The
featured essay
Christianity
Pope Leo
has stirred awake a progressive Christianity. It can rise again
With his
stand against Trump, the pope has shown the far right doesn’t have a monopoly
on Christianity. If people of good faith push hard, the future could be
redefined
Bill
McKibben
Sun 26
Apr 2026 14.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/26/pope-leo-trump-hegseth-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.
The pope
... has taken on Maga’s regressive form of Christianity more memorably and
powerfully than any religious leader in recent history
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 Episcopal 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.
torn
fragments weaving a United States flag with Jesus as depicted in Leonardo da
Vinci's 'The Last Supper'
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.)
The
theology that underlays the whole white rightwing megachurch evangelical
movement is unforgivably shallow
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.
I hope
that this fight ... between the pope and the president continues, because it’s
providing a theological education to the public at large
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.
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