c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

(UNDATED) Maybe it’s just me, but in these nervous and restless times, it seems that religious bias is still very much with us. In fact, it seems to have become even more acceptable. Consider the following examples, gleaned from recent books and newspaper articles.

Item: A New York Times film critic, describing the Sundance Film Festival at which “The Spitfire Grill” won a prize, observed that it was “sinister” that the film had been produced by the Catholic Brothers of the Sacred Heart.

What is sinister about a religious order producing a film that’s become a box-office success? The critic did not bother to say. Apparently the very thought of a religious order involved in filmmaking offended the critic’s secularist sensibility.

Clearly a participant in what legal scholar Stephen Carter called “The Culture of Disbelief,” the critic must have assumed that any participation by organized religion in the cultural life of the country was not only inappropriate, but evil.

Of course, many journalists are biased against non-Catholics as well. Some media types cast evangelical Protestants as the enemy because they assume (falsely) that religious conservatism inevitably means political conservatism. If you believe in the Bible, they reason, then you must be on the far right politically.

But it seems to me their anti-Catholic bias is the result of their assumption that Catholicism is the same as Protestant fundamentalism because both religions oppose abortion. It’s a rigid, naive and inaccurate depiction of the complexity of American religious and political life. However, you don’t have to be flexible or well-informed any more to be a journalist. You certainly don’t have to display an open mind to either evangelicals or Catholics.

Item: Samuel Freedman’s new book, “The Inheritance” (Free Press) purports to illustrate, through the study of a couple of families, the departure in recent years of Catholics from the Democratic party. Brilliantly written, the book has won accolades from almost all reviewers. But as far as I know, no one has questioned its basic assumption _ that Catholics have deserted the Democratic coalition.

In fact, since 1952 Catholics have not disproportionately voted for Republican presidential candidates. Majorities have ebbed and flowed, but Catholics have always been more likely to vote for Democratic candidates than other white Americans. Thus, while the majority of Americans switched to the Reagan column during the 1980s, Catholics did not shift at a higher rate than anyone else. Indeed, Catholics were less likely to vote for Reagan than were other white Americans. In 1992, Catholics were more likely by 10 percentage points to vote for Clinton than were other white Americans, a fact that almost no one noted then and few remember now.

In a recent Wall Street Journal election poll, Clinton’s lead among Catholics was 26 percentage points over Bob Dole, a lead similar to that in other polls. But again, no one seems to have noticed. Why not? To my mind, bigotry best explains it.

Item: Since New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani suggested that Catholic schools might help public schools in his city, hordes of national media people have descended on the Catholic schools to see what goes on in them. The journalists,it seems, failed to do their homework; they do not refer to the substantial social science research on the subject, most notably Anthony Bryk’s “Catholic Schools and the Common Good.”

After a hasty visit to a Catholic classroom, media folks conclude that the Catholic schools are rigid and that is the reason for their success. Apparently they mean that discipline is taken seriously in Catholic schools and that demands are made on the students that they work. Obviously you can’t have schools impose such requirements on students. It’s un-American, maybe even sinister.

But Bryk’s work shows that academic demands are only one of the reasons for the success of Catholic schools. Two others are that the Catholic schools take more seriously each student as a human person and provide stronger community support for students. None of the peek-and-run stories in the media seems to have noticed this phenomenon. I’m not sure where the line between sloppy reporting and bigotry is, but I do know that the stories in the national media about Catholic schools have crossed that line.

END GREELEY