This finding puts the leaked draft opinion of Judge Samuel Alito into stark relief as an outlier and raises questions of whether the conservative majority on the US Supreme Court is Establishing religion in taking a stance against any constitutional right to abortion. The religions in question are Catholicism and Evangelicalism, both of which, along with Mormonism, contain a majority or plurality that opposes abortion.

About 30% of Americans are religiously unaffiliated, up from 8% in 1990. They overwhelmingly believe abortion should be legal (73%). So Alito and the Republican Party are imposing their religious beliefs on these secular Americans who see no secular purpose in an abortion ban. This is nearly 100 million Americans we are talking about.

MSNBC: “For Religious Right, Abortion Was A Means To Power As Segregation Lost Political Potency”

Mainline Protestants — Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, etc., make up about 10% of Americans, down from 30% in 1970. Still, that is 33 million people. Some 60% of them think abortion should be legal in most or all cases, and 5% say they don’t know, so that I think we may conclude that 65% of these denominations’ members don’t think it should be illegal. That leaves 35% who do, of course, but they could not win a vote at a national convention of any of these churches.

About 70% of African-Americans identify as Protestant, and 52%, a majority, believe abortion should be legal. Note that 28% of African-Americans are evangelicals, so that explains why the support isn’t higher. About 6% are Catholic.

There are roughly 74 million Catholics in the US, about 30% of the population. This Pew Research Center poll found that 48% of them believe abortion is for the most part legal, whereas 47% disagreed. American Catholics are far more liberal than their church hierarchy, and a higher percentage of them gets abortions than is true among Protestants. The Supreme Court is effectively siding with the American Catholic minority against the more numerous abortion supporters.

Pew says of American Jews that it classifies “5.8 million adults (2.4% of all U.S. adults) as Jewish. This includes 4.2 million (1.7%) who identify as Jewish by religion and 1.5 million Jews of no religion (0.6%).” Another 2.8 million American adults have at least some Jewish background, through a parent or other relative.

Based on polling, Pew finds that 82% of Jewish Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. For the Catholic Alito, four of his Catholic colleagues, and one conservative Protestant (Gorsuch) to de facto deprive Jewish women living in states controlled by Republican legislatures of the right to control their own bodies in accordance with their religious beliefs is surely a triumph of some religious traditions in the US over others, and is discriminatory. See for further on this argument today’s IC column by H. Scott Prosterman.

Buddhist Americans are something like 1.2% of the population and are a mix of white converts and Asian-Americans. 82% of them believe abortion should be legal. This result is wildly at variance with what most Asian Buddhists would say. The Dalai Lama, for instance, has called abortion a form of killing. But Buddhist Americans have their own distinctive approach to this issue.

Muslim Americans are about 1.1% of the population. On the order of 56% of them believe abortion should be legal, and another 9% don’t know. So 65% of them don’t have a strong objection. I have pointed out that ten Muslim-majority countries have abortion on demand, and another 19 allow it under certain circumstances.

So Alito is taking a position more conservative than that of a majority of Muslim Americans.

So who wants to ban abortion? 63% of Evangelicals, who are 17% of the population, about 35 million people, and 47% of Catholics, roughly 34 million people. Even if you add all abortion critics in all the religions together, they are a minority of the country. Some 69% of Americans over all want to maintain Roe v. Wade.

“In total, he is taking 12 people with him. They are all from Syria.”

Rome Reports: ” Pope takes three refugee families with him to Rome”

Rome Reports: “Bernie Sanders speaks at the Vatican”

Billionaire bigot Donald Trump’s tiff with Pope Francis continued on Thursday, though Trump appears to have gotten cold feet about taking on the Pontiff toward the end of yesterday.

The reason this dispute is important is that Trump cannot win the presidency with only the backing of white Protestants, and he has now alienated everyone else. As Mark Gray points out, the country has changed dramatically, so that white Protestants are no longer a majority:

h/t Our Sunday Visitor Weekly

US Catholics typically split 50/50 between Democratic candidates and Repubican ones in presidential elections. White Protestants split 40/60 in favor of Republicans. Everyone else, 26% of the electorate, skews heavily Democratic. Latinos have been trending Democratic, and Trump and Carson have probably pushed them further in that direction and also have energized Latino voters to come to the ballot box.

Only about 25% of the 80 million US Catholics are solid Conservatives, with another 35% saying they are “moderates.” About 50% of Catholics vote Republican in presidential contests.

h/t Pew from 2008

So the only ways a Republican can win the presidency are either to pull members of the Catholic working and lower middle class the way Reagan did, or to get a substantial Latino vote, the way George W. Bush did.

