Church, Sex, and the Public Sphere in Italy
The relationship between the Catholic Church and the Italian state changed significantly during the 20th century. The Lateran Accords of 1929 between the Italian state and the Holy See included a treaty recognizing the sovereignty of the Holy See in the Vatican City State and a concordat establishing Catholicism as the official religion of the Italian state. During the 1920s and 30s the Church supported many of Mussolini’s family policies, which aimed at increasing the size and influence of the traditional family with a male head of household and Catholic teachings on sexuality were generally reflected in Italian law. This alliance proved tenuous in the second half of the century as pro-natalist family legislation was challenged and some Italians began to argue for a distinction between civil law and Catholic teaching. The Italian social movements of the 60s and 70s, including the women’s movement, emboldened citizens and politicians to pursue the legalization of divorce. The decade of prolonged debate that followed the introduction of the 1965 Fortuna Divorce Bill led to a renegotiation of the relationship between Church and state. A popular vote affirming the legalization of divorce in 1974 indicated that a majority of voting Italian citizens was willing to distinguish between Catholic teaching on divorce and Italian laws. With the revision of the concordat in 1984 and implemented in 1985, Catholicism was no longer the state religion of Italy and compulsory religious education ended in the public schools.
Although the statistics regarding religion in Italy vary widely, some contemporary scholars have agreed on defining the religious climate in Italy as “diffuse.” Diffuse Catholicism is described as a majority of Italians identifying (but not necessarily practicing) as Catholics, and Catholic values influencing (but not necessarily monopolizing) many aspects of social life and individual choices. This status of Catholicism was affected by the Church itself in its turn towards democracy and religious freedom in the 1960s, embodied in Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae. The Church’s adaptation to modernization and embrace of religious freedom has paralleled a shift in the way modern Italians relate their beliefs to their actions. Church attendance has dropped and many Italians have voted against church teachings in questions of divorce and abortion, while Catholicism remains “a valued link to the past and a way of expressing present needs.” Many patterns of personal sexual decisions also go against Catholics teachings, and individuals are as likely to distance themselves from religion as they are to change their sexual behaviors in accordance with church teachings. Regardless of the inexact relation between belief and practice, Catholicism is still regarded as one of the major political pressure groups in Italy.
In political terms, this trend of “diffuse” Catholic religion does not result in a clear cut binary of conservatism and liberalism. A recent study has shown that those embracing modern individual freedom are often liberal on legal issues of abortion, sexuality, and gender roles but conservative on issues of economic equality, while “orthodox” and traditionalist Italians are often conservative on legal issues of abortion, sexuality, and gender roles but socially progressive on economic reforms. While Italian averages lean towards orthodoxy, the two sides are not as polarized as they are in the United States. Religion remains an important determinant of political, economic, and sexual attitudes in Italy.
Church, Sex and the Public Sphere in the United States
The United States has never had an established state church at the federal level--such an arrangement is expressly forbidden by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution--but that does not mean that religion has been absent from the public sphere. The history of the United States has been one in which increasing levels of religious diversity have re-shaped the very notion of what it means to not have a state church.
Given three major differences from the Italian picture--religious disestablishment as the norm, a historically Protestant rather than Catholic majority, and much larger populations of religious minorities--there are nonetheless some striking similarities between the United States and Italy in the area of church, state and sex in recent history. Like Italy, the United States has seen religious groups play a significant role in the controversies surrounding changing understandings of sex, gender, the family, and the body. While Protestant fundamentalist groups took a back seat in U.S. politics for much of the 20th century (which some historians attribute to a resounding defeat in the court of public opinion after the infamous 1925 Scopes Monkey trial), an unlikely alliance of Protestant fundamentalists, Protestant evangelicals and conservative Catholics came roaring into the public arena in the 1970s in a development that is still having important ramifications today.
What could possibly bring such previously disparate groups together? A large part of the answer has been agreement over political issues regarding sex and the family. While divorce had always been legal in the United States due to its Protestant cultural leanings, the United States still experienced major changes in divorce law due to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. In 1969, California became the first state to adopt "no-fault" divorces. Other states soon followed suit. Whether the laws were changing to accommodate the increase in divorces or whether they were themselves catalysts for the increase in divorce rates is still debated. But many religious groups saw this change in the law as an "attack" on the institution of marriage and continue to oppose further changes in laws regulating marriage in the family. Most recently the opposition of these conservative religious groups to gay marriage and even to civil unions has figured prominently.
