The Voting Guide Catholics Really Need

The U.S. Bishops Miss an Opportunity

At their annual general assembly on Wednesday, the United States Catholic bishops voted to affirm that, among political issues, abortion is “our preeminent priority” rather than “a preeminent priority.” The bishops voted in favor of an amendment adding the former language to a new letter introducing the bishops’ voting guide, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship. The decision signals the bishops’ continued focus on the abortion issue in the post-Dobbs political landscape.

Although this vote generated the headlines, the most important decision the bishops made concerning the voting guide was to put off, yet again, any major revisions to Forming Consciences itself. The bishops have presented the public with essentially the same document, with only minor revisions, since 2007. Forgive me if I am too bold, but the persistence of the current form of Forming Consciences is not testimony to the enduring power of its vision of Catholic public engagement (although it does have strong points), but rather the bishops’ collective lack of imagination and creativity in addressing the challenges faced by American democracy, and envisioning the Church’s social mission in that context, over the past decade or more.

A few years ago, I traced the evolution of the U.S. bishops’ voting guides from the first, published in 1976, to that published in 2011, ahead of the 2012 election. Over time, there are several shifts in how the documents envision the faithful’s engagement in the political arena in response to the changing political and social context. For example, the earliest documents, written in the midst of the cynicism of the post-Watergate and post-Vietnam years, but also in the aftermath of Vatican II, focused on encouraging conscientious and thoughtful participation in the democratic process—an emphasis reflected in the document’s name at that time, Political Responsibility. By the late 1980s, the documents proposed a more ambitious vision of a bipartisan coalition of Catholics and others promoting a “consistent ethic of life,” a hope that dimmed as partisan positions on abortion and other life issues hardened in the 1990s.

In its current form, as the name Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship suggests, the bishops’ voting guide focuses on the formation of the conscience of the individual Catholic as they prepare to vote. This conceptual framework for understanding Catholic political engagement, like any other, emphasizes certain points while downplaying others. For example, the current iteration of the document emphasizes doctrine and the role of the bishops as teachers of doctrine, responsible for the formation of the consciences of the faithful; the summation of Catholic social teaching as a set of doctrines or “key principles” may seem timeless, but it only dates back to the 1990s. Second, it understands the task of the voter as weighing and prioritizing among discrete “issues.” The first part of the document describes how a faithful voter should form their conscience and come to a conscientious voting decision, while the second part outlines how a Catholic, guided by the Church’s social teaching, should look at a series of issues facing American society. But consider the following challenges that weighed heavily on voters in the 2020 and 2022 elections, and some of which remain hugely relevant for the 2024 election:

• In 2020, the world faced the outbreak of COVID-19, and in the U.S., political leaders and public health officials had to rapidly make public health decisions about limiting travel, regulating public gatherings, and rationing or distributing healthcare supplies, balancing public health against other important goods like the education of children, economic stability, employment, and freedom of movement, all with limited knowledge about the virus, its potential spread, and the possible effects of various policy decisions. All the while, the president was spreading misinformation about the virus and making unrealistic promises, for example that the virus would be defeated in a matter of weeks or that people could return to attending church by Easter of that year.

• On January 6, 2021, a mob of protestors violently attacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to interfere with the certification of the Electoral College vote and ultimately to overturn the election results in favor of Donald Trump. At the same time, Trump and a number of his advisers and allies were involved in a plot to fraudulently interfere in that certification, again with the aim of overturning the election results. More broadly, the mistaken belief that the 2020 election results were “stolen” remains relatively widespread—as recently as August of this year, 69 percent of Republicans considered President Joe Biden’s electoral victory illegitimate.

• An increasing number of people learn about current events through social media, and while in some cases this may mean they are connecting with more traditional forms of news media by means of social media like X (formerly Twitter) or Facebook, it also means that many people are bombarded with misinformation and content intended to foster polarization, discontent, and rage.

All of these are crucial challenges the American democratic system must address—indeed, they are potentially existential challenges to the democratic system itself. But for that very reason, none fits very well into the model proposed in Forming Consciences, in which an individual voter carefully considers their vote by weighing candidates’ stances on a handful of issues against the policy positions recommended by the bishops. These challenges have less to do with the individual conscience and discrete policies and more to do with the social and political ecology that American Catholics inhabit.