After his performance this week, Trump probably has little shot at either. He is thus left with 60% of White Protestants, at most, and probably will get few votes from the other major groups if he is that standard-bearer (non-Christians include Jews, members of Asian religions, and a growing segment of people who answer “none” when asked their religion in polls– all of them vote heavily Democratic). This would be a blow-out for the Democrats even more extensive than the 1964 trouncing of Goldwater by Johnson.

The brouhaha won’t affect Trump in largely Protestant South Carolina, but my guess is that the “moderate” swing vote among Catholics is now likely to swing elsewhere.

The whole thing started when Pope Francis went to Mexico and spoke out about the plight of Mexican labor migrants to the US, complaining about the “human tragedy” of migrants who flee their homes for environmental reasons.

Trump accused the Pope of being an agent of Mexico and said that the government there had only told Pope Francis “one side of the story:”

“He didn’t see the crime, the drug trafficking and the negative economic impact the current policies have on the United States. They are using the pope as a pawn and they should be ashamed of themselves for doing so, especially when so many lives are involved and when illegal immigration is so rampant.”

(Actually, the evidence is that in recent years more Mexicans have left the US than have come in; and immigrants typically have a low crime rate because they are afraid of being deported).

The Pope replied vigorously:

“Anyone, whoever he is, who only wants to build walls and not bridges is not a Christian . . . Vote, don’t vote, I won’t meddle. But I simply say, if he says these things, this man is not a Christian . . . We need to see if he really said them and for this I will give him the benefit of the doubt.”

Trump also went on the offensive, saying “For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful.”

But Trump has been going around questioning Ted Cruz’s religious faith, saying it is inconsistent for him to tell bald-faced lies and then to represent himself as a Christian

And, I don’t know if Trump has heard of excommunication, but it is a prerogative of the pope to, like, question people’s faith.

Then Trump went medieval, shouting, “If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president because this would not have happened.”

ISIL has talked in its braggart way about taking the Vatican, but Italian police maintain that there is no evidence of an immediate danger to the Pope.

“On the plane coming back from Mexico, a reporter asked the Pope about the charge: “Am I a pawn of the Mexican government? I leave that to your judgement, to the people to judge.”

Responding to Trump’s charge of being politicized, the Pope added, “Thanks be to God if that is what he said, because Aristotle defined man as a political animal: at least I am a human person.”

JEB! took Trump’s side against Pope Francis, despite being a Catholic himself.

By Thursday evening I presume someone showed Trump the above population chart, because he was talking about what a “great guy” Pope Francis is. But my guess is that it is too late.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

AP: Pope: Trump ‘Not Christian’ for Wanting a Wall

Trump accused Pope Francis of being an instrument of the Mexican government because of his pro-immigration stance. The Vatican responded.

U.S. Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump is no stranger to slinging insults and criticism, but he might have been punching out of his league when he picked a fight with the Vatican over Pope Francis’ stance on immigration.

But the Vatican fired back on Tuesday night, saying Trump has no business lecturing the pope when it comes to immigration, noting that the pontiff always speaks out in defense of the rights of migrants and refugees around the world.

The squabble kicked off when Trump, who has unrelentingly promoted his campaign promise to build a giant wall to keep Mexicans out, suggested that Pope Francis was only visiting the U.S.-Mexico border during his five-day tour in the country because the Mexican government coerced him to do so.

The #Pope is in #Mexico blessing the US-Mexico boarder right now. Could the Pope be anti-Trump? #CNN

— Hope (@HopeAlsoTaken) February 17, 2016

In an interview on Fox Business Network, Trump called Pope Francis a “very political person” and claimed he’s unaware of the “problems” migration poses to the U.S. from the billionaire’s anti-immigration perspective.

“I don’t think he understands the danger of the open border that we have with Mexico,” Trump said. “I think Mexico got him to do it because they want to keep the border just the way it is.”

The Vatican rejected the accusation ahead of the pope’s arrival in the northern Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, immediately across the border from El Paso, Texas. Vatican spokesperson Father Federico Lombardi said that it is “very strange indeed” to suggest that “the pope is an instrument of the Mexican government.”

Vatican to Trump: To suggest pope is an instrument of the Mexican government, no. That is very strange indeed https://t.co/qkWMZLt0wm

— David Luhnow (@davidluhnow) February 17, 2016

During his visit in Ciudad Juarez, the pope’s activities included visiting a prison and holding a cross-border mass with observers on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border.

Trump’s criticism of the pope is a turnaround from his opinion of Francis two years ago, when the billionaire wrote on his Twitter account that he liked the new pope “so much.”

The new Pope is a humble man, very much like me, which probably explains why I like him so much!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 25, 2013

But as the chief champion of anti-immigrant rhetoric and right-wing migration policy, it’s not surprising that Trump makes an enemy of any advocate of migrants’ dignity and rights, even the pope.

