“Many Americans Raised Catholic, Still Are.” That’s the announcement blaring today from the website of one of my local news outlets (here). It’s followed by this analysis, citing the latest Pew Forum “Faith in Flux” study:
A majority of people who are raised Catholic keep the faith through adulthood.
The latest Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life shows that 68-percent of Americans who were brought up Catholic still practice the religion, which is one of the highest retention rates among Christian denominations.
Things are going great guns for Catholicism in the U.S., no? That’s surely what one would conclude, having read the preceding headline and the explanation following it.
But head to the “Faith in Flux” study itself at the Pew Forum website (here), and one reads the following:
While the ranks of the unaffiliated have grown the most due to changes in religious affiliation, the Catholic Church has lost the most members in the same process; this is the case even though Catholicism's retention rate of childhood members (68%) is far greater than the retention rate of the unaffiliated and is comparable with or better than the retention rates of other religious groups. Those who have left Catholicism outnumber those who have joined the Catholic Church by nearly a four-to-one margin. Overall, one-in-ten American adults (10.1%) have left the Catholic Church after having been raised Catholic, while only 2.6% of adults have become Catholic after having been raised something other than Catholic.
That statement is from the Pew Forum’s executive summary of the Faith in Flux study, in a section of the executive summary called “Leaving Catholicism.”
“[T]he Catholic Church has lost the most members in the same process; this is the case even though Catholicism's retention rate of childhood members (68%) is far greater than the retention rate of the unaffiliated and is comparable with or better than the retention rates of other religious groups”: 68% of those raised Catholics are presently identifying as Catholics.
But one in ten American adults (10.1%) is a former Catholic, and those who have left the Catholic church outnumber those who have joined by a nearly four-to-one margin.
Hardly a rosy picture at all, is it? Certainly not the picture my local news outlet expects you to have in your mind as you read its story.
The disparity between what some media folks would like to make of the Pew data, and what Pew itself is making of those data, is illustrative: it is a significant reminder of what happens when groups interested more in spinning than in reporting lay hold of data such as the data captured by the Pew "Faith in Flux" study.
This spin process is one we’re going to be seeing in rampant mode in the next weeks, I suspect. Many political and economic groups have a strong vested interest in leading the public to believe that Catholicism in the U.S. is alive and well, strong and united, a bastion of the political and religious right.
That is simply not the case. A majority of American Catholics voted for Mr. Obama and continue to support him. As a body, American Catholics lean further left on most moral, political, and economic issues than the majority of Americans—far more to the left than do evangelical Protestants (here). And the U.S. Catholic church is deeply divided and demoralized due to the efforts of right-wing demagogues to force it to the right.
Granted, for some decades now, with spinmeisters like Richard John Neuhaus, Deal Hudson, and Newt Gingrich hard at work to suggest that American Catholics are largely neoconservative, the media have had a free pass at using the term “Catholic” as a cipher for neocon. And quite a few American bishops have done all they can to cement that identification.
The facts say otherwise, however. And they also say that the more the leaders of the American Catholic church try to push it to the right, the more the American Catholic church bleeds members.
One in ten American adults as former Catholics is not a pretty picture. It’s a shocking one, one that points to glaring pastoral malfeasance on the part of the leaders of the American Catholic church. And no amount of fancy spinning is going to diminish the reality of that picture and the data underlying it.
