Personally as an American Catholic I have always had a certain sympathy for Mormons, they are generally pleasant, they have little historic antipathy for catholics and they are frequently persecuted by the very same people who until very recently talked about Popish plots. Add the fact that I was once subjected to a Baptist specifically condemning them to me and several others for believing in the “false doctrine of works” and my feelings can grow positively warm.

Huckabee’s sleazy insinuations against Romney for his religion grate on many catholics as well, even non religious ones because they remind us, as a group, of the kind of rhetoric that isn’t so long past in this country especially regarding Kennedy.

As an incidental I might note that Romney’s fiercest defender at the National Review is the very vocally Catholic social conservative, Kathryn Lopez.

“Agree with Pitkin” are the three sweetest words in the blogosphere, but it sounds like you’ve gotten to the right place place the wrong way here. If counties were indeed arbitrary divisions, then these results would be fine. The problem is that Kirchner is treating them as arbitrary divisions—as random samples of the Iowa population—when they are not arbitrary at all. When you’ve got geographic data like this where pretty much every demographic variable is organized along the same lines, plus a bunch of geographic confounders like endorsements by local officials, unions with memberships based in particular areas, etc., you just have a lot fewer data points than the naive regression analysis Kirchner does assumes. Under the circumstances, calculating significance and so on as if you’ve got 100 separate observations is just bad statistics. It’s not a first approximation of anything. Henry should know better.

Not really. It’s an absolute wreck. Ignoring confounding, and ecological inference, and collinearity, it’s not even a correct calculation.

The guy has designed his independent variables so as they’re structurally dependent on each other (%Religious = %Catholic + %Evangelical + %Other). So the inferences are all going to be wrong. That aside: you can’t use the coefficient for Catholicism to test whether Huckabee had most trouble where there were more Catholics while including terms for the percentage of population religious and the percentage of population evangelical. These terms are going to at least in part control for the absolute proportion of Catholics, defeating the whole object.

God knows what the correct interpretation of the Catholic coefficient is, but it’s not going to represent the % change in the Huckabee vote for every additional % of Catholics in the population. Which is what you’re supposedly testing.

Blair was what you’d call ‘Catholic by osmosis’ long before he officially jumped; my guess is that he didn’t want to become the first Catholic PM through conversion, in case that set off any weird constitutional nonsense. Better that someone raised in the Church crosses that barrier, because he/she will be more able to tell insufferable converts like Anne Widdicombe to shut up.

What I said. I can’t speak for others, but I for one have never had to turn off the TV and dive behind the couch because of Catholics coming up the front walk.

The Catholic Church, in my observation, works hard to try and bring back people who were raised Catholic and lapsed. Roping in everybody and everybody is not their main focus, as it emphatically is for both Mormons and Baptists.

The regression is based on the counties representing 100-odd independent observations. but look at the map: that’s just obviously not true. We aren’t looking at 100 counties here, we’re looking at three or four regions. Under the circumstances regression analysis isn’t going to be able to distinguish between religion and anything else that varies along the same regional axes, which no doubt includes not every all the demographic variables you could think of but no doubt some idiosyncratic geographic stuff as well. It’s like doing a regression on comments on this post and some typical Redstate thread and treating every comment as an independent observation. You’d find that left-leaning blog readers are far more interested than right-leaning ones in the Flashman books. No doubt with a high degree of statistical significance and a big r-squared.

Such BS.

I am skeptical that a Catholic party leader wouldn’t face opposition from Scotland and Northern Ireland voters, particularly if the party leader was Tory.

You mean like this Tory party leader? (A Scot, to boot!)

His party did eventually throw him under a bus, it’s true. But that’s because he was rubbish, not because he is catholic.

Here’s another Scottish RC (but non-Tory) party leader, BTW. Also given the push; but for booze, not popery.

As for the Wee North and its (lack of) influence on the choice of non-NI party leaders: what psg said.

Historically religion was certainly influentional:Methodism/Liberalism and Church of England = Tory-Party-At-Prayer etc and you can still see the influence of that on our own map.However those who unconsciously vote like this are no longer so active religiously as to suddenly alter a lifetime’s voting habit when a party leader switches religion.

In my own family and others I know the rabidly anti-Catholic ancestors were that infuriating beast the working-class Tory,doggedly voting against their own economic interests.Anyone still like them would merely see one more reason for not voting Labour so no change.The Tories have only 1 Scottish MP and no hope of much more in any forseeable circumstances.

“People who’s church services routinely involved parishioners speaking in tongues thought WE were the weird ones.”

Well, you do cannibalise your God every week. Every religion looks weird to every other, and they all look weird to atheists.

The monarchy,of course is a different matter covered by written parts of our constitution.Blair might have been understandably anxious to avoid bringing the two issues of the monarchy and the established church into contemporary debate—-full reform of the House Of Lords where the bishops still retain their ex officio seats is still ongoing (98 years to date).

For my part I’ve always hoped someone—The Lib Dems most likely—- would make disestablishing the C of E a commitment if only so we could all enjoy outbreaks of antidisestablishmentarianism.