Via TeleSur

Watch:

TeleSur: “Donald Trump Attacks Pope Francis”

In his White House address on Wednesday, Pope Francis again brought up the urgent issue of global warming,

climate change is a problem which can no longer be left to a future generation. When it comes to the care of our “common home”, we are living at a critical moment of history. We still have time to make the changes needed to bring about “a sustainable and integral development, for we know that things can change” (Laudato Si’, 13).

He linked climate change not only to the general welfare of people on earth but especially to the fate of the “excluded,” i.e. the poor. He seemed to be saying that the poor will suffer even more from climate change than the rest of humanity, and everything indicates that he is right about that.

One of the problems with an enormous organization like the Catholic Church, encompassing 1 billion out of our 7 billion human beings, is that it is hard even for the top leader to get the word out to the faithful. And then, of course, the faithful often drag their feet or disagree with church policy. Pope Francis’s two predecessors both opposed Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, but polling suggested that only about a fifth of American Catholics even knew about that. About half of Catholics vote Republican in the US, and that section of the church may not have been so eager to circulate the anti-war message from Rome.

So can Pope Francis get the word out to US Catholics? And will they do something practical about climate change?

At the moment, many of the larger Catholic dioceses are heavily invested in fossil fuels. Some 8 percent of the $1.65 billion portfolio of the Archdiocese of Chicago is invested in fossil fuels, e.g. In other dioceses, having on the order of 6 to 7 percent invested in fossil fuels appears to be common.

According to Pope Francis, that 6 to 7 percent of the diocese’s portfolio may as well be invested in brothels or in abortion clinics. Climate change will kill lots of people, after all, and the Church is all about affirming life. It will also diminish the quality of life for a lot of people, with extreme weather events and more severe droughts in some parts of the world.

So, will the dioceses divest from fossil fuels? Will they announce that they have done so and pressure other leaders of society to do so? Let’s see if there is practical action. (By the way, divestment isn’t always easy. If you put your money in mutual funds, there is often not a means to separate out where it goes. And even if you have a socially responsible mutual fund, it probably invests in the banks that fund the fossil fuel corporations. But, you can try.)

Churches emit carbon dioxide just as most American buildings do. If they are heated by coal, they may be emitting quite a lot of CO2. Church leaders know this, and some are swinging into action. Saint Eugene Catholic Church in North Asheville, NC, is putting 146 solar panels on the roof. The panels will generate 22% of the church’s electricity. Some 55% of North Carolina’s energy is generated by coal, which is extremely dirty and polluting. 34% is nuclear, which is low-carbon. So this church is actually reducing its carbon emissions quite significantly.

Churches all over the country are doing the same thing Saint Eugene is, and their cumulative effect could be significant. If enough join in. Studies have shown that solar panels are like yawning. If a neighbor puts them on, you are more likely to do so, as well. So, not only are the churches putting on panels, but that very act may encourage home-owning parishioners to do so as well.

Churches often also own vehicles, and they could go for electric ones or plug-in hybrids, another way of cutting down on their emissions.

The Catholic Church has one leg up on a piece of practical climate action: meatless Fridays. If 80 million Americans avoid beef on Fridays and during Lent, that actually also has a significant positive climate impact. In fact, Pope Francis should think about extending the number of meatless days.

In my own view, the US government is pretty hopeless as an engine of significant carbon reduction, and the big changes are likely to be more grassroots. If they will listen to him and act, the quarter of Americans whom the pope supposedly leads could form a crucial lever in moving all Americans toward a greener and less dangerous future.

We social scientists are more interested in what society actually does than in religious rhetoric. We’ll be checking in.

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Related video:

Mother Jones: “Pope Francis Urges the United States to Act on Climate Change”

The papal trip to the United States that Francis will begin on September 22 is the most difficult of his pontificate so far.

This is because of what I call the pope’s “American problem” – a cultural and ideological distance between the more socially minded Jesuit from Argentina and the more conservative leadership of the American Catholic Church.

Francis is not only the first non-European pope. He is also the first pope since Vatican II – the council that “opened the church to the world” – who has never set foot in the US, even before becoming pontiff. And, finally, he is the first pope from Latin America – a fact that presents American Catholics with a particular kind of challenge to their tendency, evident in the writing of George Weigel, for example, to identify themselves as the youngest and most energetic Church in global Catholicism, and to see American Catholicism as representative of the rest of the world.

A Latin American challenges these tendencies because Latin American Catholicism represent a mix of “global south” and of European Catholicism very different from North American Catholicism.

But why should non-Catholic, non-Christian, non-experts care about Pope Francis coming to America? What does this media fascination in the papal trip (just look at the latest issues of Newsweek, Time, People and The New Yorker) say about our world?

