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Donald Trump’s second administration has been a reckoning for America, and perhaps especially for America’s Christians. From the deployment of masked paramilitary thugs to enforce immigration policy to the full-throated assault on transgender Americans to an unrelenting campaign against the rights of women and girls, reactionary Christianity is riding high. This agenda pursued by the administration has been made possible through 50 years of campaigning by the religious right, a coalition of white evangelical Protestants, conservative Catholics, and conservative Eastern Orthodox Christians and Jews that formed the core of the late 20th- and early 21st-century Republican Party.

But in this season of their triumph, a genuine faith-based opposition is finally beginning to break through.

The evidence of religious resistance first emerged on Inauguration Day. During the National Prayer Service at the National Cathedral, Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, DC, stared down from the pulpit at the new president and told him in a sturdy voice:

Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. … In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.

These words, a public reminder that there is diversity within the Christian tradition with respect to political opinion, were only the beginning. The Episcopal Church has since ended its relationship with the US government’s refugee resettlement services over the administration’s controversial decision to admit Afrikaners as refugees.  

There appeared to be some coalition-building when a dozen or so religious organizations sued the administration over new policies that gave immigration officials more latitude in making arrests in and around houses of worship. And, in July, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Sean Rowe, penned an op-ed at Religion News Service with the headline: “Once the church of presidents, the Episcopal Church must now be an engine of resistance.”

Yet all of this is happening within some of the most liberal denominations in the country. These are also denominations that have been in demographic decline for decades, and only 11 percent of the American public identifies with the mainline Protestant traditions. This is hardly encouraging for the possibility of a mainstream political movement or resistance.

Enter American Catholicism, a group that may redefine the role religion has played in politics and public life.

The bargain

The political power of the religious right depended in large part on religious conservatives agreeing to adopt the GOP’s positions on issues such as labor rights, immigration, environmental regulation, and even taxes. In exchange, the Republican Party embraced their reactionary consensus on certain social issues, largely related to gender and sexuality. First came opposition to abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment, later to marriage for same-sex couples, and today to transgender inclusion.

To understand why the compromise made sense for both sides, it is important to remember the seminal role that race, and particularly the civil rights movement, played in forming the religious right. The end of segregation in public schools galvanized white evangelical Southerners to reenter politics in the early 1970s. The first allies they found — allies that made them a national and not a regional force — were second-generation immigrants, whose parents had come to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century from southern and eastern Europe (and Ireland). These groups were, by a large margin, Catholic. 

Upon their arrival, these immigrants had not been considered “white.” After growing up largely in ethnic neighborhoods in northern cities like New York and Chicago, the children of these early 20th-century immigrants found economic prosperity in the post-World War II boom and through government programs such as the GI Bill. The only thing they now lacked was admission into the top tier of America’s racial hierarchy. The alliance with white evangelicals provided just that. For example, in the battles over school busing, white evangelicals — and the national media — publicly framed Catholics as fellow defenders of white neighborhood schools, treating them not as foreign outsiders but as part of a unified white Christian community.

The shared concern of evangelicals and Catholic “ethnics,” once very antagonistic American groups, was what we now euphemistically call “cultural anxiety,” a reaction to a rapidly changing and racially integrating society. Anyone surprised that the children of not-quite-white immigrants would join with white Southerners against Black progress must remember that racial tensions between newly arrived immigrants and Black Americans in northern cities were among the most intense conflicts in early 20th century America. The idea of Black Americans being able to replicate the rapid rise of the “newly white” was just as unacceptable to many of the descendents of these immigrants as it was for white Southerners, even if for different reasons. 

These founding foot soldiers of the religious right sought to slow social progress and turn back the clock on integration, and they were willing to trade away the economic policies that had brought them affluence. For a Republican Party that had long been shunned by these voters, the chance to win them was worth abandoning its once-enlightened, patrician stance on matters of personal conduct. The party that had once championed women’s suffrage and abolition, and tolerated reproductive rights, turned its back on all of that for this new base.

An uneasy alliance

It should go without saying that Christians are incredibly politically diverse. After all, there are over 2 billion Christians in the world, roughly a third of all human beings and 62 percent of Americans. If Christians all agreed on every public matter, politics as a competition of ideas would simply cease to exist in a number of countries.  But the success of the religious right has been so complete that their particular brand of reactionary Christianity has come to dominate the “Christian” label itself. In a strange way, conservative Catholics, through their alliance with evangelicals, ended up with more influence over public perception of Catholic teaching than the pope himself. But it was always a marriage where the threat of divorce lingered over the dinner table. 

For evangelicals, the gravitational center of the religious right, the grand compromise with the GOP was almost effortless. For Catholics, even the ones who eventually embraced it, the bargain was far messier, more conflicted, and never fully secure.

