Pope Francis Under Fire From Conservatives
As Pope Francis prepares this week to deliver a historic address to Congress, he is drawing fire from an unlikely group: conservative hardliners.
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) announced last week that he will boycott Thursday’s speech over expected remarks on climate change, saying the pontiff is acting like a “leftist politician.”
Rush Limbaugh called Francis’s views on capitalism “pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the pope.” And conservative columnist George Will wrote in a recent column that the Holy Father "embodies sanctity but comes trailing clouds of sanctimony.”
This pope is no liberal on many of the social issues — such as abortion and gay marriage — that matter most to the far right. But his positions on immigration, relations with Cuba and Iran, and income inequality are at odds with the those held by the GOP.
Recent polling shows Francis is widely popular among Americans. A CNN-ORC poll released this week found that 63 percent of Americans view Pope Francis favorably, compared to 74 percent among Catholics specifically
Republicans who choose to publicly disagree with the views of a major religious leader whose every word matters to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics do so at their own peril.
Republicans have to be particularly careful given that their base includes conservative religious evangelicals, strategists say.
“That's the Pandora's box that Republicans have to navigate particularly given the religious fervor of their supporters. But at the same time, they need to find a way to stand up on the key critical political issues,” said GOP strategist Ford O’Connell.
'Religious Nones' Are Growing Quickly. Should Republicans Worry?
Jenny Schulz isn't religious.
Schulz is not alone. She is part of a growing group of American adults who do not identify with any religion. More than one-in-five American adults say so now, the highest in U.S. history. They are being identified as the religious "nones," so called for their lack of religious affiliation. As they grow in size, they are also gaining political power.
Those "nones" consist of atheists, agnostics, and people who simply say they subscribe to no religion in particular. Altogether, they make up nearly 23 percent of the adult population, according to Pew.
That's more than than Catholics, and nearly as many as evangelicals, at 25.4 percent, according to the most recent Pew Religious Landscape Survey. Between just 2007 and 2014, the adult population of "nones" skyrocketed by 52 percent, to nearly 56 million. And that growth makes the "nones" one of the biggest, but least-noticed, stories in American politics, Smith said.
But even with all of the public displays of religion, you can already see politicians playing to a less religious electorate. Republicans, who fare poorly among the "nones," are subtly tailoring their messages for an increasingly secular nation.
"You're already seeing Republicans, in particular, take this into account, and you're seeing it with gay marriage," said Ford O'Connell, a Republican strategist who worked for the McCain-Palin campaign in 2008, chair of CivicForumPAC, managing director of Civic Forum Strategies and author of Hail Mary: The 10-Step Playbook for Republican Recovery. "What you're starting to see is Republicans significantly changing their tone and rhetoric. ... For example, on gay marriage — they're couching it as 'religious liberty,' which sounds less divisive."
"The real question for the Republican Party is will this trend continue and will it continue at this rate?" O'Connell said. "I can see them changing their views on not so much abortion but other related issues [like same-sex marriage] by 2024."
Why 2024? Because that's when today's millennials will be entering middle age, replacing today's Gen-Xers and baby boomers. As millennials marry, settle down and have kids — things they're doing later than their parents — he thinks there's a possibility they will shift rightward. The GOP does better among married women than single women, he points out (though his logic assumes that marriage could make a person more conservative, not just that conservative women might be more likely to be married to begin with). And once people marry, he added, more-religious people might end up bringing their less-religious partners into the church.
