If you are ever asked to predict a winner in a California governor’s race, be sure to bet on the Catholic.
Xavier Becerra’s rapid rise to one of the top-two spots in this month’s gubernatorial election was a surprise, but it shouldn’t have been. If, as expected, Becerra wins the governorship in November’s runoff election, he’ll be the state’s fifth consecutive Catholic governor.
And that is no accident. While California is caricatured as crazy, uber-progressive, even godless, the truth is that we might be America’s most Catholic state.
California has more Catholic residents than any other U.S. state — more than 10 million. By percentage of Catholics among our population, we rank eighth, trailing mostly East Coast states with strong Irish and Italian heritage. And the Archdiocese of Los Angeles is the nation’s most populous Catholic diocese.
Catholicism also bonds together our people, particularly our diverse immigrant groups. Our massive populations from Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Central America, Vietnam, and the Philippines (the second-most common country of birth for Californians, after the U.S.) all have a religious tradition in common.
We might be even more catholic in a secular sense. The word catholic comes from the ancient Greek katholikos, which meant “regarding the whole” or “universal.” Nineteenth-century German theorist Max Weber wrote, “The concept of a catholic institution is one that is coextensive with the world itself.”
By that reasoning, California, which contains the whole planet in sunny miniature, is quintessentially catholic.
But our catholic mix also results in contradictions that can curdle into hypocrisy, in ways that feel familiarly Catholic. Our state and the Roman Catholic Church are both known for large populations, for great beauty, for enormous wealth, and for the highest of ideals. Both state and Church are also known for failing to live up to those ideals, for permitting indefensible abuses, for ugly histories.
Those histories intersect in California. The 18th and 19th century history of this place is inseparable from the Catholic Church. The Spanish and Mexican conquests staked their claims via 21 Franciscan missions stretching from San Diego to Sonoma.
These missions shaped our architecture and design, and named our cities and regions for every Catholic saint in heaven. Which is why Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and San Diego are our most powerful regions. It’s also why — Father, hear my confession — your heretic-columnist can tell gullible children that the Silicon Valley capital is named in his honor. (“San Jose” means “Saint Joe,” and kids, that’s me.)
Former California poet laureate Dana Gioia, himself a Catholic, has argued that the “Catholic imagination” shaped California into something vastly different than the rest of the U.S.
“Our seasons, climate, landscape, natural life and history are alien to the worldviews of both England and New England,” wrote the former National Endowment of the Arts chair in 2011 essay, “Being a California Poet.”
“Our towns are named Sacramento and Santa Rosa, not Coventry or New Haven,” Gioia added. “There is no use listening for a nightingale in the scrub oaks and chaparral.”
But through that Catholic imagination, Californians, Gioia wrote, see this landscape as “sacrament, shimmering with signs of sacred things.” Which explains our passionate and bipartisan environmentalism.
Catholicism also explains the fervor of our current fight with the Trump administration over immigrant rights. The idea of California as “sanctuary” is Catholic in two ways. A sanctuary is a very sacred physical space with a church, and sanctuary is a synonym for the right to asylum.
Sanctuary policy is a centerpiece of modern California-Catholic history. During the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of refugees arrived here, fleeing brutal civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala. When the U.S. federal government refused them political asylum, thus subjecting them to deportation, the Catholic Church stepped in.
Our Lady Queen of Angels, a downtown L.A. church led by Father Luis Olivares, openly defied the feds by explicitly providing sanctuary for immigrants. The networks formed in that era to provide food, housing jobs, and legal defense to unauthorized immigrants included the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), a leader in today’s struggle against Trump’s mass deportation.
Ever since the anti-immigrant 1990s governorship of the Protestant Pete Wilson, California’s leaders have defended sanctuary. It certainly helped that all four governors have been Catholic.
Gray Davis, who was raised Catholic and returned to the church at the urging of his wife, effectively killed off Wilson’s anti-immigrant measure, Prop 187.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, a lifelong Catholic, fought his party in defense of the environment, public health, immigrants and the poor. And when his words and actions were less than pious, First Lady Maria Shriver, a daughter of America’s most famous Catholic family, could reassure Californians that his heart was in the right, Catholic place.
Jerry Brown left seminary before becoming a priest but made his Jesuit education — which is about educating “the whole person” — a centerpiece of his political identity. By his account, Catholicism was a factor in his frugality, his environmentalism, his preference for rehabilitation over incarceration and his relentless questioning of those tired souls who worked for him.
Critics sometimes dismiss Gavin Newsom as a WASPY pretty boy without understanding how deeply Irish Catholic he is. In office, Newsom has invoked his Catholicism on climate policy in explaining his love for personally cleaning up filthy roadsides (“good works!”) and in justifying his decision to halt the death penalty and dismantle San Joaquin’s gas chamber.
Becerra fits that mold. In the campaign, he has described himself as a practicing Catholic, and he has long credited his religion for his commitment to health care access and immigrant rights. “My faith has been my North Star throughout my career in public service,” he said in a Facebook ad during his time as a Biden cabinet secretary. “It teaches me to give back and care for others — especially the poor and marginalized.”
Five Catholic governors in a row is longer than our streak of Democratic governors. And it’s no coincidence. Our Catholic streak reflects real differences between California and a country that has elected only two Catholic presidents: John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Joe Biden in 2020.
According to a Pew Research study published last year, American adults are more than twice as likely to be Protestant (40%) than Catholic (19%). In California, it’s more evenly split, with Protestants and Catholics each representing one-quarter or so of the adult population.
Of course, such statistics don’t stop other Americans from dismissing California as “godless.” Conservatives, in the church and in the federal gpvernment, have questioned all four Catholic governors because of their support of abortion rights, gay rights or stem cell research. As state attorney general, Becerra fought with nuns — the Little Sisters of the Poor — over enforcement of the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act.
In this context, one California-based, Catholic religious scholar (who asked not to be named) compared California’s place in America to that of Samaria in Biblical Israel.
Samaritans were not pagans. They worshiped the exact same God as the Jews, traced their lineage back to Abraham, and strictly adhered to the Torah. But they were independent and rejected the Jerusalem temple establishment.
Instead, they built their own temple on Mount Gerizim and interpreted the religion in their own peculiar way.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square, an ASU Media Enterprise publication.
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