While the politics of evangelical Christians is by nature fluid and divided, Catholicism inherently demands greater ethical uniformity. And during the period in which the religious right was taking shape, Catholic social teaching was evolving in a direction that made this alliance particularly fraught. 

Since the middle of the 20th century, Catholic ethics globally has been increasingly concerned with poor people, with migrants, and with the responsibility of governments to provide justice to those on the margins. As the decades wore on, the Vatican’s teachings on social and economic justice were increasingly out of step with the GOP platform on almost every issue except abortion and marriage for same-sex couples. Catholic participation in the politics of the American religious right therefore relied on a certain level of inconsistency. The very people who demanded that Catholic, pro-abortion rights politicians such as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi be denied communion often ignored Church teaching on the death penalty, the treatment of poor people, and immigration.

Importantly, the tension between the two traditions is not only one of abstract ideals. It also reflects the different demographics of their communities. Roman Catholicism in America is far more racially and ethnically diverse than evangelical Christianity, which might be why  the strident xenophobia of some white evangelicals is harder for American Catholics to embrace.

As a whole, Catholicism is increasingly concentrated in the Global South, with 72 percent of the world’s Catholics living in Latin America, Asia, or Africa. In the United States, it is increasingly a religion of new arrivals. A hundred years ago, immigrants to America came mostly from southern and eastern Europe, but that is no longer so. As a result of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, over the past 60 years, the largest share of immigrants coming to the United States are now arriving from Latin America and Asia. Of course, Latin America remains overwhelmingly Catholic (even in the face of recent declines), and, coincidentally, the two largest East Asian countries sending immigrants to the United States after China are Vietnam and the Philippines, both of which have substantial Catholic populations. 

These trends mean that, today, there are over 53 million adult Catholics in the United States, or approximately 20 percent of all Americans. While 70 percent of American evangelicals are white, just over half of American Catholics are. Notably, 40 percent of American Catholics are Latino. And while 12 percent of American evangelicals were born outside the United States, 29 percent of American Catholics were.

These Catholics, who are the present and future of the Catholic Church, are more likely to be someone, or know someone in their faith community, who is adversely affected by the MAGA paradigm. Plus, today’s American Catholics are more likely to feel solidarity with those in the Global South, because they are more likely to have familial ties there. For them, issues like immigration and foreign aid are often matters of life and death.

The simple fact is that changing demographics mean Catholics are being disproportionately affected by Trump’s draconian policies. Support and even silence are no longer a tenable position for the Catholic hierarchy and for an increasing number of Catholics, no matter how politically conservative they may be. Will they be loyal to their fellow Catholics or will they be auxiliary members of the new MAGA faith?

Remember that the original religious right offered their Catholic allies the promise of whiteness. Given the obvious historical parallel, one might think that a continuation of the alliance would allow newly arrived Latin American and Asian Catholics to benefit from the same deal that Italian and Polish Americans enjoyed. 

But today’s Catholics are not being made such an offer by politically ambitious evangelicals, who are much more concerned with immigration as an absolute evil than their forebearers were. Instead, anti-immigrant rhetoric occupies a more prominent place in America’s nationalist discourse than at any time since the 1920s. 

In the end, American evangelical Christianity is malleable to the cultural and political demands of the United States in any given historical moment. But Catholicism is different. The faith is ancient, its practice global, its people profoundly diverse, and its intellectual tradition one of growth and debate.

All this makes Catholicism a wild card in the shifting landscape of American alliances. And just as the alliance of evangelicals and conservative Catholics made the religious right, a new alliance of mainline Protestants and progressive and centrist Catholics could make a durable religious left. If this happens at the same time that enough conservative Catholics conclude that the compromises demanded by MAGA — especially on issues like immigration — are simply too much to accept, then American Catholicism may present a very different public face. And it will not be the ultra-conservative image promoted by the Catholic League and other auxiliaries of the religious right.

We may already be seeing the early outlines of such a transformation. 

What a religious realignment could look like

The pope from Chicago’s South Side may be the greatest symbol of that new alliance. Perhaps never before has a Pope challenged a US president as directly as Pope Leo XIV has Donald Trump.

“Jesus says very clearly, at the end of the world, we’re going to be asked…how did you receive the foreigner?” Leo, the first American-born pontiff, said in November, directly addressing the Trump administration’s immigration policies. “… And I think that there’s a deep reflection that needs to be made in terms of what’s happening.” These remarks are part of escalating criticism from the pope, which has strongly condemned  the “vilification” of immigrants, a not-so-subtle nod to the terror unfolding on the streets of many American cities

Leo’s words have been followed by deeds. The first American bishop appointed by the new pope is Bishop Michael Pham, the child of Vietnamese refugees. Pham will head the Diocese of San Diego, which has been among those worst affected by Trump’s war on immigrants. Pham has, in turn, been among the clergy who have attended immigration court hearings in support of those caught in the web of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And in December, Leo announced the replacement of New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the head of the New York Archdiocese and one of the most powerful and vocal proponents of a political ultra-conservative Catholicism. The new bishop, Ronald A. Hicks, is in many ways Dolan’s opposite and is widely known as a defender of immigrant communities.

