices to evaluate, but my hunch would be there would also not be much difference between the sub-groups on this issue either but I would expect that the level of concern for this would be significantly higher than concern for the environment.

The Republicans are only likely to draw some of the None/Other vote away from the Democrats in a magnitude that could alter electoral outcomes if one or more of the following occurred: 1) an economic downturn (...or $6 gas?), 2) a foreign policy failure by the president, or 3) a political scandal involving the president. But even with these events I’m not sure Republicans would ever have a chance of winning a majority of None/Other voters. The prevailing electoral tides are that strong.

Republicans could alternatively look to dominate the Catholic/Christian vote (not just win, but obtain strong majorities) as a counter-balance to the growing strength of the Nones. Strong majorities among Protestants were the key to Republican Party success in 2010. But looking ahead to November with the economy improving and polling favoring President Obama this does not look likely to reoccur in a magnitude that would be needed. The best hope for Republicans in the future may be an old fashioned American religious revival that could begin to bring down the growing numerical power of the Nones.

In this sense Rep. Ron Paul may have been right when he said social conservatism is “a losing position” in the current electoral environment. There just may not be enough voters in the current electorate who are on the conservative side of “culture war” issues for this to be the focus of a winning Republican electoral strategy at the national/Electoral College level. There is some divide among Christians on these issues and a campaign focusing on these would likely drive None/Other in even greater numbers toward the Democrats.

I’ve run a variety of statistical simulations on the national popular vote as well as state popular votes using exit poll data (accounting for Electoral College votes). The “magic number” coming out of most of these for President Obama is 44. His support among Catholics and Protestants can go no lower than 44% and he will likely win re-election as long as his support among the None/Other vote is similar to what it has been in recent elections (typically above 70% overall). One of the reasons Democrats lost the majority popular vote for the House in 2010 was their extremely low support among Protestant voters. This dropped to 38% in 2010 from a 45% vote total for President Obama in 2008 (44% of Catholics voted for a Democrat in 2010 Congressional elections). If House Democrats would have attracted 44% of the Protestant vote in 2010, and all other outcomes remained the same, estimates for the national House vote would have increased to 50% Democratic overall.

In 2012, if Democratic “safe” states remain as such and President Obama is able to attract only 44% of the Protestant vote and 44% of the Catholic vote in each battleground state, he would likely narrowly lose Ohio and Iowa but still narrowly win majorities in Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, Nevada, and New Hampshire (in the latter two states one in four or more voters are expected to be None/Others). This would result in 291 Electoral College votes—a healthy surplus above the 270 needed to win re-election (for more on the math see this update).

In other words, perhaps we should not be so surprised to see President Obama take some of the positions he has in direct opposition to Catholic leaders. He may be risking majorities of the Catholic vote yet simultaneously he is also building more strength among None/Other voters. His campaign relies heavily on polling and research and I am sure they fully understand the implications of religious affiliation and vote preferences in the electorate. What seemed so irrational to some weeks ago is beginning to look to me like a campaign strategy. Don’t get me wrong, he cannot run the risk of seriously alienating Catholic or Protestant voters. He just has some room to maneuver given his likely strength among the None/Others. I don't think his campaign is really worried about “winning” the Catholic vote. In the 2012 political climate, getting just 44% would likely be a win.

[...If this is your first time reading a post here... As I frequently note on any political topic, I am a political scientists who is not registered to vote. I intentionally have no political affiliation nor activity. The analysis above is not intended as advocacy for any candidate, party, or campaign. It is my best attempt at an objective and detached analysis of the polling data and electoral math as it stands today.]