I missed this post until @medinabuckeye1 quoted it...
But I think that a good portion of Notre Dame's historic fandom has been from people who didn't go to college and couldn't find South Bend on a map... But they were either Irish or Catholic (or both), and so they were Notre Dame fans. Historically both populations were somewhat denigrated in American society. The Irish and Italians were seen as "lesser" than other Europeans, leading to centralizing in more working-class and/or civil service jobs. And Catholics were similarly distrusted, as we saw with JFK and concerns that he'd be more beholden to the Pope and the Vatican than he would be to America and the Constitution. Nothing crystalizes a marginalized population more than a common champion, and I think the Notre Dame Fighting Irish fit that mold.
I think from a demographic perspective, the under-35 set is less religious than they were 40 years ago. And I'd say those who ostensibly identify as Catholic are probably nowhere near as fervent about Catholicism being their "identity" than they were 40 years ago... So the allure of rooting for Notre Dame just because it's a Catholic school maybe is less of a draw.
Being in California for the last 25 years, where there isn't a massive Irish-identity population (i.e. not like NY or Chicago), I can't really say whether the aspect of being "Irish" as core identity has similarly diluted. But I might think that if it has, then it would be another reason why Notre Dame fandom would be naturally waning in the younger generations.
While most fan bases have some natural perpetuity in graduating alumni, being close family of graduated alumni, etc, Notre Dame never had that. It was always driven by cultural identity. I think it's possible that draw is simply getting weaker as some of those core identity signifiers weaken.
I agree and I want to add this:
With religious identity there is another long-term change. If you go back to say the 1950s and 1960s the US was probably something like 95% religious with about 90% of that being Christian and the bulk of the rest being Jewish. Protestants always made up the bulk of the Christians and when Christians were ~90%, Protestants were a large overall majority. Today there are a LOT more of what would have been "other" in a 1950s/1960s chart. I'm talking here about atheists, Buddhists, Muslims.
I'm NOT vouching for the reliability of Pew but the first google hit on "religious identity in the US" was
this link. According to it, just in the last 17 years (2007-2024) the Christian percentage dropped to 62% from 78% and the Protestant percent dropped to 40% from 51%. The Catholic share also dropped to 19% from 24%.
These are major long-term shifts. Protestants made up a majority of Americans from early in Colonial times until the last few years. Catholics probably haven't been below 20% since at least the early 1900s and maybe longer.
Back when the VAST majority of Americans identified as "Christian" the Catholics were the "other". Now that Christian is barely a majority and Protestants are NOT a majority alone, I think that most people mentally group Catholics in with Protestants. Ie, when
@OrangeAfroMan goes off on his anti-religious tangents he doesn't make distinctions between Protestants and Catholics and those attacked by him tend to see the whole of Christians as allies.
My point is that Catholics simply aren't (either in reality or in perception) the "other" anymore. They are fully a part of the bare majority of Americans who identify as "Christian". That inherently makes their identity as "Catholic" less relevant compared to their identity as "Christian".
I don't know if I'm doing a good job of explaining this but consider a geographic example:
- If someone from the Cleveland area asks where I'm from, I say Medina.
- If someone from Cincinnati asks I say Cleveland.
- If someone from the Midwest outside of Ohio asks, I say Ohio.
- If someone from California asks, I say The Midwest.
- If someone from Europe asks, I say the US.
- If an alien at Roswell asked, I'd say Planet Earth.
My point is that the specificity of your identity varies based on the context:
- If you are Protestant and in a group of all (or nearly all) Protestants then your identity within that group becomes Methodist or Baptist or whatever.
- If you are in a group of nearly all Christians (like 50s/60s America) then your identity within that group becomes Catholic or Protestant.
- If you are in a group of nearly all religious people but <50% Protestant then your identity within that group becomes Christian.
- If you are in a group where ~50% are religious and 50% are not religious then your identity becomes "believer".
My view is that in addition to the fact that there are less younger Catholics, the ones that do exist tend to identify less by that distinction because in the context of 2025 they instead identify more as part of the "Christian" bare majority.