This shift has broken part of the religious right’s spell. The idea that holding certain GOP- or MAGA-approved political views is synonymous with taking the “Christian” position is no longer tenable. The rhetoric once used to shame pro-abortion rights Catholics like Biden and Pelosi can now be applied equally to anti-immigrant Catholics such as Vice President JD Vance and Steve Bannon. After all, the pope has declared that support for immigrants and opposition to the death penalty are essential parts of a truly “pro-life” ethic. The tolerance for the old hypocrisy that made the religious right possible may be at an end. 

It’s true that some of the most reactionary Catholics in America, including Bannon, have rejected the papal intervention. Vance, American Catholicism’s most high-profile convert — who like many converts has a much more conservative political and theological outlook than many cradle Catholics — has tried to brush aside papal criticism. 

But Leo is the pope. And his increasingly strong stance on the dignity of immigrants demands that some American Catholics choose between obedience to the Church and loyalty to the Republican Party. For the first time in decades, there is space to imagine a genuine, nonpartisan, faith-based opposition to the religious right and its even more extreme successor in the MAGA faith. 

As in the movement’s original formation, any new coalition will require compromise, perhaps especially on issues related to gender and sexuality. But hurdles do not put such a deal off the table. The Catholic Church, internationally, is undeniably moving more toward the American mainline Protestant position on such issues and away from an increasingly hardline American evangelical perspective. And American Catholics have always had more diverse political views on these issues than their evangelical counterparts. This is to say, for a new coalition to form, compromise would be necessary but not impossible.

The religious right has defined American Christianity for half a century, reshaping politics, theology, and culture in its own image. But as Trump’s second administration pushes the coalition into increasingly extreme territory, new cracks are appearing. Mainline Protestants, though diminished, are asserting themselves, and Catholics are showing signs of resistance, a resistance that might even lead them into a new coalition. And if the history of the religious right teaches us anything, it is Catholics who are the key. A new faith-based opposition is still fragile, but if it can form, it could redefine both American Christianity and American politics.

Charlie Kirk has been turned into the first martyr of the MAGA faith. And this matters because it is martyr veneration that helped both Christianity and Islam transform from small local movements centered on charismatic preachers into global religions. In launching its own martyrs, MAGA may be moving from a movement focused on one beguiling leader in the person of Donald Trump to a broader faith that could outlast him. 

Since the assassination, a variety of MAGA-foe pundits have compared the MAGA response to Kirk’s murder — including Stephen Miller’s convenient claim that Kirk’s last message to him was a call to “dismantle the radical Left” — to the response to the killing of Horst Wessel, a German Nazi murdered by two members of Communist Party of Germany in 1930. In the hands of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Wessel’s death became a rallying cry, and Wessel himself a heroic martyr whose death symbolized the Nazi struggle against Communism. Goebbels had Wessel mythologized through songs, rallies, and public ceremonies, creating a cult around him that galvanized support for the Nazi movement.

The comparisons to Horst Wessel are not without merit. His death was a major boon for Nazi propaganda, just as Kirk’s death has given MAGA and the Trump administration proximate cause to escalate attacks on their political adversaries. But those comparisons miss something crucial. Goebbels himself was consciously drawing on an earlier model, and it is that model, the Late Antique cult of the martyrs, that the MAGA faithful are now, consciously or not, also invoking. 

Until now, the evangelical Christianity that Kirk embraced — and still the default mode of worship for American Christian nationalists — has had only a tenuous relationship with martyrdom. There have been powerful stories, to be sure: Cassie Bernall, the teenager at Columbine who supposedly declared her faith before being shot, or John Allen Chau, the young missionary killed on North Sentinel Island. But these episodes are remembered as isolated moments of witness-inspiring stories of faith, rather than built into an ongoing culture of veneration as evidenced by the official support for the efforts to celebrate Kirk’s memory, including from the president of the United States. Evangelicals have often been suspicious of martyr-saints in part because this brand of martyr veneration smacks of “works” and Catholic hagiography rather than the Evangelical emphasis on personal salvation. 

That reluctance has been a weakness, because martyrs inspire the faithful, galvanize movements, and spread a message far more effectively than any sermon. After all, what better evidence of truth than that there were hundreds, nay thousands, prepared to die in witness to that truth?  

In fact, while it is now common to claim that Christians were relentlessly persecuted by the Roman Empire, in recent years this idea has been widely challenged. Scholars like Candida Moss have convincingly argued that while individual Christians were persecuted and occasionally killed for their beliefs, the idea of persistent and widespread persecution was largely an invention of Christians themselves. Researchers have argued that stories of Christian persecution were insidiously crafted not just to inspire the faithful, but also to silence and shame nonconformists and keep the churches funded.

