Catholics Are More Progressive Than The Vatican, And Almost Everyone Else [FiveThirtyEight]

Catholics Are More Progressive Than The Vatican, And Almost Everyone Else

1:23 PM | Oct 17 | By Carl Bialik




Roman Catholic bishops released a draft document this week calling for the church to welcome gays, unmarried couples and people who have divorced. The document is proving to be highly controversial among conservative Catholics, and the official English translation already has had some of the welcoming tone revised out of it. But several public-opinion polls suggest that Catholics in many countries are ready to accept such change — more ready than members of many other religions.

In the U.S, the General Social Survey, which is conducted by the research organization NORC at the University of Chicago, has been asking about divorce and gay rights since the early 1970s, and about cohabitation since 1994 (typically at least every two years). At my request, GSS director Tom W. Smith sent data, broken down by religion, for half a dozen questions. In their answers, American Catholics consistently have shown themselves to be more tolerant of divorce, gay rights and unmarried cohabitation than have American Protestants and Americans overall — especially in recent years.

In all but one of the 14 GSS polls over the last quarter century, more Catholics than Protestants said divorce should be easier to get by law. In every survey since 1973, more Catholics than Protestants said gays should be allowed to speak publicly, teach and have books they wrote available in libraries. (If those questions don’t sound like they go very far by today’s standards, keep in mind that the Vatican isn’t going all that far, either, and that when these questions were asked in 1973, more than a third of Americans didn’t agree — half, in the case of teaching.) Also in each survey, more Catholics than Protestants said gay sex was “not wrong at all.” And all four times the GSS asked whether a couple living together unmarried was acceptable, more Catholics than Protestants said it was.











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