About the religion, I feel that here in the French part, few people care about being catholic or reformed. And in these cantons there are few difference between the vote of catholics cantons and the reformed one : Jura votes about the same than Neuchâtel, Fribourg votes about the same as Vaud... Perhaps Fribourg is slightly more conservative than Vaud but it is much more related to the German minority in this canton than to the religion...
True, when it comes to voting behaviour in referendums and opinions on political issues.
On the other hand when it comes to party politics, the PDC is still much more popular among Catholics than among non-Catholics and therefore much stronger in Jura and Fribourg than in Neuchâtel and Vaud. A moderate center-right Jura Catholic and a moderate center-right Neuchâtel Protestant who agree on every political issue will often vote for PDC and PLR respectively just out of tradition, because PDC is the generic option for the former and PLR for the latter.
In German-speaking Switzerland the main divide today when it comes to the issues is not religious anymore, even though the map might still look like that. It's mainly urban-rural, but you will see that mainly on district maps because conservative Catholic Appenzell-Innerrhoden is a canton on its own and conservative Protestant Obersimmental is not.
What I wonder about is that some traditional CVP strongholds tend to vote according to the SVP paroles in referendums more often than according to CVP paroles. The SVP would seem a better fit for these cantons than the federal centrist CVP. Yet it is still difficult for the SVP to make a breakthrough in these cantons (except Schwyz).
About Luzern. There is chunk of Sondernbund cantons that seem to vote rather isolationalist, but are firmly Catholic. However, the most isolationalist party SVP has been strong in Ref cantons. Is CVP more or less isolationalist than SVP or FDP. Or are the differences more about assimilation and immigration matters.
The SVP is clearly the most isolationist party of the major parties. Taking a look at maps on the district level in Reformed cantons the SVP strongholds usually are strongly supportive of "isolationist" referendums. But often you can't detect it on the canton level.
It is true that many CVP voters in traditional rural CVP strongholds hold more isolationist views than the federal chapter of the party they support. And some of these rural outposts stand out on the canton map because they are cantons on its own. (Only 0.2% of the Swiss population lives in Appenzell-Innerrhoden.)
