Not exactly the 95 theses, but...

Joseph Bottum has, to absolutely no one's surprise, a fantastic article on Catholicism, religious influence on politics and Samuel Alito in this week's Weekly Standard, and I almost don't need to say it, but read the whole thing. I would, however, like to tweak just one of the article's speculative conclusions:

There's an interesting question whether the leading evangelicals would grant Catholicism its current role if Catholics still had the kind of ethnic-voter unity they used to show. We may be seeing the emergence of one of those uniquely American compromises: A Catholic philosophical vocabulary is allowed to express a moral seriousness the nation needs, on the guarantee that the Catholic Church itself will not much matter politically.

He bases this statement on the fact that in 1960, Catholics voted overwhelmingly for JFK; these days their voting is far less cohesive. I think the compromise is far less stern, at least from a Protestant, than his statement suggests. It's not as if Protestant leadership (which is by no means as unified as the phrase "Protestant leadership" or continual invokations of some militarized column of the "Christian Right" suggests) has decided en masse to allow the Catholics their brainy rhetoric, provided only that they vote in bickering clumps. I think that credits Protestants with far too much deliberation; this is more a natural outgrowth of diverging styles than any formalized agreement.

Instead, it's that Proestant churches are concerned with reaching the American public in a very different manner than much of the Catholic world, and Protestants are perfectly content to have Catholics go about the very theoretical and painstaking work of grouding religion in solid intellectual thought. And even more than that, it's the recognition on both sides that they have essentially similar political goals -- few of which get much traction from the left. It would be incorrect for me to suggest that American Catholics and Protestants are a single entity, and it's likely that this will remain the case for quite a while. But to a significant extent, they've come together in the political arena in realizing that what benefits one side benefits the other.