Thanks for a reasoned response to my short-tempered one. They are two different statistics, and that’s why I posted both of them, and that’s why they don’t match. However, as you probably know from your own congregation, it’s the same people every week. The people who answer that they went to mass last week, but that they don’t make it every week are confessing a sinful tendency; if they didn’t think mass was important, they wouldn’t go at all. (No-one would ever accuse someone of going to Catholic mass for the entertainment.)
The point is that they value their church, as opposed to the fifty percent who never make it to church and never try. And I think it would be unfair to call these, “Catholics in Name Only.”
At 70 million Catholics church members, Catholic church members outnumber all Protestant church members combined, using the broadest possible definition of “Protestant.” But I would never claim that the majority of Christians in America are Catholic. My larger point was that you should compare active Catholics to active Protestants, or all Catholics to all non-Catholic people who call themselves Christians.
Frankly, I think that the fact that mass attendance correlates with increasing the share of pro-life voting from 23% to 67% to be absolutely astounding. And it’s actually better than I stated: the 78% of “church-going Protestants” who voted for Romney was actually only “church-going white evangelicals.” The 67% of Catholics included church-going Catholics, including the 18% of church-goers who are Hispanic (yes, only 18%. Only 38% of Hispanic immigrants are Catholic at all), 10% who are asian, and 4% who are black.
Voting data is very strict on the definition of Catholics, only counting those who are baptized members of that single denomination.
Protestants are just Christian but not Catholic, that includes people who don't belong to any church and have never been baptized, or who may have not even ever set foot in a church, it is just that they believe in Christ, it includes Episcopalians and lesbian ministers and all flavors of people, not only are they not limited to a single denomination under a single authority, it does include many who have never had a church or any denomination's teachings.