Catholics and Gay Marriage: Caution with Numbers

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 23, 2011

Our Catholic World News story is headlined Practicing Catholics more likely than general public to back homosexual unions, and we report that:

Only 31% of Catholics who attend Mass at least weekly oppose granting legal recognition to homosexual unions, according to a new report by the Public Religion Research Institute. 64% favor some sort of legal recognition of homosexual unions, with 26% favoring same-sex marriage and 38% favoring homosexual civil unions.

Well, maybe so, but this latest survey sure gives an odd impression, and one that appears to contradict the findings of many similar studies, including one done by the Pew Research Center late last year. These other studies have suggested repeatedly that the more one attends Mass, the more likely one is to reflect Church teachings in the polls.

Part of the problem is in the way the results are explained. For example, deep in the same Public Religion Research Institute study, we find this telling statement:

Only about 1-in-4 (26%) Catholics who attend services weekly or more favor allowing gay and lesbian people to marry, compared to 43% of Catholics who attend once or twice a month, and 59% of Catholics who attend a few times a year or less.

And the detailed text actually expresses an earlier conclusion a little differently:

…even among Catholics who attend services weekly or more, only about one-third (31%) say there should be no legal recognition for a gay couple’s relationships, a view held by just 13% of those who attend once or twice per month and 16% of those who attend less often.

In other words, what the survey is really telling us is that Catholics committed enough to attend Church weekly or more (that is, practicing Catholics in the traditional sense) overwhelmingly oppose gay marriage, but these same people are not quite prepared to rule out any possible form of legal recognition of what we might call gay households, with attendant civil benefits. Insofar as the results lead us to question the Catholicity of the frequent church-goers, they actually tell us very little about the Faith of the respondents. Instead, they reveal a characteristic Catholic and American reluctance to deny to others what the Faith does not insist be denied. This may be an unfortunate generosity, but it is not a doctrinal issue. (That I believe Catholics should have a keener sense of the demands of the common good in these matters is made eminently clear in a previous On the Culture entry, The End of Paralysis.)

Indeed, one of the points made in the study is that the more a particular survey question emphasizes that it is asking about some legal recognition other than true marriage, the less Catholics are concerned about it. Put another way, the more often people go to Church, the keener they are to reserve true marriage for heterosexual couples, as the Church teaches they must.

There was nothing inaccurate in our Catholic World News report, and the bullet points at the beginning of the PRRI document gave pretty much the same negative overall impression, as if the results were somehow new or startling. But once again we see that it is far too easy to get the wrong impression when numbers and categories are thrown around quickly and out of context. Statistics must be handled something like comments about God. Each comment represents but a single facet of the whole, but if one asserts any facet out of context, then people start drawing false conclusions.

Things are not nearly as bad as the reader might imagine from a quick review either of our report or of the PRRI’s own summary. It is important to note, I think, that there is little new here, and that the results are not significantly different than they have been in the recent past. Perhaps this merely proves the old adage about lies, damn lies, and statistics. Certainly it reminds us that, in dealing with real people who are reflecting on difficult issues and responding to confusing questions, statistics can be, in a word, dangerous.