In a similar vein, the MAGA movement, ever resourceful and idiosyncratic, has seemingly turned to the medieval Christian traditions, creating a martyr who would be at home in any sixth-century book or church. And as MAGA’s first martyr, the myth being crafted around Kirk both mirrors that of earlier religions’ martyrs while still bearing the unique marks of the MAGA faith, including the reshaping of the Pentecostal Kirk into a generic “Christian,” who really loved America, by the way.

How to create a martyr

On September 9, Kirk had been a member of the MAGA manosphere, a community college dropout who argued with college students. The co-founder and face of the conservative activist group Turning Point USA, Kirk entered the national political scene as a teenager. At that time, he was part of what was even then a dying breed of secular American conservative, and, at least publicly, did not show much interest at all in religion, except to urge his fellow conservatives to respect the separation of church and state. Then, in 2021, Kirk partnered with Rob McCoy, the senior pastor of Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Thousand Oaks, California, to found TPUSA Faith, a faith-based version of Turning Point. This was part of an increasingly religious tenor in Kirk’s public statements and views; however, on September 9, few would have thought of Kirk as primarily — or even particularly — a religious figure.

Yet, the moment he was pronounced dead that began to change: Alongside portrayals of Kirk as a defender of free speech, there was the explicitly religious veneration and storytelling. All over the MAGA internet, and even in reactionary circles abroad, people said: Kirk was an evangelist, even a modern-day John the Baptist. His death will be the impetus for revival. Mainstream media repeated the claim that Kirk wanted Christianity to be his legacy. And official White House social media, too, referred to his memorial as a “revival.” The hagiography of Charlie Kirk had begun.

It’s especially clear that Kirk is being made into a martyr for the MAGA movement because he’s being celebrated as a generic “Christian.” In the process, his real religious background is blurred or even completely ignored. Kirk’s wife, Erika, is a Roman Catholic and Kirk has had nice things to say both about Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians. But make no mistake: Charlie Kirk himself, to the extent he had developed an adult religious identity over the past five years, was a Pentecostal, a particularly evangelical brand of Christianity. 

Yet that hasn’t stopped both the reactionary American Catholic Cardinal Timothy Dolan from comparing Kirk to a “modern-day St. Paul.” Nor, most bizarrely of all, has it prevented Metropolitan Tikhon Shevkunov, an influential bishop in the Russian Orthodox Church known as “Putin’s Confessor,” from calling Kirk’s death “martyric” and declaring that Kirk “is truly effective in missionary work.” On social media and message boards, traditionalist Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians have declared with certainty that Kirk would have converted to their favored church if only permitted to live a bit longer, he was “interested” after all, although he never gave any real indication of any pending conversion (and many evangelical influencers have pushed back against this idea). It is a blurring of lines Kirk might have approved of. He has an upcoming book advocating that Christians adopt the Jewish practice of keeping the Sabbath, putting him in a long line of evangelicals who co-opt Jewish practice to their own ends.

The conflation of Kirk’s religious identity, both by him and his would-be hagiographers, makes most sense when placed within the larger story of how MAGA is remaking religion itself. For decades, the religious right sought to apply Christian scripture to American life; they were traditionalists, often theocrats, who wanted the law to conform to the church. But Trump’s new religious right reverses that relationship. In this movement, theology is bent to serve the nation, and churches exist to strengthen an America defined by nationalism, whiteness, and loyalty to Trump. The Religious Liberty Commission — packed not with the mainline Protestants that have dominated American religious life but with evangelicals, conservative Catholics, Orthodox Jews, and even Muslim converts — makes this explicit: It is not doctrine that binds them but a shared sense of cultural siege.

That is why Kirk’s memory works best for the movement if he is treated not as a Pentecostal, but as a generic “Christian” and specifically as a Christian whose Christian faith was explicitly tied to the MAGA cause. Theological specifics — once so divisive between Catholics, evangelicals, and Orthodox — matter far less than political utility. In a movement that builds theology to fit politics, Kirk can be cast as an evangelical evangelist, a Catholic saint, or even a hero for Russian Orthodoxy, because the point is not religious accuracy but political cohesion. 

And frankly, the generalization of Kirk’s religious identity is only possible because he was part of the MAGA faithful and came to his faith that way. Thus, it was a “MAGA Christianity.” Take, for example, Kirk’s praise of the role of the Virgin Mary in Catholicism, which Catholics and Orthodox have cited as proof he would have eventually joined them. Kirk had not come to believe in the intercessory powers of Mary or been bowled over by the countless Marian miracles that dot the history of Christianity. No, Kirk thought the veneration of Mary was an antidote to “toxic feminism,” teasing in his noncommittal way it might even be enough to make him convert.

