Willie Gin begins this interesting book with the perceptive and startling observation: “Catholic political incorporation has been forgotten” (1). As he notes, though scholars (and others) talk of “the Muslim question,” or “the Jewish question” there is no such comparable “Catholic question.” How could this be? Notwithstanding their high-status today, Catholics were long the butt of discriminatory policies, cultural racism, and the “powerful hold” of anti-Catholicism that persisted in Anglo-American discourse (2) until at least as recently as the 1960s, amplified by John F. Kennedy's candidacy and presidency. Gin, a political scientist, sets out to answer this puzzling question and does so with a comparative-historical approach. He examines the varying contexts and trajectories of Catholic political incorporation in the United States, Canada, and Australia—all democracies with, historically, a minority and culturally outsider Catholic population—from 1890 until about 2007.
As conveyed by the book's title, the key concept in Gin's analysis and the mechanism to minority incorporation is that of “reconstructive coalitions.” Rather than being categorically defined, such coalitions tend to fall along a spectrum, Gin argues, but can be largely recognized by the extent to which they achieve transformation in the status of the minority partner such that the minority identity is seen as having equal standing with the majority. As Gin notes, “not all coalitions are reconstructive” (16). Coalitions that are marriages of convenience or ones that are united by and against a common enemy may not lead to an increase in the cultural standing or recognition of a given coalition partner (chapter 2).
After the first two chapters introduce the study and provide a theoretical overview of reconstructive coalitions, chapter 3 presents aggregate political data (e.g., the percentages of Catholics in parliament/Congress, and in government ministries), showing the broad patterns of incorporation across the three countries from 1890 to the 1950s. Substantiating the theoretical and empirical value of comparative analyses, these data show that there is no single trajectory of incorporation, but rather, unevenness and divergences in the timing, extent, and precipitating context for Catholic representation. Neither the Great Depression, for example, nor World War II, nor Vatican II (1962–1965), are momentous events in explaining Catholic political incorporation. The specific political and institutional dynamics at issue in each country, therefore, require in-depth consideration and hence Gin presents discrete case studies of Australia (chapter 4), the United States (chapter 5), and Canada (chapter 6). Each of these chapters is rich in detail in highlighting the relevant contextual nuances. For example, Gin discusses the potential impact of compulsory voting in Australia, and more significantly the strength of the labor movement there, Catholics incorporation in it and in the Labour Party, and the centrality of shared working-class interests or a working-class coalition in bridging Catholic-Protestant differences (chapter 4). The American context is, of course, quite different. Among other factors (e.g., the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1910s and 1920s, which reignited anti-Catholicism and further complicated evolving electoral strategies vis-à-vis Catholics), the geographical distribution of Catholics, racial and regional dynamics especially in the South, the limited political and cultural salience of social class, and intra-denominational class-based splits-militated against the formation of a reconstructive Protestant-Catholic coalition (chapter 5). Canada has its own institutional and cultural realities, not least of which are attendant on the special status of Quebec (chapter 6). Indeed, as Gin points out, Canada is “the only country of the three…in which a Catholic majority controlled a major province,” and were a sufficiently strong minority to wield influence also at the federal level (90). However, the political impact of Catholicism and what is entailed by Catholic identity became further complicated by the Quiet Revolution and the rapid secularization of Quebecois society and institutional relations.
Chapter 7 returns to a comparison of the three countries, but the focus mostly, as also in chapter 8, in on the United States. The main theme in both chapters is what Gin calls the valorization of Catholic identity by the conservative (non-Catholic and Catholic) right in America (111). In emphasizing a conservative realignment, Gin reduces both Catholicism and Protestantism to their specifically conservative elements; he does not, for example, mention that he is referring to a very narrow slice of American Catholicism (and nor does he note that conservative Protestant evangelicalism is not monolithic). What Gin means by the valorization of Catholic identity is, essentially, the valorization of Rick Santorum's political views (131). This reductionism is fueled by Gin's reliance on partisan conservative sources such as First Things and “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” (143–144). Further, it appears that what he means by the reconstruction of religious identity is not a religious bridging but a “transformation of the standing of Catholics… in the evangelical imagination” (110).
Gin's discussion in these two chapters begs several unasked questions. Why would Catholics want to have standing in the evangelical imagination? How is “transformation” evident given that evangelicals (and Republicans in general) are not valorizing Catholic social teaching on just wages and economic inclusion but more specifically the Church's opposition to abortion? What does it mean to talk of conservative religious and political alignment when, despite the fact that a majority of white Catholics have voted for every Republican presidential candidate since 2000, many of them also support legal abortion and (more recently) same-sex marriage? What, theoretically and empirically, counts as a religious minority? And who is incorporating whom? For much of the book's chronology, it is reasonable to construe a Catholic minority and a Protestant majority. But following the decline of mainline Protestantism since the 1970s, the two largest groups are evangelical-leaning Protestants and Catholics. As several other studies show, these are two very different groups; with Catholics heavily similar to mainline Protestants on abortion, gay marriage, and other issues, and distant to evangelicals (contrary to what the dated 1982 survey in Crisis Magazine that Gin references [143)] might show). Given that there is no one majority religious group, but a mix of almost numerically proportionate groups (including now also the unaffiliated), who, theoretically would be predicted to incorporate whom, and on what grounds? Aside from the complications these questions present, the claim might also be made that, rather than a reconstructive coalition, the alliance of evangelicals and Catholic bishops and a minority of Catholics on a narrow set of issues might more readily be seen, by Gin's own criteria, as a marriage of convenience or as an alliance against a common enemy, i.e., secularism.
In Chapter 9, Gin is more open to seeing the limits in “pan-Christian coalitions” in Australia and Canada. It, and the final chapter broaden the discussion to include Europe, and speculate on how other religious and/or cultural minorities, including Muslims, might achieve political incorporation in western democracies. Overall, Minorities and Reconstructive Coalitions is useful in highlighting cross-national variation in political institutions and political context and how the relational dynamics of religion and politics are invariably entwined with a specific culture and history.
