Sometimes it is almost embarrassing to ask questions:
While 59 percent of white Catholics favored the death penalty, only 37 percent of Hispanic Catholics felt the same. Race appears to be a better predictor of one’s beliefs about capital punishment than religion is. Why?
This one is pretty easy. The more your community has to interact with the legal system in this country, the more your community knows about its shortcomings. And the more flaws you see in the application of justice, the less confident you are about the guilt of those who are convicted of crimes.
In other words, there’s no difference in how white and Latino Catholics are instructed about the morality of the death penalty. Despite that teaching, very significant percentages of each group still support the death penalty. They think the penalty sometimes fits the crime, despite what the Vatican has to say about the matter.
But there are more Latinos than whites who are concerned about innocent people getting put to death, and that pretty much explains the entirety of the difference in opinion between the two groups.
When it comes to the black community, only a tiny percentage of which is Catholic, this disparity in experience in the justice system overcomes the fact that they aren’t being formally indoctrinated by their religious instructors to oppose the death penalty.
It’s not that people don’t care what their priests say. It’s that fewer white people than people of color have the kind of firsthand experience of injustice within the justice system that leads people to doubt the guilt of people on death row.
Ask all these groups about how they feel about executing innocent people and you’ll probably find no difference of opinion at all.
59 percent of white Catholics favored the death penalty.
Bad Catholics, but if they also oppose and have never availed themselves of any form of birth control other than the “rhythm method” and never turned their backs on anyone that was poor and suffering, St. Peter might overlook this one major sin and let them into the Catholic heaven.
Yes. The correct answer would have been the Hispanics are better educated on Catholic doctrine. And it’s really true, you know, so many white American Catholics know fuck all about their religion nowadays. John Paul II has to take a big part of the blame, but it’s an indigenous thing.
Ignorance facilitates keeping the flocks in the church. What happened when a generation of white US Catholics were somewhat better educated about their religion? They left the church. Those that didn’t affiliate with another Christian sect, retained the good values/ethics of their former religion but junked all the mumbo-jumbo and misogynist crap. (The music is still beautiful.)
Universal cultural phenomenon.
Denominational losses were even heavier in the mainstream Protestant denominations, whose attachment to education — they invented Sunday school, after all, and VBS — oh, and how many colleges can you with ‘Wesleyan’ in them? — was every bit as fierce.
Everybody’s churches emptied.
“Ignorance facilitates keeping the flocks in the church.”
Or as Joel Osteen, that leading light of Christianity, puts it: “The facts may tell you one thing. But, God is not limited by the facts. Choose faith in spite of the facts.”
https://twitter.com/joelosteen/status/537592117884112896
Disagree on the last statement. I’ve seen the surveys. A majority supports the DP even if it leads to execution of innocents.
that’s not the question, though, is it?
It seems to me that this is a distinction without a difference. If a person is being asked in a question if they’re still support the death penalty if some of the people we kill are innocent, that person is being asked “how they feel about executing innocent people”. If some people would parse the question for themselves so that they don’t have to confront that fact, that doesn’t reflect a problem with the question, it reflects a problem with those people.
It’s executing innocents that shows we mean business….
“Ask all these groups how they feel about executing innocent people, in a deniable conversation, and you’ll find huge differences of opinion.”
There, fixed it for you.
I became Catholic as an adult and had already decided I was against the death penalty. I am aware the Church is against the death penalty but that is probably more due to my own digging into Church teachings than anything I have ever heard in a Church.
But the only churches I have gone to have been predominantly white.
I can’t say for sure, but I wonder if this particular teaching may also be more stressed in more Latino dominated churches.
Not to go against your basic premise, because I am sure there is truth to it, but I wonder if the amount of stress placed on teaching that doctrine doesn’t also play a role.
Yup. Especially given the history of liberation theology, which I think has stronger roots in Central and South America.
Nonsense about a ‘Catholic vote’ persists even in the teeth of stories like this.
Conservatism drives, or keeps, people in or into the Church, not the other way round. Same thing with the evangelical mega-churches, especially the non-affiliated ones of recent vintage.
They’re clubhouses first, and churches a distant second.
While 59 percent of white Catholics favored the death penalty, only 37 percent of Hispanic Catholics felt the same. Race appears to be a better predictor of one’s beliefs about capital punishment than religion is. Why?
More solidarity with murderers among Hispanics?