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One of the reasons sometimes given for why Forming Consciences needs to be revised is so that it can better incorporate the teachings of Pope Francis. I think it’s debatable to what extent there has been a shift in Francis’s approach to social teaching compared to his predecessors (particularly John Paul II and Benedict XVI), but I think there are some key ideas in Francis’s teachings that could help guide a revision of Forming Consciences.

In Laudato Si’, for example, he introduces the concept of integral ecology. Although the concept’s primary purpose is to reinforce the interconnectedness of human society and the natural environment, it also proposes “ecology” as a metaphor for understanding social life and its interconnected dimensions, for example, social ecology and political ecology. And this is not entirely new: John Paul II had likewise used the terms “human ecology” and “social ecology” to refer to the social environment that provides moral and cultural structure to our lives in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus.

In the essay cited earlier, I argued that Forming Conscience’s focus on doctrine and conscience puts too much emphasis on the intellectual dimension and not enough on the imagination. Hammering home the key principles of Catholic social teaching isn’t enough to encourage authentic Catholic political engagement; Catholics need to be formed by liturgy, popular devotions, and faith formation opportunities that foster a “Catholic social imagination.”

I still stand by that, but in the intervening years, I’ve grown to realize that Catholics also need to nurture our political ecology, the institutions and habits that make democratic participation possible. For example, in 2016, I argued that this should lead Catholics to:

• Work toward campaign finance reform, diminishing the role of money in politics to better ensure that the voice of voters is heard;

• Following the lead of Pope Francis in his 2015 address to the U.S. Congress, foster the idea that politics is truly a public service, a vocation aimed at the public good;

• Contribute to building public spaces of civic participation and dialogue, even between elections.

Four years later, prior to the 2020 election, I added that a Catholic commitment to democratic institutions should likewise include:

• Protecting voting rights by rejecting sweeping efforts to remove people from voting rolls (for example, in Virginia this year, thousands of voters were mistakenly removed from voter rolls, even in the midst of early voting in the state’s elections) and ensuring adequate access to voting stations during elections;

• Rejecting candidates who call into question the electoral process or who show complete disregard for governmental checks and balances.

Surely the individual conscience that is the focus of Forming Consciences, while pondering how to vote, should take into consideration the fragility of our very right to vote and the institutions that give us political voice.

(Photo: Element5 Digital, from Unsplash)

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The lack of attention to democratic institutions and processes in Forming Consciences is also encouraged by its focus on “issues” as the primary consideration for voters. This leads to a results-oriented approach to politics that doesn’t give adequate consideration to the inherent value of democratic institutions and checks and balances. The Catholic bishops are sometimes guilty of this “ends-justify-the-means” approach in their public statements when an executive action or judicial decision leads to an outcome amenable to Catholic teaching, even if the political or judicial process for achieving that outcome is questionable. Catholic citizens across the political spectrum can be guilty of this, as well. Consider the following scenarios:

• In Ohio, voters recently passed an amendment ensuring that abortion would be legal in the state at least up to the point of viability. A handful of legislators have since proposed a law that would prohibit state courts from using the amendment to overturn existing laws restricting access to abortion, essentially overturning the will of the people. Should Catholics, for whom abortion is “our preeminent priority,” support this effort?

• Is it the duty of a Catholic Supreme Court Justice to always rule against the use of the death penalty, and even to abolish it, even if it means ignoring or overruling democratically enacted laws?

• If Congress fails to pass meaningful immigration reform, providing a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants living in the United States, can the president bypass Congress and implement a sweeping executive order, affecting millions of people, providing limited legal rights to at least some immigrants, as President Barack Obama did with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012?

Of course, these and similar situations need to be evaluated based on the merits, but the overall impact when we focus on results at the expense of democratic process is to erode our trust in democratic institutions and to reduce politics to a series of cynical power plays.

A focus on processes and procedures can become excessive; the “rules of the game” aren’t sacrosanct and can be changed if they no longer serve the common good. But at the same time, we shouldn’t consider questions of process as less serious or less substantial than questions of policy; the procedures themselves should embody our deepest political values. In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis warns against focusing so much on “immediate results” and “quick short-term gains” that we neglect the processes that will truly develop “human fullness” (224). He has applied this principle to the synodal process within the Church, but it likewise provides good reason for thinking about the health of our political ecology and not just whether we are making progress on certain issues.