Medieval at the memorial

Oddly, those social media commentators desperate to be Kirk’s co-religionists might be on to something. On the surface, the memorial for Kirk on Sunday in Arizona has largely been noted for its evangelical character. And it is true, the event had contemporary Christian worship music and plenty of pleas for people to “read their Bibles,” subtle hints to experience the personal conversion at the heart of evangelicalism. But these aspects of evangelical worship and theology have long found their way into other parts of Christianity. Charismatic Catholics exist. And what took place at Kirk’s memorial, from the speeches to the memorabilia, was not simply evangelical enthusiasm. It echoed much older patterns, drawn straight out of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, eras that predate evangelicalism altogether.

First, there is the much-discussed contrast between the speeches given by Erika Kirk and Donald Trump. As many progressive commentators have pointed out, Erika Kirk said she forgave her husband’s killer. She was followed by the president, who immediately called for revenge. Both drew applause from the crowd. 

This may simply reflect an audience willing to cheer anything, but it also echoes the world of the medieval saint. In that world, the virtuous woman, often a virgin or widow, pleads for mercy and forgiveness for the saint’s persecutors, while the strong Christian king seeks vengeance. The idea was central to medieval notions of queenship. It is a model that allows the language of Christian mercy to coexist with the harsh realities of authoritarian rule, which is exactly what MAGA is aiming for. It was also a model that allowed for women to have a significant public role while not transgressing normative ideas of femininity. Say, for example, Erika Kirk becoming the CEO of Turning Point USA.

Then, there’s the merch: hats, T-shirts, and cups sold bearing images of Kirk with a halo above his head or walking hand in hand with Christ in paradise; these would find more home in medieval Catholicism than among idol-fearing Evangelicals. These are all part of medieval Christianity, a pre-evangelical way of making and celebrating a martyr. It is a way of celebrating the saints that the evangelicals of the MAGA faith have seemingly embraced, a part of Catholicism they have embraced despite the theological contradictions.

The earliest Christians celebrated the Eucharist over the tombs of martyrs. To this day, the relics of saints are buried in the altars of Orthodox and Catholic churches. That is how central the cult of the martyrs was to the early Christian churches’ self-understanding, even if most of the stories were simply made up. Today, the religious movement that is being built in America at this moment is as dangerous and unprecedented as its new politics. And, just like Christianity two millennia ago, this new MAGA faith is going to need martyrs for all the reasons Christianity did: to inspire the faithful, punish dissenters, and keep the money flowing. 

Martyrs made Christianity more than a small sect that would soon die out like so many before and after it; they made it a religion, offering the movement the political tools to grow and consolidate. The MAGA movement has, consciously or not, learned from this history.

For over six decades, the “religious right” in America was boomer “Christian nationalism,” straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale. It was about “keeping God in the schools” and the National Prayer Breakfast. It was traditionalist, mindful of theology, and, well, theocratic, which is to say it wanted to take the standards of a religious tradition and apply them to the secular law. They wanted the books of Scripture to replace the statute books.

But President Donald Trump is trying to create a new religious right, one that is not just illiberal but fundamentally different and opposed to traditional religion as we’ve known it. The faith of the MAGA movement is not one in which the state conforms to the church, but one in which the church is bent to the will of the strange beast that is American nationalism — the belief that the American project is an exercise in freedom and prosperity like the world has never known, but also the sole possession of those who are white, heterosexual, and unquestioningly loyal to the nation.

It’s a model of church-state relations that has less in common with post-revolutionary Iran, where an Islamic cleric known as the supreme leader and his council of religious jurists preside over government, and more in common with Soviet (and arguably contemporary) Russia, where the Russian Orthodox Church is subject to the whims of the Kremlin, acting as everything from propaganda tool to spy center.

This is evident from the members and mission of Trump’s new Religious Liberty Commission, as well as its three advisory bodies of religious leaders, legal experts, and lay leaders. The commission is tasked with preparing a report on the history and current state of religious liberty in America. 

By contrast, Trump’s three immediate predecessors maintained an Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to advise on how faith-based organizations and the government could collaborate on issues like human trafficking, climate change, or global poverty. Called “Community Initiatives” under Bush, this model reflected the church coming to the aid of the state to address issues arising from the collective moral failings of secular society.

Trump abolished this office at the beginning of his second term. His new plan — the commission charged with producing an “official account” of American religious liberty past and present — is not only unprecedented in American history; it is the product of a very different view of the church-state relationship. In this formulation, faith is not a balm for the moral ills of a nation. Here, the United States, its history and institutions, is the means by which religion can sustain itself. And therefore religious institutions prosper or fail in proportion not to their own morality or faithfulness but to the extent to which America is “American” enough.

