Pope Francis – 1

Pope Francis – 1 The Ideological and Religious Bases of Attitudes Toward Pope Francis in the United States Christopher M. Federico Departments of Political Science and Psychology University of Minnesota Abstract: Since his election in 2013, Pope Francis has achieved influence as a religious leader while also impacting political discussions through his teachings on social justice and environmental matters. In the United States, his teachings on these topics have generated some controversy among right-leaning figures. In the present study, I look at whether this controversy is reflected in mass opinion about Pope Francis. Using data from three national surveys of Americans, I find that individuals who identify with the political right evaluate Francis more negatively. Qualifying this, Catholic religious affiliation weakens the tendency for right-wing identifiers to evaluate Francis more negatively, while strengthening the tendency for those high in religiosity to evaluate the pope positively. Finally, consistent with the idea that politically-aware individuals are more likely to make ideologically-informed judgments, the relationship between identification with the political right and negative evaluations of Pope Francis was stronger among the politically engaged. Keywords: ideology, political awareness, Pope Francis, Roman Catholicism, religiosity IN PRESS, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion * Correspondence should be addressed to Christopher M. Federico, Department of Political Science, 1414 Social Sciences Building, 267 19th Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55455. Phone: (612) 625- 7217. E-mail: [email protected]. All data and code for replication can be found at https://osf.io/jtw95/. Pope Francis – 2 Elected in the wake of Pope Benedict XVI’s unexpected abdication of the papacy in 2013, Pope Francis has made an impression not only as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, but also as a global moral authority of increasing significance. Most notably, he has emerged as a prominent critic of inequality, economic injustice, and environmental degredation. He has often returned to these themes in public sermons and speeches, and he has argued passionately for the moral importance of economic justice and environmental concern to Christian morality as a matter of authoritaritative teaching in the encyclical letters Laudato si’ (2015) and Fratelli tutti (2020). Francis’s teachings in this regard, rather than being innovations, are in continuity with a longer tradition of Catholic social teaching. In this regard, his concerns about global inequality and the importance of environmental stewardship echo those raised by his predecessors in older teaching documents, such as Pope Paul VI’s Octogesima adveniens (1971), Pope John Paul II’s Sollictudo rei socialis (1987), and Pope Benedict XVI’s Caritas en veritate (2009). The prominence of Pope Francis’s social concerns have led many commentators both inside and outside the Catholic Church to code him as an especially “liberal” or “leftist” figure (Neumayr 2017). This characterization is imprecise in a number of ways, given the aforementioned continuity between Francis’s social teaching and that of his more-conservative predecessors, the extent to which his thought incorporates themes shared with traditional conservative critiques of modernity (e.g., Ivereigh 2019), and the fact that he holds a number of socially-conservative positions that are a standard part of Catholic teaching (e.g., opposition to abortion and euthanasia; see Brekke 2015). That said, the impression of Francis as a liberal or left-leaning figure has been furthered by the reception of his social teaching in the broader public sphere, especially in the United States. On one hand, his sharp criticisms of inequality and environmental indifference have been strongly praised by figures on the left such as Senator Bernie Sanders (e.g., Green 2015). On the other hand, and perhaps even more loudly, conservative opinion leaders have criticized Pope Francis as naïve and Pope Francis – 3 radical (Robbins 2015). For example, on the occasion of his 2015 pastoral visit to the United States, right-wing talk-radio host Michael Savage referred to Francis as a “stealth Marxist in religious garb,” while Fox News analyst Andrew Napolitano opined that Francis sounded “like a left-wing professor at the London School of Economics” (Willis 2015). Though the responses of politicians and pundits to Pope Francis’s public teaching have received much attention, researchers have not devoted much attention to whether a similar ideological divide in impressions of the pontiff can be found in mass opinion. In the present study, I fill this gap by examining the ideological and religious predictors of attitudes toward Pope Francis in the American public. I argue that Americans who identify with the right should evaluate Francis more negatively. However, I also argue that Catholic affiliation should weaken this tendency, while simultaneously strengthening the relationship between religiosity and positive views of Francis. Finally, in line with research suggesting that ideology more strongly influences opinion formation among the politically-aware, I argue that the relationship between ideology and evaluations of the pope should be stronger among those high in political engagement. Ideology, Religion, and Evaluations of Pope Francis As noted above, the differing public reactions to Pope Francis’s teaching in the United States suggests that views of Pope Francis himself may be ideologically polarized in the mass public as well. Specifically, several general lines of research in political behavior lead to the expectation that individuals who identify with the political right should evaluate Francis more negatively. Individuals on the right are less positively disposed to criticisms of inequality of the sort that Francis has offered in his social teaching (Jost 2020; Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, and Sulloway, 2003; Jost, Federico, and Napier 2009, 2013). In particular, right-wing identifiers in English-speaking nations like the United States (relative to other parts of the world) are especially committed to the market-oriented individualism criticized by Francis (Federico and Malka 2018; Malka, Lelkes, and Soto 2019; see also Pope Francis – 4 Azevedo, Jost, Rothmund, and Sterling 2019; Johnston, Lavine, and Federico 2017). In the United States, left and right identifiers are also sharply polarized on climate change, another issue central to Francis’ social teaching. As a great deal of research suggests, American conservatives are more likely to doubt the seriousness of climate change and less likely to support efforts to mitigate it, potentially placing them in greater opposition than moderates and liberals to Francis’s position (Kahan et al. 2012; McRight et al. 2014, 2016; Schwom et al. 2015). These basic ideological differences are also reinforced by disparate top-down signals from political elites. As noted earlier, despite commonalities between his social teaching and that of his predecessors, Pope Francis has come in for especially strong criticism from conservative and Republican opinion leaders, including many right-leaning Catholics (Robbins 2015). Liberal and conservative political elites in the United States have also sent very different signals about the importance of Francis’s signature social concern, climate change (contributing to the broader polarization on this issue described above; Jacques, Dunlap, and Freeman 2008). Given the role of of elite disagreement in eliciting polarization as the mass level (see Converse 1964; Levendusky 2009; Zaller 1992), these patterns further suggest that evaluations of Pope Francis should be ideologically polarized in the American context. At the same time, there are likely to be important moderators of any relationship between ideology and attitudes toward Pope Francis. Above all, denominational identity may be a crucial boundary condition on ideological polarization in evaluations of Francis. Insofar as Pope Francis and the papacy in general are authoritative symbols of the unity of the Catholic Church, even politically conservative Catholics who are inclined to disagree with Francis’s social teachings may continue to respect him. Here, Catholic social identity may overwhelm ideology as a motivation. Individuals are generally motivated to favor and defend important group identities (e.g., Tajfel and Turner 1986), and religion is an especially important and self-relevant identity in this regard Pope Francis – 5 (Ysseldyk, Matheson, and Anisman 2010; Norenzayan 2014). Defense of an important social identity also entails respect for group leaders and important group symbols (Hogg 2005; Hogg and van Knippenberg 2003), potentially inoculating Francis against ideological animus to a greater extent among Catholics. For this reason, the relationship between right-wing identification and negative evaluations of Francis is likely to be weaker among Catholics. The logic of social identity also suggests that a weaker relationship between ideology and Francis evaluations may be accompanied by a stronger relationship between individual differences in religiosity and evaluations of the pope among Catholics. Here, I define religiosity in the sense of greater behavioral and attitudinal commitment to religion in one’s life (Malka 2013; Smidt et al. 2009). All things considered, greater religious commitment among Catholics should predict more positive evaluations of Pope Francis, since social identity concerns should presumably

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