Friday, April 11, 2008

America's Largest Protestant Denomination   [Mark Krikorian]

David Hazony at Contentions points to a new poll that incidentally illustrates an important result of assimilation. (Complete poll here, in pdf.) The survey found that 82 percent of American Christians felt they had a "moral and biblical" obligation to support Israel, including 89 percent of evangelicals, but also 76 percent of Catholics. It's this last statistic that's striking evidence of Americanization — I haven't seen comparable polls elsewhere, but it seems exceedingly unlikely that even a majority of Catholics anywhere else would agree. Christian Zionism is essentially a Protestant phenomenon, and a statistic like this suggests how thorough was the cultural (though not necessarily theological) Protestantization of American Catholics. (The headline is from a tongue in cheek question I sometimes ask: What is America's largest Protestant denomination? The Roman Catholic Church.) The policy point is this — does anyone think three-quarters of the grandchildren of today's Hispanic Catholic immigrants will be similarly pro-Israel? It's not that Latin immigrants are uniquely anti-Semitic (I suspect they're more anti-Semitic than today's Asians or yesterday's Irish and Italians, but less so than Eastern European immigrants); rather, our ability to Protestantize them (in the sense I'm using it) has declined dramatically compared to a century ago.

04/11 08:29 AMShare