In another era, it might be possible to see this new model of engaging religious leaders as a mere accident and the commission as harmless pandering, a bone thrown to conservative religious voters who turn out election after election for Republican candidates. But it is much harder to see the commission and advisory boards as harmless pandering in the current political climate, when the concept of “religious liberty” has become increasingly weaponized. “Religious liberty” has been used by bakers to deny wedding cakes to gay and lesbian couples, by pharmacists to deny women the morning-after pill, and by ER nurses to refuse a Covid-19 vaccine. In a transformation that began when segregationists invoked their religious freedom as a defense against racial equality during the civil rights movement, religious liberty is now a dog whistle for opposition to social progress.

This strategy was one of the founding tactics of the old religious right, a tactic it shares with this new religious movement. But the MAGA religious right has taken this strategy to a new level. And this new movement is far more complex. If we believe that these ideological architects are simply “conservative Christians” or even “Christian nationalists” in the old vein, we are fundamentally misreading both the religious character of the MAGA movement and its broader ideological and practical aims. If, however, we perceive and understand the difference, we are much better situated to combat the radical remaking not just of American religion but of America itself. 

The strange makeup of the Religious Liberty Commission

Nothing makes this new religious movement more clear than a quick survey of whom Trump has appointed to serve. Of the 39 appointments made to the Religious Liberty Commission and its related advisory boards, not a single mainline Protestant is among them. 

Instead, the board is dominated by evangelicals. Evangelicals’ emphasis on personal salvation, biblical literalism, and emotive worship made them much more popular among America’s least wealthy and least educated, in contrast to the more theologically flexible mainline Protestants who once dominated the country’s political and cultural elite. These differences also made the evangelicals naturally more politically conservative than their mainline counterparts. The evangelicals on the commission are joined by conservative Catholics, Orthodox Jews, the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of America, and Dr. Ben Carson, who is a Seventh-Day Adventist. Significantly, two of the three Muslims appointed by Trump, are white, American converts to the faith.

These are both inclusions and omissions that would have been unthinkable a generation ago, when American civic religion — that is, the collective and largely unspoken religious values of a nation — was dominated by the mainline denominations while Catholics, Jews and Muslims remained on the periphery. That’s not to say that this exclusion was a good thing. But who is invited to the table does tend to reveal the values of the people and nation doing the inviting. The reign of mainline Protestants and WASPs reflected a certain set of principles about both religion and politics: moderation in religion and a separation of church and state in politics that not only maintained the neutrality of the government but also the independence of the churches. Not surprisingly then, as the old religious right rose to power, their enemies included not only secular liberals but also the mainline churches by whom they had long felt belittled.

The simple explanation for the omission of mainline Protestants now is that these denominations and their members have become more progressive and are simply too liberal for Trump. They are “victims” of the sensibility, good education, and pragmatism that defined them for generations and then lured them leftward. But this is only part of the truth. High-profile splits among Episcopalians and Methodists, as well as the existence of deeply conservative mainline churches like the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod and the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, demonstrate that there are still plenty of socially and politically conservative mainline Protestants in America, even if they are now a minority within their own tradition (which might also be said of politically conservative Jewish Americans). These religious and political conservatives would seem like natural allies to include in a coalition interested in traditional religion and traditional society. Moreover, the evangelical leaders of this new coalition might, in theory, be far more comfortable with a fellow Protestant Christian than with a Muslim, a Jew, or even a Catholic. And yet, they have been excluded.

The old American civic religion is dead. Instead, we are confronted with a cross-faith coalition united not by theology, but by a shared sense of cultural siege. This coalition has manifested not only in the Religious Liberty Commission, but on podcasts, in rallies, and in a growing number of organizations. Trump even touted the alliance in his now-infamous Madison Square Garden rally on the eve of the 2024 election. This is not to say that the traditions included are themselves devoid of theological content or that every member of these traditions is part of the new coalition. That is clearly not true. But the individuals and institutions entering this coalition are willing to put aside theological concerns, even subsume them completely, in the interest of the coalition’s nation-building project. 

This project, born from that shared sense of threat (largely around issues of gender, sexuality, and race), is not, as they would have you believe, a concerted effort to return society to some earlier state. Trump 2.0 has made clear that it is seeking to reshape America in unprecedented ways. That’s the opposite of being traditional and conservative. The goal of the new movement is to radically transform American life and society. 

How the new American religion works

While the religious right of the 1980s and 1990s was political because of their theology, this is a group doing the opposite: constructing a theology that fits their politics. Take, for example, the defense by evangelical leaders of Trump’s sexual transgressions. Trump’s sins are excusable because he is a messianic figure, they say, sent not to save our souls but America. It’s not coherent in a religious sense. It’s coherent in a political sense.

Another excellent example is Ismail Royer, one of the three Muslims Trump has appointed to do the commission’s work. To begin with, Royer might be the first member of a presidential advisory board to have served prison time for crimes stemming from his connection to a terrorist organization. That’s right, Royer served over a little over a decade in federal maximum-security prison after having been convicted of helping people travel to Pakistan to train with Lashkar-e-Taiba, an Islamist militia that aims to unite the whole of Kashmir with Pakistan and has been designated as a terrorist organization by the US government. He has certainly turned over a new leaf since his release. 

