56 percent of Catholics in the United States voted for Donald Trump, versus 41 percent for Kamala Harris. A distinct reversal of positions with respect to four years ago, when 52 percent voted for Joe Biden, a Catholic like them, and a progressive.
The religious factor certainly had less of an effect on the vote this year than in the past, above all due to the ever starker secularization of American society. Proof of this is that voters were scarcely swayed by the issue of abortion, even though the bishops’ conference had declared it a “preeminent priority” in guiding the faithful. Trump was in his way also “pro-choice,” and in various states, Florida for example, his electoral victory was accompanied by the prevalence of the “yes” in concurrent referendums more permissive on the issue of abortion.
But this was only part of a more general cultural shift that affected more than just the Catholic electorate. The sociologist and political scientist Luca Ricolfi, in his recent essay entitled “The madly correct,” has identified four signs of the growing hostility in the United States to “woke” language and ideology, a hostility that proved decisive in the outcome of the vote.
The first sign is that “already two years ago Hillary Clinton had warned that their insistence on the ‘woke’ and on LGBT+ rights would bring the Democrats crashing down.”
The second was “Harris’s running mate selection of Tim Walz, who had stood out as governor of Minnesota for his support of the trans cause and premature gender transitions.”
The third was “the internal confrontation within the feminist world, part of which had asked Harris to distance herself from ‘gender-affirming’ therapies for minors, a distancing that did not happen.”
The fourth is “the demobilization that has been underway for a year or two in many American companies of DEI policies, of ‘diversity, equity, inclusion,’ subjected to growing aversion in public opinion.”
One can add the neglect that Harris showed during the electoral campaign for the Catholic camp, in particular when she skipped the Al Smith Dinner, the charity event periodically organized by the archdiocese of New York, with Cardinal Timothy Dolan commenting: “This hasn’t happened in forty years, since Walter Mondale turned down the invitation. And remember, he lost forty-nine out of fifty states.”
But the shift underway among American Catholics is not only made up of reactive bristling at some traits of the reigning culture. It is also characterized by elements of newness, even if not such as to configure a new order alternative to that, in the process of disappearing, of post-conciliar progressivism.
Trump’s selection of the Catholic JD Vance (in the photo) as running mate is particularly revealing, both for his personal history and for the figures he refers to.
Settimo Cielo wrote about his personal history in a previous post. Let it suffice here to underline that his successful autobiography “Hillbilly Elegy” portrays the harsh life of the white working class in the decayed industrial area between the Appalachian Mountains and the Great Lakes, but not with the compassionate gaze of one who stoops down to these modern poor, whom he instead puts to the lash, demanding that they go about climbing back up the slope with the inventiveness, courage, and boldness that he himself embodied first as a Marine in Iraq, then as a student at the elite universities of Ohio and Yale, then with his connection with Peter Thiel, a dynamic Silicon Valley entrepreneur who introduced him to entrepreneurial and political activity, and above all with Patrick J. Deneen, professor of political science first at Princeton, then at the Jesuit Georgetown University in Washington, and today at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, who became his teacher and friend.
Deneen is the great theorist of the critique of liberalism, both economic and cultural. His book “Why Liberalism Failed,” published in 2018, was at the time among the most widely read and discussed, with a long review and three editorials in the “New York Times” in just a month. It was translated into a dozen languages, and even an adversary like Barack Obama recognized it as a must-read.
But Deneen, a Catholic, a reader and scholar of Augustine, Tocqueville, and René Girard, is also a leading figure in that small but influential “New Right” of Catholic thinkers that includes Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, political theorist Gladden Pappin, theologian Chad Pecknold, and journalist Sohrab Ahmari, former editorial director of the “New York Post” and founder of “Compact,” one of those brilliant cultural magazines recently born on the post-liberal and Catholic right.
The success of Deneen’s book had a precedent of equal stature, in 2012, with the release of “The New Geography of Jobs” by Enrico Moretti, a professor at Berkeley, who attributed the fracture in the United States between the two exuberant and technological coasts and the devastated and impoverished interior of the country to the overwhelming development of new technologies, which although they were indeed killing many jobs were creating space for many others. Moretti was among the experts consulted by Obama, at the polar opposite of Deneen and Vance and their postliberalism, which however, with its anti-market statism, today also takes on the appearance of “a sort of hybrid between left-wing social democracy and right-wing personal uplift,” as Vance himself said in an interview with the “New Statesman.”
In short, the American Catholic “New Right” — which is also isolationist in the field of international relations — has little or nothing in common with the geopolitical and theological battles of the Catholic “neocons” of past decades, from Michael Novak to Richard J. Neuhaus to George Weigel.
How and to what extent this will affect Trump’s presidency remains to be seen. But in the meantime it is useful to take note of some reactions of ecclesiastical politics to his election.
The first were the statements of the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin.
Questioned by journalists on November 7, Parolin wished Trump “much wisdom” and hoped that his presidency “may truly be an element of détente and pacification in the current conflicts that are bloodying the world.”
But with China, contrary to Trump’s bellicose spirit, the cardinal assured that on the part of the Holy See “the dialogue continues” and “is essentially ecclesial,” regardless of the “reactions that may also come from America,” as happened in 2020, when Trump’s then secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, in the leadup to an audience with Pope Francis, wrote in the prestigious Catholic magazine “First Things” that with the agreement signed two years earlier on the appointment of Chinese bishops, if it were renewed, as in fact happened, “the Vatican would have put its moral authority in danger.”
On November 15, once again surrounded by journalists, Parolin added that “there is no contradiction between being authentically Chinese and good citizens and being Christians,” as the great Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci had already argued in the sixteenth century, and “for us, dialogue remains the fundamental principle.”
Another possible political and ecclesiastical effect of Trump’s victory concerns Ukraine.
There is not only the declared interest of the new American president to quickly close the conflict, even at the cost of favoring Vladimir Putin. His vice-president, Vance — who has already told Ukraine that he wants to cut off all aid — has also been a vociferous critic of law 3894, approved on August 20 by the Kyiv parliament, which bans any religious organization in Ukraine that has its “center” in Russia and is “governed” by Russia, that is, in concrete terms, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church historically under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate.
The law did not come into force immediately. The beginning of procedures for the ban was postponed to May 2025, and in this grace period the peacemaking efforts of the patriarchate of Constantinople were activated, which Settimo Cielo described in detail in a post last September 2.
Well then, in a future peace negotiation in Ukraine, such an attentive observer of the affairs of the Eastern Churches as Peter Anderson, an American from Seattle, believes that the fate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church linked to Moscow could also come into play.
According to Anderson, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy no longer has an interest in forcing the ban on this Church, with the risk of an even greater inflexibility, in a possible negotiation, of both the Kremlin and the Russian patriarchate. While in turn the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is seen as having an interest in guaranteeing its autonomy from Moscow, as a majority of its metropolitans and eparchs already want, in a renewed equal relationship with the Russian patriarchate and the other sister Churches.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.
