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Civil Religion and Ethnic Americans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2018

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Extract

My comments on ethnic Americans stem from a particular and specific frame of reference. First, I am a Catholic priest. Indeed, as another sociologist remarked (not intending a compliment): "He's nothing but a loudmouthed Irish priest." (May it be etched on my tombstonel) Still, these are my views, not the or even a "Catholic position." I very much doubt that there is a Catholic position on anything at this stage of the disorganization of the Roman Church. Secondly, I assay a tentative model, subject to empirical testing sometime in the future, about the "civil religion" of the Catholic ethnic. (I take it, by the way, that "ethnic" is merely a euphemism for "Catholic" when most people use it. Such does seem to me unfair to Scandinavians, German Protestants and even Anglo-Saxons, who, if The Christian Century is to be believed, are now ethnics too.)

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1973

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References

Religion and the New Majority (Association Press, 1972)

* Professor James D. Wright of the University of Wisconsin has recently demonstrated that the opposition of Catholic ethnics to the war, shown by Norman Nie and Sidney Verba as evident in 1967, actually goes back to the beginning of the war. It was the college-educated upper middle class that was more sympathetic to the war, not the so-called hard-hat ethnics of the early 1960's. Incidentally, Wright also finds that older people were more likely to have opposed the war from the beginning than younger people. Naive young scholar that he is, Wright seems to expect that his findings will be believed.