Today, Royer works as the director of the Islam and Religious Freedom Action Team for the Religious Freedom Institute, an organization that applies the American right’s strategy of invoking religious liberty both at home and abroad. Royer has been an outspoken supporter of the plaintiffs in Mahmoud v. Taylor, a recent Supreme Court case that will decide if parents can opt students out of reading books with LGBTQ+ themes on the grounds of religious freedom. The irony of a man who did prison time for recruiting young people to a terrorist organization being concerned about kids reading Heather Has Two Mommies aside, Royer has actually developed a pretty interesting view of the relationship between religion and American politics, telling the Middle East Forum, “America is a Christian country. … It was founded in Christian principles…I would like to see a restoration of those principles.” These are principles he infers from “classical civilization,” which has long been code within far-right circles for draconian views about race, gender, sexuality, and the like. This both gives us some insight into Royer’s meaning and suggests none of these people have actually read any Catullus.

He also penned a 2018 op-ed for the Washington Post titled “Muslims Like Me Don’t Have Theological Beef with Evangelicals. It’s the Prejudice Against Us That’s the Problem” in which he recounts how “at home” he and his wife felt at the anti-abortion Washington March for Life among “fellow believers.” He also bemoans the greater welcome Muslims have received on the American left, arguing it has caused American Muslims to abandon hardline positions on issues like sexuality. Of course, Royer ignores that, as a white man, he is in the minority (in a way that matters) among American Muslims. 

But he is also making a fairly innovative argument: In claiming he wants to restore Christian principles and complaining against Muslims being welcomed by the left, he says theology doesn’t matter; only politics does. Because in the end, America (not God) — and specifically America as it is imagined by the MAGA movement and Trump — is the source of liberty and human flourishing. With respect to the things that matter most to him, Royer does have more in common with the evangelicals at the March for Life than he does with those Muslims whom he mourns being “secularized” by the tolerance of the left. It appears that Royer shares a political vision of America with those evangelicals and does not care about sharing a theological vision with Muslims. 

Royer might become fast friends with fellow commission member Eric Metaxas. Raised Greek Orthodox, Metaxas has existed in a sort of denominational gray area for the whole of his adult life. He attended an Episcopal Church in Manhattan (where he served in the vestry) and has written bestselling biographies of the two most famous Lutherans ever: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther himself. But he is now comfortably described as an “evangelical intellectual.” All suffice to say, Metaxas probably doesn’t care all that much about the deep theological issues that have divided Christendom. What he cares about is politics.

Metaxas is much more worried about feminism erasing women, warning against the Covid vaccine, and partnering with the messianic rabbi (Kirt) Schneider to get the rainbow back. And like Royer, Metaxas sees the America of MAGA’s dreams as a bulwark against these perceived threats to the social order, as he suggested in a truly bizarre exchange with Michael Flynn. In the same exchange with Flynn, it becomes clear that, like Royer, Metaxas believes first and foremost in America, whose preservation and protection must take precedence over all other concerns.

This movement seeks power not to preserve a spiritual order or influence their own or anybody else’s afterlife but to reshape society in the here and now. This is the only world they really care about. In fact, one of the most shocking differences between the old religious right and the MAGA religious right is how little the afterlife comes up. Where Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Pat Buchanan never ceased talking about the threat of eternal punishment, both for individuals and the nation, these new guys never bring it up. They are, for all intents and purposes, metaphysical atheists, occasionally invoking vague theological language only because it still holds cultural sway. 

What the new religious right has built has more in common with the Roman Imperial Cult than the tent revivals of early America. Like the ancient pagan religion of the Roman state, the focus is on the power and fertility of the nation, currently demonstrated by the prevalence of pronatalism in the MAGA movement. Think about the concerns about medical treatment rendering trans kids infertile. Now compare that to the religious right’s response to the AIDS crisis. Jerry Falwell called AIDS “God’s punishment” for gay sex, but he did not frame the problem with gay sex as its non-procreative nature. For Falwell, gay sex was wrong because it was unbiblical; the absence of reproduction wasn’t the issue. There is even more stark a contrast when we look at abortion. While the old religious right focused on condemning abortion as unnatural and murderous, parts of MAGA appear to be more concerned about how abortion access might affect birth rates. 

Finally, there’s the seemingly endless celebrations of the state and its power. In the brief time since he returned to office, Trump has planned a military parade and established two new holidays. Now, with the commission, he has ordered a hagiographic recounting of the nation’s history, placing the story of the country within a sacred narrative by official channels. That is big imperial cult energy (and if you don’t believe me, read the “Aeneid”). This is the displacement of the trappings of religion with America First alternatives.

