Pope Leo has stirred awake a progressive Christianity. It can rise again | Christianity

In the same way that America’s shambolic war on Iran has turned Donald Trump into the most effective EV salesman the world has ever seen, so his attempts to defend said war have produced another unlikely outcome: the rise of a genuine and global theological debate. Led by Pope Leo but extending across Christian denominations, it’s producing the sudden recognition that a kind of progressive Christianity long given over for dead seems to be stirring. Christ is risen, as it were – and if people of good faith push hard, the future could be redefined in powerful ways.

This story has developed so rapidly, with so many steps, that it’s hard to remember them all. When America launched its cruel attack, there was widespread reporting that some officers were exhorting to treat it as a prelude to the second coming. That provoked no pushback from the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, a representative of a tattooed Christianity (not that it matters, but have these people not read Leviticus?); indeed, with each press conference Hegseth edged closer to a revival meeting, invoking God’s blessing on his bombing and pillaging. “We are hitting them while they’re down, which is the way it should be,” he said.

Liberal Protestant leaders in America have pushed back in their ways, but their ways often go unnoticed. Virtually no reporter ever seeks out the head of the Methodists or the Lutherans or any of the other sects that once dominated American religious life. Real Christianity is always journalistically represented by evangelicalism – everyone knows its stars, the Franklin Grahams and the Paula Whites, the layers-on-of-hands in the Oval Office. Hegseth’s denominational leader, Doug Wilson, has gotten far more airtime than the heads of the much larger Protestant traditions, because they don’t do insane things like demanding women give up the vote. Partly as a result, a generation of Americans has grown up convinced that Christianity is a freak show, and another generation – those inside the evangelical tent – have grown old unchallenged in their thinking that scripture somehow demands the various cruelties we’ve seen play out in the “culture wars”.

But it doesn’t. In fact, for most of American history Christianity has been read in the opposite way, as a liberating force. Yes, slaveholders cherrypicked passages to assure themselves that human bondage was biblical, but for enslaved people, and an ever-larger abolitionist movement, the story of Exodus profoundly undercut that idea. Social movements of all kinds rode in on the back of the gospel: temperance, mostly supported as a defense of women against drunkards, was a religious crusade; to promote it, the Methodists built the building that is still the structure nearest the nation’s Capitol, the better to lean on the political class. That same building was used as the planning headquarters for Dr Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, an apex moment of a civil rights movement previously unimaginable outside the Black church. In those days roughly half of Americans belonged to these mainline Protestant churches. They were the consensus in America.

That mainline Protestantism started to decline in the wake of the 1960s, mostly because it asked more of its adherents than many of them were willing to give. As the commitment of young preachers to justice kept deepening, many of their parishioners found that a comfortable civic obligation had become an uncomfortable challenge. Many stopped going to church altogether, and others drifted to the evangelical megachurches that offered themselves up as, among other things, entertainment – all pop music and drama. But Methodism and the rest never disappeared; indeed one recent survey found mainline Protestantism is roughly comparable in size with evangelicalism.

Even before the war, there were signs that these churches – while not exactly coming back, certainly not to the dominant role they once played – were reasserting themselves in remarkable ways. The first person to really stand up to Donald Trump in the days after his inauguration, as he launched his blitzkrieg of rightwing change, was Episocal bishop Mariann Budde, who at the official prayer service marking his ascension, told him: “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now,” specifically naming immigrant and gay communities. (Trump, of course, called her a “so-called bishop” and said the service at her cathedral had been “very boring”.) There were a great many different forces behind the magnificent display of non-violent resistance in Minneapolis this winter, but one of them was the Lutheran church, dominant in the region and with a long tradition of immigration advocacy. (Full disclosure, I’m on the advisory board of Global Refuge, known until last year as Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Service). Renee Good, shot in January as she drove away from a protest, was a serious Presbyterian, who’ had taken mission trips as a child; at a vigil marking her death, the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire called on his clergy to “get their affairs in order to make sure they have their wills written” so that they could, if necessary, stand between “the powers of this world and the most vulnerable”. After Good’s death, hundreds of clergy from across the country descended on Minneapolis as an act of witness; about 100 were arrested in a protest at the airport, appealing for an end to the flights disappearing immigrants from their families and communities.

