Ron DeSantis Catholic or evangelical: The candidate’s odd religion politics. – Slate

When Ron DeSantis strode onto the stage in April in front of almost 10,000 students at Liberty University, he did so with an introduction from the school’s chancellor, pastor Jonathan Falwell, son of legendary televangelist Jerry Falwell. The chancellor noted that the university took pride in inviting speakers “who have brought wisdom to this idea of what it means to be a champion for Christ.”

DeSantis took the opportunity to paraphrase Jesus’ words in the Book of John, when he promised believers they would be rewarded if they followed him.

“Yes, the truth shall set you free,” DeSantis said. “Because woke represents a war on truth, we must wage a war on woke.”

It was an evangelical performance in a deeply evangelical setting. Anyone watching it might assume DeSantis was at home among evangelicals. But here’s the thing: He’s not one himself.

Ron DeSantis is solidly Roman Catholic. A recent descendant of Italian immigrants, DeSantis counts a Catholic priest as an uncle and a nun as an aunt. He grew up going to Catholic school and attending Catholic mass every Sunday. And yet, until recently, many people weren’t sure whether he is still a practicing Catholic. When the Catholic magazine America reached out to his press team to clarify his religious denomination, for example, they got no response. Given that DeSantis makes faith integral to his political identity, it became confusing enough that the Orlando Sentinel published a story with this reveal:

After months of dodging the question, DeSantis’ staff and a priest have confirmed

that DeSantis and his family regularly attend the handful of Catholic churches in the

Tallahassee area.

So, what, exactly, is DeSantis doing here? Why was his Roman Catholicism essentially a secret? Faith can be no private matter for a Republican presidential candidate. As Politico and others noted recently, DeSantis’ presidential campaign has outlined educated white evangelicals as being his gateway to the nomination. So is this Catholic-evangelical two-step how he’s trying to court voters, and if so, is it a good strategy? What, exactly, is Ron DeSantis signaling to Republicans with how he presents his faith?

DeSantis has made it clear that Catholicism is not central to his image. Unlike President Joe Biden, who is known to pray the rosary and identifies proudly as Catholic, DeSantis keeps things generically Christian. Even the prominent Catholic masses he has attended could be justified by non-Catholics as political in nature: one at the culture war–infused Ave Maria University, and one at a “Blue Mass” for police officers who died while on duty. His fight against abortion certainly taps into a traditionally Catholic battle, but it’s a battle that Protestants co-opted decades ago. When he speaks of his faith in interviews, he speaks of “faith”—not the church’s teachings or anything more distinctly Catholic in flavor. If this choice is a matter of identifying as—or appealing to—a generic white Christian American, it doesn’t sound that different from his recent efforts to pronounce his own name in a less European way.

But from the way he speaks at events and in interviews, it does seem that DeSantis isn’t just trying to seem less Catholic. It sounds like he’s also trying to seem more evangelical—or at least one specific kind of evangelical.

In speeches, DeSantis has a favorite line: It is time for us to “put on the full armor of God.” He has used it in reference to resisting COVID lockdowns or enacting abortion bans or just standing against leftists. This is a reference to Ephesians, in a passage about Christians staying committed in their faith, but DeSantis uses it in reference to opposing enemies. It’s a term now commonly used in allusion to “spiritual warfare,” popular among evangelicals who feel the call to win over the country.

There are other ways he takes on this spiritual warfare language, as when he ran an ad (alluding to Paul Harvey’s “So God Made a Farmer” speech) implying that he had been sent by God to be a fighter. It’s a religious tone that fits the candidate’s culture-war sensibilities.

This messaging has received mixed reviews from religious experts. Some view DeSantis’ language as plainly antithetical to his Catholicism. But others believe it’s reflective of how some modern American Catholics have embraced a more aggressive, us-against-them Christianity.

It’s a tone that David DeCosse, the religious and Catholic ethics director at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, said is not very Catholic. “Of course, it’s not possible to say it’s inherently incompatible with Catholicism,” he said. “But there definitely is a tension of stark division, of good and bad, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and the left. At some point, that simply does not work with Catholicism.”

As he explained it, modern Catholic theology insists on the dignity of all people, and that no one is beyond redemption. “What you can hear in this stark binary language on the part of DeSantis is that the fill-in-the-blank—the liberals, the left, the Democrats—have become inherently evil in some way,” he said. “You’re moving out of that Catholic sense of the world and moving into something maybe evangelical, maybe Manichean.”

Still, even if DeSantis strays from official church teaching, there are many Catholics with deeply cynical, black-and-white views of the world. And there are some embracing the ideas of spiritual warfare. This trend has emerged from different traditions within the church, but for DeSantis specifically, it comes from the sort of masculine Christianity that emerged first in the 1990s among Protestants.

