MANCHESTER, NH - JANUARY 06: Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum (C) pats a girl on the head as he arrives for a "Faith, Family and Freedom" campaign town hall meeting in the parking lot of the Belmont Hall restaurant January 6, 2012 in Manchester, New Hampshire.
(Chip Somodevilla - GETTY IMAGES)
As the dust settled after the Iowa caucuses, it became clear that a plurality of evangelical Christians had thrown in their hat with an unexpected, but strangely apt candidate. Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator who lost his seat in 2006, performed substantially better than any of his rivals among born-again or evangelical Christians, with 32 percent of the coveted demographic’s vote.
Santorum, who received the endorsement of several influential evangelical leaders in the days leading up to the primary, is a devout Catholic. But his success in Iowa led conservative leaders, including James Dobson and Gary Bauer (who endorsed Santorum yesterday) to organize an emergency meeting to determine whether evangelicals can make the difference in New Hampshire and South Carolina, where Santorum will need all the help he can get to unseat Mitt Romney, who is leading in both states.
The partnership between evangelical Christians and the Catholic Santorum may seem unlikely. But in addition to evangelicals’ general friendliness toward Catholics (84 percent have a favorable view), Santorum’s record on a wide range of issues makes him a logical ally for evangelical Protestants. Perhaps the quintessential culture warrior, Santorum’s career in the Senate was indelibly marked by his intense focus on hot-button social issues. But ironically, on these issues, Santorum is out of step with his fellow Catholics.
Throughout his campaign and his time in the Senate, Santorum has unwaveringly opposed same-sex marriage and adoption by same-sex couples, recently declaring that children were better off with an imprisoned father than with two female parents. This is the first of many places where Santorum’s views are more aligned with evangelicals than American Catholics. A majority (52 percent) of Catholics support same-sex marriage, making them the most supportive of all major religious groups and slightly more supportive than the general population. By contrast, only 19 percent of white evangelical Protestants favor allowing same-sex couples to marry, while almost half (47 percent) strongly oppose it.
Similarly, Santorum has been tenacious in his opposition to abortion in almost all cases; during his time in the Senate, he helped lead the effort to ban a procedure that conservatives refer to as “partial-birth abortion,” and he testified that there are no circumstances where abortion is necessary to protect the life of the mother. His enthusiastic participation in the anti-abortion movement is far more likely to endear him to evangelicals than to Catholics; while Catholics are evenly divided on the legality of abortion (49 percent favor legal abortion, while 48 percent oppose it), a slim majority say that at least some health care professionals in their community should offer abortions. Among evangelicals, however, only 3-in-10 say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while a similarly low number (36 percent) say that some health care professionals in their community should provide abortions.
On the issues of same-sex marriage and abortion, Santorum is in line with the Catholic hierarchy, even if he’s out of step with American Catholics. But when it comes to climate change and evolution, Santorum diverges even from the Roman Catholic leadership. In 2001, Santorum offered an amendment to the No Child Left Behind bill, encouraging teachers to provide lessons on intelligent design alongside evolution. His stance -- that evolution is controversial -- contrasts with that of the Catholic Church, which generally accepts evolution and allows that material science is compatible with the belief that human life as a gift from God. Here, as above, Santorum’s views are closer to evangelicals (32 percent of whom believe human beings and other living things evolved over time) than to his fellow lay Catholics, 61 percent of whom believe in evolution.
Similarly, Santorum’s position on climate change scholarship, which he has referred to as “junk science,” sharply contrasts with Church leadership. Late last year, Pope Benedict XVI appealed for the success of a UN climate change conference, saying that a “credible” response was necessary. Here again, Santorum is far to the right of American Catholics, 70 percent of whom believe there is solid evidence that the earth has gotten warmer over the past few decades. He is even to the right of most evangelicals, 57 percent of whom believe in climate change.
Evangelicals are likely to play a significant role in the South Carolina primary, even if faith doesn’t make a substantial difference in Tuesday’s contest in New Hampshire. And among the 47 percent of evangelicals who say they would be uncomfortable with a Mormon serving as president, Santorum has one weighty advantage: He’s not Romney.
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