Why Michigan Catholics favor Romney

Green says you can think of Catholicism on a continuum.

“There is … what we might call the orthodoxy of religious beliefs, and someone like Sen. Santorum is a very orthodox Catholic in terms of religion. He holds very closely to the traditional teachings of the Church,” he says.

That continuum moves from the very traditional to the nontraditional.

“Some Catholic conservatives or liberals for that matter may be turned off by a fellow parishioner or a Catholic candidate who is self-consciously a traditionalist,” he says.