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A second problem with the way Forming Consciences centers the voting decision around “issues” is that those issues are treated as discrete things that a voter might tally for or against a politician, or which a voter could weigh against each other. In Laudato Si’, however, Francis reminds us that “everything is connected” (91). For example, he insists that to address the problems facing the natural environment, we must understand how our treatment of the environment is linked to our treatment of the poor.

Francis’s insight is particularly important to American politics in the aftermath of the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision overturning Roe v. Wade and leaving it to the states to legislate on the issue of abortion. As moral theologian Charlie Camosy has argued, if Catholics who oppose abortion are going to get in the weeds and actually attempt to legislate, they will need take a more integrated approach that understands the connections between abortion and poverty alleviation, support for families like the now-expired child tax credit, domestic violence, and racism, among other issues. Camosy likewise suggests that this approach will require opponents of abortion to engage in dialogue with abortion supporters to craft policies that offer support to women and children or that address the structural causes of poverty. Such dialogue will only be possible, however, if we are attentive to the political ecology, as I noted above.

The current framework of Forming Consciences, however, militates against the approach advocated by Camosy, not just because it treats political issues as discrete rather than interconnected, but also because of its underlying assessment of American pluralism. Forming Consciences implicitly treats pluralism as a threat to the Catholic conscience, and so it focuses on how the Catholic voter can maintain the purity of their conscience in the election process. The point is not that these concerns are not important, but that it comes at the expense of encouraging collaboration with those who may not share all of our values. The voter guides produced in earlier decades put a greater emphasis on collaboration, and this is something that ought to be recovered when an updated version is finally produced.

That is not to say that we must simply return to the framework of earlier guides. Indeed, it’s important to learn from their drawbacks, as well. For example, although the “consistent ethic of life” of the late 1980s and early 1990s provided a comprehensive social vision, it was short on details on how to make this vision politically viable and was soon overwhelmed by the pull of partisanship.

So, what is the voting guide that Catholics really need? Of course, the bishops should continue to speak to how Catholic social teaching can inform how we think about the issues facing American society. But there needs to be a much greater focus on how Catholics can help nurture a democratic political ecology, both by strengthening democratic institutions, but perhaps even more importantly, encouraging different forms of political participation and public dialogue in between elections. And finally, when the bishops do talk about the issues, they should follow Francis’s lead and explain how they are interconnected. They should not be simply reduced to stances which one is either for or against, a position that encourages further polarization. The bishops plan for a new document to be ready in time for the election in 2028. Hopefully by then it is not too late for Catholics to help repair our damaged political ecology.

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Of Interest…

• The editors at America offer some insights from the recent Synod to help guide how Catholics approach the upcoming 2024 elections. They raise some of the same concerns I mentioned above, including recommending that Catholics not see the abortion issue in isolation from other issues like poverty and access to healthcare. They also emphasize the importance of fostering dialogue. But they also encourage us to listen to the voices of those marginalized from mainstream politics so that we can take seriously their concerns.

• Also at their general assembly, the U.S. bishops overwhelmingly supported a petition already proposed by the Catholic bishops of England and Wales to recommend that the 19th-century prelate and theologian Cardinal John Henry Newman be named a “Doctor of the Church.” I can’t call to mind another Catholic thinker from the last two centuries more worthy of the honor. Newman is widely respected across the theological spectrum and his work on the development of doctrine has been pivotal to the Church’s contemporary self-understanding.

• Similarly, the bishops voted to advance the cause for canonization of the 19th-century American priest Isaac Hecker, the founder of the Paulist Fathers. This is exciting news, not least because I believe my dissertation director Bill Portier’s first book was on Isaac Hecker, and as a graduate assistant many years ago, I assisted Pat Carey with some of his work on Orestes Brownson, Hecker’s friend and ally.

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Coming Soon…

• I apologize that this post is coming out a bit later in the week than normal. I had some travel obligations earlier in the week. That being said, expect the timing for the newsletter to be a bit unpredictable as we enter the holiday season and final grading season!

• For paid subscribers, I am planning a new post looking again at the ongoing conflict in Gaza, which I wrote about earlier in October. Watch for the new post this weekend, or Monday at the latest.