If you take this argument that general, then I would say Islam is also one of the most popular religions on earth but well, very lowly reprecented in the US army (below 0.4 percent)
I pledge ignorance. Yeah, sorry should have looked that up before posting. I was always under the impression, North America tended towards other faiths, like Baptism or Mormon.
My guess is the vast majority of those are Hispanic Americans who have been Catholic since birth, and not part of the modern far-right Catholic conversion movement (like Vance).
Trump got 48 percent of Hispanic American vote in 2024, a historic high for the GOP. The anti women and anti immigrant parts (in spite of what appears to be cognitive dissonance) of the GOP platform are very popular in that community from what I have seen.
"are Catholic" is so fuzzy though. "identify as" and "practices" are wildly different experiences, at least on the receiving end. I'm sure that percentage is mostly consisting of "identify as" rather than "practicing".
There's likely a large group in the middle - IDs as, but not regular practitioners of, who would absolutely not like being excommunicated despite their lack of practice.
For this purpose identify is enough - as anyone who identifies will be horrified even if they otherwise don't care about the church. Many non-Catholics (including non-Christians) are also horrified even though they otherwise don't care about what the pope says at all.
I don't think supporters of the current US president would be horrified. They already support his anti-christian behavior, and seem more interested in being part of that group than they are in the religion itself.
More likely he would just assert that the Pope isn't actually the Pope, and thus any excommunications are void, and his supporters would roll with it. Some of them already believe this. Any words, true or false, which make them feel better to believe. That's religion, right? He is their true religion.
People can identify as Christians without being "practicing" Christians. It's a very loose concept that varies heavily based on countries, denominations of Christianity and many other factors
100,000 people joined the catholic church in america this week.
At this point I don't think anything other than the church retains the ability to present a coherent moral or metaphysical intellectual framework to people who care about that kind of thing.
I would be very surprised if the united states is not majority catholic in ~100 years
Wait until you find out how many Latinos aren't catholic. (Yes, it's a lot, probably most, but in some LATAM countries Catholics are now outnumbered by evangelicals).
Latinos (~20% of the military) plus the very military-forward Italian and Polish American communities plus countless others... what a ridiculous statement