And then there were the Catholics. Approximately 60 million Americans are at least nominal followers of the Roman church – but the secular world tends to pay the church fairly scant attention, at least between sex scandals and papal conclaves, the white smoke being a cracking good story. In America, to the extent that journalists covered the Church as a political force, it was for what had become its single-issue focus on abortion. Many officials in the church hierarchy made common cause with the evangelicals over the last few decades, becoming a key part of the religious right.

But their congregants never voted in a bloc the same way as the evangelicals – they drifted right over time, but Obama won clear majorities of their ballots. There always remained a core of post-Vatican II liberals in the church, soldiering away at the tasks of caring for the poor and the sick; politicians from Ted Kennedy to Mario Cuomo to Nancy Pelosi managed to stay in more or less good standing with the church. (Remember Alex Pretti, who was fatally shot by ICE after Renee Good? He grew up in the church, attended a Catholic grammar school, and won the Light of Christ medal from his Catholic Boy Scout troop.) Pope Francis began to re-energize this core, appointing new cardinals and bishops who were more attuned to these issues (and to the environment, which Francis took on as his new addition to the liturgy). Those leaders began to speak out during the last year, especially as ICE targeted the Hispanic population that is a large section of Christendom. The bishop of San Bernardino in California publicly exempted Catholics in his diocese from their obligation to attend mass if they feared arrest.

Which brings us to the pope, the American pope, who has taken on Maga’s regressive form of Christianity more memorably and powerfully than any religious leader in recent history. Leo grew up in this country in precisely that period when the church was transitioning, post-Vatican II, to a more liberal tone. He left America before the church fathers turned rightward with their grim obsession with a woman’s right to choose. He was overseas while that was going on, mostly in Peru, ministering to the poor. In some ways, his seems like a 1960s or 70s Christianity, preserved by circumstance. And he speaks midwestern American English, easy for everyone to understand, hard for anyone to undercut.

The beef between Leo and Trump started to come into focus as the immigration debate heated up: among other things, he was roused by reports that ICE was denying communion to immigrants in detention. America’s new war on the marginalized was, he said, “extremely disrespectful”. But his unease clearly grew with the onset of the war – and in particular with Trump and Hegseth’s insistence that it was a holy war, fought in the name of Jesus, and blessed by God. On Easter weekend, when the president declared his intention to wipe out an entire civilization unless he got his way, the pope had had enough. He said the president’s words were “unacceptable”, a stern message that actually lands far stronger than the profanity that has become the lingua franca of the political class in recent years.

Trump recognized the power of the attack, and it enraged him, especially when three cardinals from around the country continued the call-out on 60 Minutes. The president responded in two by now infamous ways: his long screed declaring that the pope was a loser, and his tweet showing himself as a robed Jesus beaming healing light on an apparently deceased Jeffrey Epstein lookalike. That this was blasphemous escaped not even the president’s usual acolytes, some of whom, reaching for the parts of the Bible they remembered, pondered the idea that he might be the antichrist.

But that’s not what seemed to really fire up the pope (who lives surrounded by the greatest religious art ever made and probably had a chuckle at the AI depiction Trump offered up). What stung him, instead, was the insistence of Hegseth that God was blessing the fight. Leo, in measured terms, announced that God “does not hear the prayers of those who wage war”. Trump’s hapless sidekick, JD Vance, then warned the vicar of Christ that he should be “careful” in his use of theology, because there was a “thousand-year tradition of just war theory”. Surely God had been on the side of the Americans who liberated France, Vance exclaimed, reaching back for the last unambiguously righteous exercise of US power.

Indeed, there is a millennium-old just war tradition, and it descends from Augustine of Hippo, St Augustine. Leo, as it happens, is an Augustinian, and spent 16 years in various forms of seminary education, studying among other things this precise canon – and he actually had been in Hippo, in modern-day Algeria, as this exchange was building. The pontiff had in fact been careful – precise – in his choice of words. God does not, he said, hear the prayers of those who “wage” war – Augustine’s theory, as it has developed over the years, makes it clear that the only sanctified warfare is practiced by those who were attacked first. As Daniel Flores, the American bishop in charge of explaining these matters to the faithful, patiently told reporters, citing catechism: “A constant tenet of that thousand-year tradition is a nation can only legitimately take up the sword ‘in self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed’. That is, to be a just war it must be a defense against another who actively wages war, which is what the Holy Father actually said: ‘He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.’” (To return to Vance’s example, the Axis were the aggressors in the second world war.)

