The Religious vote

...21 November 1980: 651...

...Is it a sin for Catholics to vote for candidates who support government funding of abortion...

...There is no polling data on the impact that tuition tax credits might have had on anyone's vote, and election day exit polls indicate that abortion—like the Equal Rights Amendmentwas low on a list of issues that concerned voters as they entered the polling booth...

...A poll of Catholics in twelve key congressional districts taken for LIFEPAC, an anti-abortion group, in September, found Carter and Reagan neck-and-neck, but indicated that Catholics saw little difference between the two candidates on abortion...

...Dwight Eisenhower received 49 percent, to Adlai Stevenson's 51 percent, in 1956...

...The American bishops, widely accused of tilting toward Ford on the abortion issue in 1976, were intentionally quiet as a body this year...

...But in an election when people seemed to be voting to get theirs, tuition tax credits offered an extra bonus to parents of the twenty-five percent of Catholic students in parochial schools...

...Still, Reagan led Carter by virtually the same margin among more liberal Protestants, again reflecting the national trend in the 1980 election...

...Both candidates won their primary and general election campaigns...

...When historians look back on the massive involvement of religion in the 1980 elections, they are likely to conclude that it was not religion's noble side that we saw...

...The New Right fathered the Moral Majority movementsubject of widespread media attention this year...

...Carter, who promised in 1976 to support constitutional tax aid for private schools, has frequently been denounced by Catholic leaders for his later opposition to tuition tax credits, a plan he called wasteful, inefficient, and unconstitutional, the latter judgrnent all but certain to be shared by the U.S...

...Reagan also, received a boost from Father John Meyers, president of the National Catholic Educational Association, who sent out—and publicized—three letters during the campaign...

...A considerable backlash against the New Christian Right emerged in the six weeks before the election, but Reagan managed to put just enough distance between himself and the Jerry Falwells...

...There were no meetings with the candidates and only one token denunciation of the Democratic plank favoring legal abortion...

...But at this point it seems the New Christian Right rode rather than created the anti-incumbent, anti-Democrat, anti-liberal wave that dominated the 1980 elections...

...Religious leaders did speak out on issues like SALT II, arms control, aid to the cities, help for the poor, and foreign aid in this year's election...

...Cardinal Humberto Medeiros of Boston attracted national attention two days before a local Democratic primary when he virtually called it a sin to vote for candidates who support abortion funding...

...Both groups favored Reagan and, in all but a few instances, conservative Republican congressional candidates...

...The election indicated that while Jews were far from enamored of Reagan, they were reassured enough that he did not want to make America a "Christian Republic" that a majority did not vote for Carter out of fear of the Moral Majority influence...

...Two Catholic single-issue constituencies were again hard at work in 1980—the anti-abortion groups and the Catholic school lobbies seeking tuition tax credits for parents of students in private elementary and secondary schools...

...Cardinal John Krbl of Philadelphia, who has never tried to mask his contempt for Carter, breakfasted with Reagan during the campaign and denounced Carter—over abortion and tax credits—before 250 archdiocesan priests the next day...

...Other Republican presidential candidates have received higher percentages of the Catholic vote...

...At the same time, normally Democratic Catholics this year virtually mirrored the general electorate, which gave Reagan 51 percent of the vote, Carter 43 and Anderson six...

...These were only some of the questions raised in the 1980 national elections, which featured an historic degree of religious influence and involvement...

...It became the neoconservative conventional wisdom to charge liberals with hypocrisy for attacking Medeiros and not Maher, although there was a clear difference in the respective candidates' approach—Frank and Shannon never espoused abortion as quite the social good Metzger found in racism...

...Before mainline religious leadersCatholic, Protestant and Jewish—could address issues of justice and peace, they had first to defend their right to disagree with a handful of highly visible, independent fundamentalists claiming to find biblical justification for opposing the Panama Canal Treaties...

...Archbishop James Hickey defended DeFiore's right to take a leave—he said he would have granted similar leaves to archdiocesan lay employees seeking to work for Carter or Anderson—but a spokesman for Hickey conceded that DeFiore hadn't used the best judgment when he used official archdiocesan stationery to explain his decision in a virtual campaign letter sent to every teacher and principal in the archdiocese and every bishop and Catholic school superintendent in the country...

