After more than a century of widespread antipathy between Catholics and evangelical Christians, a Catholic with Italian immigrant roots from the industrial Northeast has emerged as the favored presidential candidate among evangelicals, even in states he lost over all, like Ohio and Illinois. On the eve of Louisiana’s primary on Saturday, Mr. Santorum had won a plurality of the evangelical vote in 9 of 16 states, according to exit polls by Edison Research.
“Santorum represents a game-changer,” said D. Michael Lindsay, the president of Gordon College, a Christian school near Boston, and an expert in evangelical voting patterns. “His candidacy has the potential to reshape conservative political alignment, securing once and for all evangelical support for a conservative Catholic in public life.”
Mr. Santorum has, in fact, performed far better with evangelical Christians than with Catholics, who have preferred Mitt Romney, a Mormon, in virtually every state. Through a critical reading of the data, Mr. Santorum’s base of evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics could be seen by cynics as a coalition of zealots, held together by intolerance. By another way of thinking, however, his candidacy offers proof of a growing tolerance on the part of evangelical Christians, a willingness to shed ancestral religious prejudices.
That Santorum is drawing Evangelicals should not come as a shock.
His Catholicism today is not John Kennedy’s Catholicism from fifty years ago. Aside from abortion, Santorum talks about a lot of the same things Evangelicals do. Foreign policy, the exceptionalism of the United States, the role of government: Santorum has more in common with today’s Evangelicals than he does with either left-wing post-Vatican II Catholics who want him out of their bedrooms or traditional Catholics who think he is a neo-con warmonger and pro-big government in the way Bush 41 was.