But what about religiously affiliated women? Where were their voices in all of this? And what did they think about the mandate? This was the question that intrigued Elizabeth Patton, an OB/GYN and health-services researcher at the University of Michigan. “There was a lot of media framing around religious opposition to the mandate and we tend to hear from certain religious and political leaders, but the voices of religious women aren’t really well-represented,” she said. “We wanted to see what women who self-identify with a religious affiliation think.”

Patton and colleagues conducted the first study to look specifically at the views of religiously affiliated women aged 18 to 55 (reproductive age and just beyond)—those who are most affected by access to birth control—on the contraception mandate. And what they found is surprising. Catholic women, the group most frequently singled out in the policy debate, were among the most supportive of employer-provided contraception coverage.

Sixty-three percent of Catholic women said that employers should provide no-cost contraception for employees, making them second only to mainline Protestant women, at 66 percent, in their support. Both groups supported the mandate at greater rates than the general population—according to the Public Religion Research Institute, 61 percent of Americans think public corporations should have to provide health insurance that offers free contraception, and 57 percent think the same for private corporations. “Catholics are often portrayed as the group that is opposed to the mandate, but these women had some of the highest rates of support,” Patton noted. “This shows that the narrative that we hear isn’t reflecting what women are thinking.”

It’s the religious affiliation of the women who were least supportive of the mandate that hints at the political alliance that formed around opposition to it. The women who were most likely to say they opposed the mandate were from conservative-leaning denominations, such as Baptists, non-denominational Christians, Pentecostals, and Mormons. Fewer than 50 percent of these women supported the mandate. This suggests that it’s largely the leadership of the Catholic and conservative Christian denominations, as well as rank-and-file Christians who belong to these denominations, who oppose the mandate, not Catholics themselves. (It turns out that the political leanings of the women surveyed had very little effect on their support for the mandate, once researchers controlled for other factors.) “Sometimes we are hearing from religious leaders but this doesn’t that reflect what attendees really feel,” Patton said.

Understanding the views of religiously affiliated women is important because the question is far from settled. Just last week, the Supreme Court sent a bellwether case involving the University of Notre Dame back to the lower court. It centered on the so-called accommodation for religious nonprofits that the Obama administration created in an attempt to assuage their concerns. Faith-based institutions object to the accommodation, which requires nonprofits that don't want to provide contraception to notify the Department of Health and Human Services, which then tells the employers’ insurer to cover contraceptives, because they say it still renders them complicit. “It violates Notre Dame’s religious beliefs to hire or maintain a relationship with any third party that will provide contraceptive coverage to its plan beneficiaries,” the Catholic university said in its petition to the Supreme Court.