Erin Covey in today's edition of the National Journal writes:
When President Trump tear-gassed peaceful protestors in front of the White House to take a photo in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Christian leaders had dramatically different responses. For Pittsburgh resident Kevin Hayes, who had organized Catholic groups for Clinton and Obama, it was the tipping point that pushed him to galvanize his community for Joe Biden.
“I actually wrote an email to about 600 people who had been the remnants of [Catholics for Obama and Catholics for Clinton], and said, ‘I just reached the point, I want to do everything I can to make President Trump a one-term president, and do you want to join me?’” Hayes said.
Almost all responded and said they were interested—a significantly larger response compared to 2016, when Hayes said about 250 were members of the Clinton group.
Since 1992, a majority of Catholics have voted for the winner of the popular vote—except for 2016, when exit polls indicated that a little more than half of Catholic voters picked President Trump. But with observing Catholic Joe Biden on the ballot this year, white Catholic support for Trump appears to be eroding in the Midwest.
In Pennsylvania, a Marist poll this month found Biden leading Trump among white Catholics, 53-43 percent. And an Aug. 30-Sept. 3 Marquette poll had Biden leading Trump among Catholic voters in Wisconsin, 50-46 percent.
Hayes’s group, which now has about 800 members, reached out to the Biden campaign, which announced in July that it hired Josh Dickson as its faith outreach director. During the past month, the campaign launched Catholics for Biden, along with other faith-based coalitions, and named three dozen Catholic politicians and other lay leaders as cochairs. The Democratic National Convention also featured two ... Catholic leaders, the Rev. James Martin and Sister Simone Campbell.
“The Biden-Harris vision is something that is deeply rooted in the ideals of loving our neighbors as ourselves, of being our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper, caring for the poor and vulnerable,” Dickson told National Journal. “[It’s] really rooted in that ideal of imago dei, that everyone is created with inherent human dignity in the eyes of God.”
The Biden campaign has made explicit appeals to religious voters. On Monday, Biden spoke at a virtual event with the Poor People’s Campaign, a progressive faith-based activist group led by Rev. William Barber II.
“We are all created in the image of God, and everyone’s entitled to be treated with dignity and respect,” Biden said, going on to discuss the dignity of work, a major tenet of the Catholic Church’s social teaching.
“What's unique about it, and frankly, I think different than what we saw in past presidential campaigns, is that you have a candidate who understands the Catholic social teaching ethic of striving to put above all else that which achieves the common good,” Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle, a Catholics for Biden cochair, told National Journal.
Boyle, an Irish Catholic who represents a large white Catholic population in his Philadelphia-based district, emphasized the American Catholic community’s political and ethnic diversity, quoting columnist E.J. Dionne Jr.’s line that “there is no Catholic vote.” But he did say he believed the language of Catholic social teaching, echoed by the Biden campaign, would resonate with Catholic voters.
....
On Thursday, John Carr, a former political adviser to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, endorsed Biden—a sign that cracks may be forming in the firmly antiabortion side of the Catholic electorate. Carr had not made political endorsements in any previous election.
read the entire article here: National Journal
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