“Overall, it 100 percent makes sense from a Catholic perspective,” said Lauren Horn Griffin, a professor in the philosophy and religious studies department at Louisiana State University. “There’s a real prevalence of military metaphors in Catholicism.” She cited the Knights of Columbus, a popular Catholic men’s organization. “Knight imagery, crusader imagery, are very common. And that often leads to spiritual warfare language. So I think that there’s definitely a spiritual warfare rhetoric in the Catholic past and present.”

More than any dogma, DeSantis’ spiritual warfare language was likely inspired by geography, as his Catholicism is informed through interaction with the evangelicals around him. “There’s certainly a Southern vibe,” Griffin said. “It’s a Southern way of talking about it, which Catholics don’t share as much.” In this light, in how he talks about religion, DeSantis is signaling where his cultural loyalties lie, rather than his deeply held beliefs.

But there was one moment in which DeSantis clearly affirmed himself as either directly speaking to or identifying with evangelicals. In an interview with the conservative evangelical Christian Broadcasting Network, the station’s political analyst, David Brody, asked DeSantis to describe where he is today with his Roman Catholicism. DeSantis gave a bland, wandering answer about raising his children in a “Christ-centered household” and with “those values,” avoiding their “indoctrination,” and wanting to bring the Bible alive for them. But when Brody pressed about his theology, DeSantis gave a decidedly un-Catholic answer.

Brody: From the Roman Catholicism standpoint, there’s a lot of tradition, there’s a lot of rituals. That’s kind of how it’s steeped in. Evangelicals kind of see it as that born-again relationship with Jesus. How do you process that? 

 

DeSantis: Well, I mean, if you think about what’s the most compelling part of the Bible, there’s a lot, for me. I would point out, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” [from John 14:6]. I mean, that’s ultimately what the faith centers around. Yes, there’s a lot of traditions, and I think a lot of those are nice. But at the end of the day, it’s: Where is your heart with respect to God, and what is that relationship? That, to us, to my wife and I, is kind of where we center that. And some of the history, I think, is really neat … But in terms of how we do it, we really just focus on: What is the cornerstone of being a Christian in the modern world? And I think it’s really back to that in John [14:6]. 

Not only did DeSantis call Catholic traditions a tepid “nice” and Catholic history “really neat,” he gave such a Protestant-sounding answer that Brody had to follow with a clarification. (“You consider yourself Roman Catholic today? Still?” “Yep,” DeSantis said.) As Brody would write on Twitter afterward, “his answer about having that PERSONAL relationship with God was fascinating considering you typically don’t get that type of answer and language among traditional Roman Catholics.”

“Sacramentalism is not simply nice,” said William D. Dinges, a religious studies professor at the Catholic University of America, about the Catholic rites. “They’re constituent for what it means to be a church. Catholicism is not a me-and-Jesus form of religiosity. It’s profoundly communal in the sense of our relationship with Christ and the church. From my point of view, he’s talking more Protestant-evangelical than Catholic.”

We can’t say whether DeSantis really leans this way “in his heart,” or if he’s playing up his Protestant-esque personal relationship with God for purely political reasons. We have evidence, though, that he doesn’t care about reaching out to Catholic voters, partly because Catholics do not vote as a bloc. (They’re split nearly 50–50 among the two parties and tend to vote more along racial, ethnic, and class lines.) Repeatedly, Catholic bishops have chastised DeSantis for his positions on the death penalty and on immigration. But DeSantis has shown no sign of moderation or remorse at the bishops’ criticism.

And we have evidence he’s trying hard for the evangelical vote. The week he announced his candidacy, he chose to speak to the largely evangelical audience at the National Religious Broadcasters’ annual convention. And his focus on Israel—alongside his acknowledgement that his Israel position has to do with the Bible—is clearly connected to evangelical priorities, given that Catholics do not share in certain evangelical theological views about the nation.

So DeSantis’ religious messaging leaves him in a strange spot. While Donald Trump barely makes an effort to pretend to be religious—no one confuses him for a religious man—DeSantis is trying to brand himself as a credible, vaguely evangelical Christian. But that’s a crowded lane beside fellow candidates Mike Pence and Tim Scott, who have for decades proved themselves to be authentic, committed evangelicals. With those uncut options, how many educated white evangelicals will really go for the less pure version? Neither fully Catholic nor fully evangelical, DeSantis is counting on voters to care enough about religious authenticity to defect from the religiously illiterate Trump, while not caring enough to think too hard about whether he’s an actual, authentic evangelical candidate.