Papal trips: a 20th-century invention

Church history is very long, but the history of papal trips is not (there are, for example, no good studies, to my knowledge, of the history of this very particular theological event).

In the Middle Ages and early modern times, popes did travel sometimes, but only in emergencies or fleeing under threat. The conclave of 1799-1800, for example, took place in Venice, not Rome, after Napoleon’s invasion of Italy. In 1848, Pope Pius IX had to flee Vatican City because of the political revolution in Italy: he returned to Rome only in 1850.

The first modern papal trip took place in 1964 with Paul VI visiting the Holy Land. It became a fundamental part of the papal job description with John Paul II, less than 40 years ago.

The example of John Paul II, who took 104 foreign trips, is crucial, but it can also be misleading in trying to understand the political importance of these visits.

John Paul II’s first trip to Poland in 1979 was clearly a factor in the political change that led, one decade later, to the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe.

There were other groundbreaking trips for John Paul II – such as, for example, his visit to Cuba in 1998 – but they were more symbolic in nature. They did not bring about a real political change.

Indeed, Francis’ trip to the US is probably not going to change the views of American Catholics, much less the deeply polarized politics in this country.

Hearts and minds unlikely to be moved

To begin with, the economic message of Francis is deeply dissonant from the tradition of capitalism in America.

Catholic social doctrine has always been skeptical of free market ideology, and with Francis’ encyclical on the environment Laudato Si’, the church has updated its criticism of the ruthless nature of market forces and their impact on creation with growing concern about climate change.

But popes do not legislate on the economy, they just point out the values and principles that should inspire a society that respects – and not just in theory – the life of every human person. Catholic social teaching works through general principles that need to be applied by lay Catholics. So how will American lay Catholics respond?

American Catholics (both liberal and conservative) have always, understandably, been very protective of their autonomy. That is something popes have noticed – one clear example being the Vatican’s condemnation in 1899 of the heresy of “Americanism” or the insistence on the need to adapt Catholicism to America.

What’s more, and this is not insignificant, Francis is not as comfortable speaking English as his predecessors – indeed, he spent the summer studying the language in preparation for this trip.

American culture has a tremendous ability to absorb every other culture. It is undeniable that the culture of Catholics in America has been largely changed by America, and no pope can do much about that.

But here’s why you need to watch this papal visit

So why is a papal visit interesting, if not essential, for those who want to understand something of the world today?

The first reason, and perhaps the most obvious one, is that Francis presents Catholics and non-Catholics alike with the idea that there is another “source” for understanding ourselves and the issues that divide and unite our communities.

Catholicism makes the case against “monism” – against the dominance of one intellectual, philosophical and spiritual tradition. Roman Catholicism is not just a church: it understands itself culturally and geopolitically as “a world” – or “the” world before modernity turned secular. In this papal trip, therefore, the leader of the Catholic Church is meeting America, the global leader of its “counterpart” – modernity, capitalism and pluralism.

But the second, and to my mind the most important, reason to pay attention to what happens in the next few days is the story of relations between the papacy and the Catholic Church on one side and the United States on the other: a story about change in religion and politics.

Francis is addressing Congress on September 24 2015.

The very idea that the Roman Catholic pope, head of the Vatican State, can address Congress would have shocked most Americans only 30 years ago.

It was only in 1984 that the US and the Vatican established diplomatic relations. Ronald Reagan did that. He would have been surprised to witness the successor of the anti-communist pope John Paul II accepting a hammer and sickle crucifix during his trip to Bolivia earlier this year.

Catholicism today is part of the American mainstream. Just look at the Supreme Court: six of the nine justices are Catholic. This is a stunning change from the original exclusively Protestant identity of America.

On the other hand, world Catholicism has become in recent years much more American than it used to be – and much more American than Italian, for that matter.

Church teaching on religious freedom and democracy and the new sensibility on the role of women in the Church came to Rome largely thanks to the experience of Catholics in the United States. It was an American Jesuit theologian, John Courtney Murray, who was the chief drafter of the document of the Second Vatican Council on religious liberty, approved in 1965 – in 1954 he had been silenced by the Vatican for writing on the subject.

The point I want to make here is that the influence the Vatican has on the US and vice versa can be seen only over a long period of time – over years, if not decades. It is very unlikely that we will see any change before the next presidential election.

But change there will be, and paying attention over the next few days is the only way to capture the direction of that evolution. And that matters, whether you are Catholic, American or none of the above.

Massimo Faggioli, Associate Professor of Theology; Director, Institute for Catholicism and Citizenship, University of St. Thomas

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Rome Reports: “Pope is welcomed to the U.S by President Obama”