We asked recently why there seems to be so little anguish among conservative Protestants over the fact that there are no Protestants on today’s US Supreme Court.

The 2012 Republican Presidential primaries have raised a similar question: Why do today’s conservative Protestants seem to love the Catholic candidate Rick Santorum?

Political scientist Matthew Franck pondered this question this week.  Franck identifies as a conservative Catholic who has lived and taught for years in a region dominated by conservative evangelical Protestants.  Franck asks:

So what’s up with the victories of Rick Santorum, a western Pennsylvania Italian Catholic, in two states, Alabama and Mississippi, where upwards of four in five voters described themselves in exit polls as evangelical or “born-again” Christians?  Although the New York Times’ Bill Keller famously misidentified Santorum last year as an evangelical, these voters know better.  They knew going to the polls Tuesday that they could choose the LDS Mitt Romney, the Lutheran-turned-Baptist-turned-Catholic Newt Gingrich, or the lifelong Catholic Rick Santorum.

Franck notes the novelty of this situation:

The first observation to make about the role of religion in these two deep-south states, then, is that three non-evangelical candidates all did respectably well in a heavily evangelical (and conservative) electorate.  Each of the candidates topped 30 percent of the vote.  Just a half century ago, John F. Kennedy had to go to Houston to make a case to Baptist ministers that a Catholic deserved a shot at the presidency.  (Some Catholics, then and now, think JFK surrendered too much of his faith to mollify his critics.)  Only four years ago Mitt Romney felt similarly compelled to reassure voters that a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints deserved a fair chance as well.  Now in 2012, we seem past all that.

Just as many conservative Protestants care more about the politics of US Supreme Court justices, especially on social issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and the role of religion in the public square, Franck concludes that Protestant fundamentalists are judging the current crop of Republican Presidential contenders more on their positions than their faith backgrounds:

For better or worse, Santorum is widely known as the “social issues” conservative in this race, the consistent defender of life, of marriage and family, and (as he himself put it last night) of the “centrality of faith” in many Americans’ lives.  Look at how strongly he did among voters who think a candidate’s “moral character” matters most, and you get the picture.

If Franck is correct–and his conclusion makes intuitive sense to me–it tells us a lot about the changing nature of Fundamentalist America.  It seems to confirm James Davison Hunter’s 1992 thesis in Culture Wars.  In that book, Hunter argued that creed and denomination had come to mean less than the divide  between orthodoxy and progressivism.  That is, the old divisions between Catholic, Protestant, and Jew had eroded, replaced by a split between conservative and liberal factions within each faith.  Along with the deafening silence among conservative Protestants about the current makeup of the US Supreme Court, the non-issue of Santorum’s Catholic faith among conservative Protestants certainly seems to confirm Hunter’s argument.