Inductivist

A Wisconsin bishop on the latest Catholic child abuse scandal:

The bishop was particularly candid in his assessment of the cause of [sexual abuse] problems: “In the specific situations at hand, we are talking about deviant sexual — almost exclusively homosexual — acts by clerics. We’re also talking about homosexual propositions and abuses against seminarians and young priests by powerful priests, bishops, and cardinals.

In his new book Suicide of a Superpower, Pat Buchanan claims that since Vatican II, American Catholics have gotten less religious and more culturally liberal. The graph (GSS data, sample size = 13,432) shows that he's right. Attending more than weekly (gray) or weekly (pink) is down. The following are up: 2-3 times a month (magenta), once a month (gold), once a year (green), and never (red).

While I have a lot of respect for both Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, they are not sociologically conservative--at least not as I measure it. I figure a denomination is conservative in this sense if its most involved members are its most conservative. You can gauge the soul of a church by its most active people. If I calculate the correlation between attendance and one's level of political conservatism for a sample of white Southern Baptists (GSS data), I get a decent .28--more religious people tend to be more conservative. By contrast, the correlation for white Catholics is a trivial .11, and Orthodox members are even worse: .07.  I know many liberals in both denominations who can be found in the pews every Sunday. It seems like the conservative parishioners are more outspoken (refreshing for someone who spends Monday-Friday listening to loudmouth, university-emboldened liberals). But if you want a church filled with conservatives, you will probably have to go elsewhere.     

This Pew table shows that Hispanics have much less religious knowledge than whites; their mean is even lower than that of blacks. One reason why Hispanics, most of whom are Catholic, are not socially conservative is that they do not even know what they are supposed to believe.  I place some of the blame on the Church. Republicans who argue that we want Mexican immigrants because they are Catholic and therefore conservative are ignorant or dishonest.

"You Catholic girls start much too late": Another observation from "Adventureland": Where does this stereotype of the Catholic girl who won't put out come from? It must be old. I looked at GSS numbers for single white girls 18-22.


Percent not having sex in past year (N = 459)

Protestant 25.3
Catholic 17.4
Jewish 8.3
None 15.2

Compared to Protestants, Catholic girls are putting out. Was the stereotype developed by Jewish Hollywood types who had an easier time with Jewish girls (look at their numbers)? Speaking of that, I thought Jewish women were uptight about sex. Another stereotype from frustrated Jewish men?