...Shea was assisted by Leonard DeFiore, superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of Washington, who took a leave of absence to work on Catholic issues for Reagan...

...Can God hear Jews pray...

...One criticized the make-up of a federal advisory committee on education and warned Carter that Catholics might have to look elsewhere than the Democratic party for support...

...one praised Reagan for his support of tuition tax credits and one congratulated a senior in a Catholic high school in Texas for asking Carter about tax credits during a town meeting...

...There are no signs that either issue in itself swung Catholics to Reagan, but both contributed to an atmosphere that created the ReaganRepublican sweep...

...Reagan wooed this evangelical vote and succeeded in his desire to attract evangelicals without scaring away moderate voters, particularly Catholics and Jews...

...Archbishop John Whealon of Hartford denounced the Democratic party in a column in his archdiocesan newspaper and other Connecticut bishops joined him in a statement urging Catholics to vote against candidates supporting abortion...

...But Reagan's five-point margin over Carter was slightly larger than Nixon's margin over McGovern...

...Reagan won 35 percent of the Jewish vote, two points higher than Nixon scored in 1972, but the balance did not go to Carter...

...Carter drew about 40 percent of the evangelical vote in 1976, a high figure for a Democrat in recent years...

...Richard Nixon outpolled McGovern 52-48 percent among Catholics in 1972...

...DeFiore created a minor uproar within his own archdiocese when local and national black Catholic groups called for his dismissal...

...He received 47 percent, with 17 percent going to John Anderson, who drew a significant amount of support from Jews throughout his campaign...

...His comments were clearly aimed at two Democratic candidates—Barney Frank, a Jew, and James Shannon, a Catholic...

...But those words were for the most part buried in an avalanche of selfishness and manipulation in the guise of religion...

...He drew 48 percent of the Catholic vote, compared to 43 for Carter—a 14-point drop since 1976 and the worst showing by a Democrat in memory—and 9 percent for Independent candidate John Anderson...

...But this year that percentage dropped to 32 percent, with Reagan getting 64 percent...

...New Right activists Howard Philips, Ed McAteer, and Bob Billings—a fundamentalist minister who later worked on Reagan's campaign—recruited television evangelists like James Robison and Jerry Falwell to develop New Right organizations that were specifically "Christian...

...Robison's Religious Roundtable, Falwell's Moral Majority and the west-coast Christian Voice focused on fundamentalist Christians and, to a lesser degree, on Catholics, Mormons, and Orthodox Jews—in an effort to put right-wing politicians in office...

...Eighty percent of those surveyed opposed federal funding of abortion, as do both Reagan and Carter, while a majority support legal abortion in some circumstances, a view closer to Carter's than to Reagan's...

...This JIM CASTELLJ is the religion editor-far the Washington Star...

...And abortion was one of the issues emphasized by New Right groups like the National Conservative Political Action Committee to manipulate public opinion during the campaign...

...Reagan, acting partly on the advice of Don Shea, a Catholic priest working for the Republican National Committee, backed tax credits to appeal to both Catholics and evangelical Christians supporting their own schools...

...Among Catholic ethnic groups, Reagan won a majority of Irish-, Italian-, German- and French-American Catholics, while Carter led among Hispanics and Polish/Slavic Catholics...

...Supreme Court...

...The New Christian Right was a factor in some close victories—particularly those of Jeremiah Denton in Alabama and Don Nickles in Oklahoma, both Catholics...

...The New Right didn't create the major causes of public discontent—OPEC oil prices, Iran, high mortgage rates, unemployment—but it fed that discontent, created an atmosphere of distrust and hatred and offered voters an outlet to vent their feelings by giving them someone to vote against...

...Another bishop—Leo Maher of San Diego—told area Catholics it would be a sin to vote for Tom Metzger, the Ku Klux Klan leader who had won the Democratic nomination for Commonweal: 650 a congressional seat...

...strongly suggests that Catholics voted on the same issues as other Americans—dissatisfaction with inflation, unemployment and the Iranian hostage situation, a symbol for America's inability to make the rest of the world do what it wants it to do...

...Was America founded as a "Christian Republic...

...There were historic shifts in religious voting patterns—especially among Catholics and Jews—in this year's presidential election, but most polling data indicate that these shifts reflect widespread national frustration and desire for a change rather than any deep ideological mutation...

...Reagan made the best showing among Catholics of any Republican in more than fifty years...