Trump v. Pope

The President’s attacks on the leader of the Catholic church threaten to alienate a large sector of his religious supporters

Photo by Nicolas Weldingh on Unsplash

Has U.S. President Donald Trump forgotten just who is buttering his bread? That is the question that a recent trifecta of religiously themed Trump controversies is bound to raise. The fight with the Pope, started by Trump and carried on by his servile vice president, JD Vance, is sure to alienate some of his conservative Catholic supporters. The AI-generated Trump-as-Jesus image, which the President posted on social media, managed to offend Christians of all denominations. (After all, as the writer John Fugelsang points out, the only thing Jesus and Trump have in common is they spent a lot of time with prostitutes and used ghostwriters.) And the video evidence that Crusader-tattooed holy warrior Pete Hegseth adheres to the gospel as revealed to film director Quentin Tarantino doesn’t seem likely to help with the white evangelicals who form MAGA’s most enthusiastic bloc of voters. This isn’t twelve-dimensional chess by a cunning regime; it’s bad politics from an administration that long ago lost the plot.

But it’s not quite as bad as it should be, and that is the more interesting point about this latest episode of how-low-can-he-go. Because the trifecta exposes the nature of the so-called religion that animates the Christian nationalist movement that has sustained Trump in power.

Let’s start with Trump’s hostilities toward the Pope. According to JD Vance and some theological sane-washers in the media, the debate concerns the “Just War Doctrine” and its application to the Iran war. Augustine articulated this theory in the fifth century and Thomas Aquinas formalized it in the 13^th century. Pope Leo, as a member of the Augustinian order, appealed to this long tradition when he decried “tyrants” who are “ravaging the world” and “cloaking their quest for domination in false religion.” Just War Doctrine states, in a nutshell, that war may be waged only with a clear and just cause, such a self-defense, on a proper legal foundation and as a last resort. Trump’s war, which has had shifting stated purposes, is hardly in America’s immediate self-defense, and was hardly the last resort—but let’s leave that debate to the side. Trump’s provocations of the Pope have nothing to do with Just War Doctrine in this traditional sense.

Some of Trump’s lackeys have occasionally wrapped the Iran adventure in religious rhetoric, to be sure, but their rhetoric is closer to that of a struggle for civilizational supremacy. When Trump posted his threat to commit war crimes— “A whole civilization will die tonight”—he managed for once to choose at least one word carefully. The Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security has certainly grasped the relevant historical antecedents for such a view. It has taken to posting images reminiscent of Nazi propaganda posters, along with the infamous painting by John Gast, titled American Progress, an allegorical representation of Manifest Destiny. Pete Hegseth gets it too. His tattoo—“Deus Vult”—borrows from medieval crusader rhetoric that has been taken up by white supremacist-aligned groups in the twenty-first century. The argument for war here is not as a last resort in self-defense. It is a theory appears to justify aggression toward pretty much anyone who doesn’t remind “us” sufficiently of ourselves.

This tribal theory is not at all unique to those who identify with Western civilization. Indeed, Iran’s religious leadership has in turn long framed its hostility to “the West,” including supposedly deviant ideas about women’s equality, as a civilizational struggle and used this framing in its provision of military, financial, and weapons assistance to proxies over decades. So, you might think that Christian nationalist sympathizers would have a problem with this body of theory. Maybe some of them do. But Trump’s views have been clear for the past ten years and have, in fact, cost him little of their support.

The Jesus pic, sadly, further exposes the nature of the kind of religion favored by the MAGA movement. Many Christian nationalist leaders, including Sean Feucht and Andy Ogles, denounced the image as blasphemous. They are surely right about that. These anguished reprimands among Trump’s evangelical surrogates would have been more compelling, however, had these MAGA-aligned preachers not spent the past ten years extolling Donald Trump as “God’s man” divinely sent. From a theological perspective, there is no good case in the Christian faith for deifying Trump. But it didn’t stop Trump’s Christian nationalist supporters before. Will it stop them now?

Pete Hegseth’s impersonation of Samuel Jackson’s fictional hitman in the film Pulp Fiction exposes the same underlying reality. We are all supposed to think that Christian conservatives arrived at their politics through an intensive reading of the Bible. But the Bible is famously open to interpretation. And it is well established that many Christian nationalists arrive at their understanding of the Bible through intensive exercises in political partisanship. In the case of Hegseth it seems obvious that the lust for domination, conquest, and violence comes first, and the Bible comes after—and maybe the isn’t even the Bible at all.

Many theologians and lay Christians argue that this kind of bloodthirsty religion isn’t recognizably Christian. It surely isn’t the religion of some number of those who voted for Trump in the last election. But how many? And will it be enough to move them?

If we look at this as a numbers game, the trouble for Trump is likely on the Catholic side. Over 80 per cent of white evangelicals voted for Trump, but the evangelical vote is concentrated in deep red districts where MAGA can afford to lose a few votes. Catholics, meanwhile, who represent about 22 per cent of the population, have generally lower levels of support for Trump; sixty per cent of white Catholics voted for Trump in 2024. Moreover, Catholics are spread around the country in crucial battleground states. And Trump’s increase in support among Latino Catholics between 2016 and 2024 is now collapsing.

One way to gauge the reaction is to look at the response from Trump and his coterie. On the one hand, Trump deleted the Jesus post. On the other, he isn’t letting go of his beef with the Pope. After the Pope’s original statement, Trump posted an accusation that the Pope is “WEAK on Crime.” Which is really just a doubling-down on the ideological-tribal theory, refocused on the civilizational enemy within—namely, immigrants who are supposedly destroying the American way of life. JD Vance, whose upcoming book on his newfound Catholic faith features a picture of a Methodist church on the cover, has attempted to lecture the Pope on Augustine and theology, even warning him to “be careful.” Sean Hannity, a critical mouthpiece for the MAGA network, announced he is no longer Catholic and added, “Pope Leo XIV is now seemingly more interested in spreading left-wing politics than the actual teachings of Jesus Christ…where are the pointed words for Iran?”

In fact, Pope Leo had pointed words for Iran, too, condemning the regime’s murder of its own citizens. In recent weeks Pope Leo has also condemned violence in the Sudan, said Ukraine has been “martyred” in a “senseless war,” and called for peace in Gaza, which he described as a humanitarian catastrophe. Leo also critiqued the “inhuman” treatment of immigrants shunted into detention centers across the U.S. Speaking in Cameroon, Pope Leo made the point that “the Holy name of God is being dragged into the discourse of death.” These actions are consistent with those of other Popes and other religious leaders, who have frequently called for peace around the world and throughout human history.

The real danger for Trump in these own goals is the politics of religion is not theological. It’s that they come at a moment when the stench of the loser is starting to cling to him. The mutterings about Trump’s blasphemy are of interest not for what they say about the religion of his newfound critics so much as their perceptions of the political moment. Maybe it has dawned on them that Trump will go down. Maybe they will see in these heretical missteps an opportunity to make a break.

A case in point would be the theocratic conservative Rod Dreher, who moved to Hungary years ago to support Victor Orban’s efforts to pillage his own country under the banner of religious nationalism. Dreher now seems to think that Orban had to go. After years of support for Trump and the MAGA cause, he seems to be changing his tune on Trump, too. “He’s radiating the spirit of the antichrist,” Dreher now says of Trump.

It’s a very convenient thing, this hotline to God. To paraphrase another famous doctrine of war, religion in this instance as in so many in modern America, is just a continuation of politics by other means.