There are so many interesting things here. One is the contrast between that ancient scholastic tradition on the one hand and the careless pretend theology that has been the mark of the modern American megachurch – a contrast as striking as that between Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and Trump’s AI Dr Jesus. Another is the reminder that a few words can trump a screed – by Thursday the pope had had enough, and from Africa launched the closest thing he’ll ever make to a Truth Social post: “Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”

And in response, Trump and Hegseth had … nothing. Because the theology that underlays the whole white rightwing megachurch evangelical movement is unforgivably shallow. There are plenty of fine evangelical theologians – in addition to a small left evangelicalism (I write a regular column for its flagship magazine Sojourners), there are serious conservatives, too. You can read them in magazines such as Christianity Today, founded by Billy Graham, or find them at Graham’s alma mater, Wheaton College. But the part that reaches the public from its big name pastors is a mishmash of isolated passages from Revelation and lurid injunctions against carnal sin, things that are very much not the preoccupations of the Gospel. Jesus, many are shocked to hear, never expressed the slightest hint of an opinion on gay or transgender people. Far from backing rightwing economic policies, he held that the rich should give away all that they had to the poor; in place of ICE’s cruelties he called again and again to welcome the stranger.

The depth of white evangelical theology is demonstrated by the fact that 70% of its adherents still support Trump, even after the carnival of racism, cruelty and blasphemy they’ve witnessed in the second term. The movement’s “spiritual formation” has been tested and found wanting.

So when Hegseth went to pull out the big guns, he didn’t have much to work with. Even less, in fact, than he thought. He offered a now famous long and hyperbolic public prayer describing the one American success of the entire war, which was the rescue of an airman whose plane had been blown from the sky, and which I will quote here:

Pray with me please. The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of comradery and duty shepherd the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children.

And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. And you will know my call sign is Sandy One, when I lay my vengeance upon thee. Amen.

Hegseth likely thought he was glossing Ezekiel 2:17, but he was actually quoting very nearly verbatim from the lines Samuel Jackson gave in Pulp Fiction just before murdering a man. Hegseth’s confusion was funny, and also not funny, given that its point was to invoke “great vengeance and furious anger” on an Iranian regime and people that had been the victims of attacks that had killed many thousands. And even less funny when you consider the “great vengeance and furious anger” now being wreaked on poor people across the planet who find themselves without the fertilizer they need to plant their crops.

If you actually read Ezekiel 25:17, which both Hegseth and Quentin Tarantino relied on, you’ll recall that vengeance is generally reserved for God: “And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.” Trump, meme aside, is not in fact the Lord.

Neither, actually, is Pope Leo, though he has the benefit of knowing it. He is the custodian of an institution that he’s trying to repair, one that ran itself on to the shoals of sexual and financial scandal. I’m not a Catholic (I’m a Methodist) but it is inspiring to watch him at work on that reconstruction project, finding bishops who share his sense of the world.

Leo’s willingness to stand up to the end product of that rightward decline, the shallowest public figure in human history, may inspire the resurgent liberals from the Protestant tradition. If he can stand up to the president, they can perhaps find more voice to reclaim their heritage from the evangelicals who have walked away with the cross and the Bible in recent decades.

Something’s happening: I was speaking in the home cathedral of Boston’s Episcopal diocese over the weekend, and when I talked about Leo’s witness, people I knew to be good Protestants were in tears. As the war began, the United Methodist bishops asked people to “pray for peace”, a fairly anodyne stand; by its sixth week, the president of its council of bishops was getting stronger. “We reject any language or action that endangers civilians or threatens to destroy entire civilizations, and we raise a prophetic call to our leaders, urging them to persistently choose the path of peace,” said Tracy Malone from that midwest red redoubt of Indiana. Parishioners arriving for a Good Friday service at a Colorado Methodist church found 168 tiny pairs of shoes arranged in a heart on the front stairs, one for each of the girls killed in the hideous attack on a school in Minab in the early hours of the conflict.

I hope that this fight – between the clergy and ICE, between the pope and the president – continues, because it’s providing a theological education to the public at large. For a very long time, people outside faith communities have regarded Christianity as some combination of silly and irrelevant. It’s completely fine that they don’t convert – any poll will show that rule by atheists would make America a more humane place than it is at present. But it’s good for everyone to be reminded that the Christian tradition is powerful, radical and subversive.