But perhaps the key spark that set off the fire of the religious right's resurgence in American politics in the 1970s was the 1972 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court Decision that legalized abortion in the United States. By the end of that decade Jerry Falwell (who had once decried politics as too dirty for those seriously interested in religion) founded The Moral Majority to bring together religious groups opposed not only to abortion but also to other changes in government policy regarding human sexuality. This group and others which followed in its wake (such as the 1990s Christian Coalition) continue to voice loud opposition to abortion as well as to insist that schools teach "abstinence only" as a means to avoiding pregnancy and disease in sex education classes.
But just as in the Italian case, it is not a simple case where "religious" voters are conservative across the board while others are more liberal. American Catholics, for example, largely mirror the population as a whole on most political issues including those involving sex and the family. The same can be said of mainline Protestants. Only highly committed religious believers (often defined by regular church attendance) tend to show this highly conservative slant on social issues. For other Americans the religious influence is, as in the Italian case, "diffuse" at best. Catholic voters taken as a whole represent a major "swing" vote in American politics for this reason.
Sources for Handout Information and Suggested Additional Reading
Bibliographic Resources
Italy
Caltabiano, Marcantonio, et al. “Interdependence Between Sexual Debut and Church Attendance in Italy.” Demographic Research 14, no. 19 (May 30, 2006): 453-484.
Campbell, Francis. “No Future in the Ghetto.” The Tablet (Feb. 2nd, 2008).
CIA. The 2008 World Factbook. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/.
Cipriani, Roberto. "The Sociology of Religion in Italy.” Sociological Analysis 51 (1990), S43-S52.
Davis, Nancy and Robert Robinson. "Religious Cosmologies, Individualism and Politics in Italy." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 38, no. 3 (Sept. 1999): 339-353.
Durex. “2005 Global Sex Survey Results.” http://www.durex.com/cm/gss2005results.asp#.
Foster, Leila Merrell. Italy. San Diego: Lucent Books, 1999.
Scaraffia, Lucetta. “‘Christianity has liberated her and place her alongside man in the family’: From 1850 to 1988,” pp, 249-280, in Lucetta Scaraffia and Gabriella Zarri, eds., Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Seymour, Mark. Debating Divorce in Italy: Marriage and the Making of Modern Italians, 1860-1974. New York: Palgrave, 2006.
Wanrooij, Bruno P. F. “Italy.” The Continuum Complete International Encyclopedia of Sexuality (2004): 620-635, http://kinseyinstitute.org/ccies/.
--------. “Italy: Sexuality, Morality, and Public Authority.” Sexual Cultures in Europe: National Histories, edited by Franz Eder, et al. New York: Manchester University Press, 1999: 114-137.
United States
Allitt, Patrick. Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America. Cornell Press, 1993.
Bendyna, ME. “Catholics and the Christian Right: A View from Four States.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 39, no. 3 (2000): 321-332.
--------. “Uneasy Alliance: Conservative Catholics and the Christian Right.” Sociology of Religion 62, no. 1 (2001): 51-64.
Curry, Thomas L. Farewell to Christendom: The Future of Church and State in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Frank, Thomas. What's the Matter with Kansas? New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004.
Hamburger, Philip. Separation of Church and State. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Harding, Susan. The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000.
Jelen, Ted G. “Catholic Priests and the Political Order: The Political Behavior of Catholic Pastors.”
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42, no. 4 (2003): 591–604.
McGreevy, John T. Catholicism and American Freedom. New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
2003.
------. “Shifting Allegiances: Catholics, Democrats and the GOP.” Commonweal CXXXIII, no. 16 (2006)
Pew Forum. http://pewforum.org/surveys/campaign08/.
Phillips, Kevin. American Theocracy. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.
Stricherz, Mark. “Goodbye, Catholics: How One Man Reshaped the Democratic Party.” Commonweal (2004).