The old methods of resistance won’t work

All this should matter to anyone who wants to stop them. First, you can’t counter this kind of movement the same way you would more traditional “believers.” Combating the religious right in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s was in many ways as simple as pointing out hypocrisy and holding leaders to the same standards they held others. And it worked. Many of the figures of the old religious right have simply been shamed from public life, making way for their new, more pernicious, replacements.

But MAGA is pretty impervious to shame. You can’t just appeal to theological humility or scriptural counterpoints. And you can’t rely on their own sense of conscience. What animates them is political utility.

If we understand how the MAGA religious movement is different from the old Christian nationalists, those who wish to combat Trump and his ilk might find some new allies. All of those traditionalist conservative believers — the Latter-day Saints, the conservative mainline Protestants, Catholic bishops without Instagram — might be the key to taking down the Church of MAGA. This doesn’t mean that progressives have to agree on everything or anything or even like them. But it does mean recognizing that the enemy of your enemy might be your political frenemy, especially when they are alarmed for different but equally serious reasons. 

Many traditional conservative believers remain committed to some basic moral architecture, to rules that bind even their leaders, and to a God who ultimately cannot be manipulated. The administration’s draconian immigration policy is now disquieting some evangelicals, concerned about co-religionists who have sought refuge in America from real religious persecution. And the Trump administration’s pronatalist advocacy for IVF has many conservative Christians, including conservative Catholics, on edge. These groups may not like the world as it is, but they don’t like the world MAGA’s new civic cult seeks to build either. And in this light, they may wish to fight it out on the old terms. If progressives can make the idea of the last war appealing, there is hope for a viable coalition.

Trump and MAGA have declared a religious war, not just against secularism or progressive forms of religion, but also against traditional religion that refuses to serve their radical vision for the world. This is not a theocracy in the making. This is not The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s something newer, stranger, and much more difficult to fight: religion of nation and identity disguised in the trappings of familiar faiths.

 We won’t defeat it with scripture or appeals to conscience. We’ll need to name it, unmask it, and forge unexpected alliances with those who (whatever their doctrine) still believe in a higher power than Donald Trump.

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.

Less than a week after becoming vice president, JD Vance, only the second Catholic to hold the office, had a very public break with the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church in America. Without evidence, the second-in-command accused the US Conference of Catholic Bishops of settling “illegal immigrants” in order to access federal funds. Though largely used as fodder for internet “gotchas,” the scuffle pointed to a wider trend — one that could remake the country’s religious landscape and the fundamental way Americans think about how they believe and where they belong.

Vance is not just a Catholic. He’s a very specific type of Catholic, part of a group of young white men who, over the past decade, have found their way (often online) into both increasingly conservative politics and traditional religion — primarily Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, rather than the Protestantism that has been a common cultural feature in America. (For the uninitiated, Eastern Orthodoxy, sometimes called “Greek Orthodox” or “Russian Orthodoxy,” is essentially the Eastern equivalent of the Catholic Church, though significant differences have arisen).  

One recent study from the Orthodox Studies Institute suggests that conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy has increased 24 percent since 2021. These recent converts tend to be under 40 and single, and the majority are men. There is not a similarly comprehensive study of Catholic conversions, but dioceses are reporting increases in the number of converts anywhere between 30 percent to 70 percent since 2020. 

The absolute number of converts isn’t large, but as Vance shows, they can be influential. These people are entering religious communities that have not had many converts in the United States and have historically been associated with specific immigrant ethnic groups, the Irish in the case of Catholicism and the Greeks in the case of Orthodoxy. In fact, American anti-Catholicism has historically been buoyed not only by the centuries-old prejudice of a Protestant society, but also by a bias against foreignness. 

And — in part because of this “foreignness” and the ways it has insulated these groups — these ethnic and religious communities have remained politically moderate, or, more accurately, largely defiant of the usual political categorizations. For example, the majority of American Catholics now vote Republican, but a majority also support abortion rights in all or nearly all cases. Similarly, only a slight minority of American Orthodox Christians are Democrats, but a majority support marriage equality and access to legal abortions.

To understand this, consider that the conventional understanding of America’s contemporary religious and political landscape centers two other demographic groups for whom religion and politics are more neatly aligned. White evangelical Protestants are reliably conservative across a broad range of issues, both social and economic, and loyally Republican. Meanwhile, white secular atheists/agnostics are reliably progressive and loyally Democrats. 

This alignment is (at least in part) because they are both the descendants (ideologically and in some cases quite literally) of America’s English, Dutch, and German Protestant founding stock. These traditions are about believing correctly more than they are about belonging. And, in fact, fundamentally committed to separating out the elect from the community. 

On the other hand, traditionally Catholic and Orthodox communities represent different strands of American history, histories that sideline political identity in the name of big-tent community belonging. Catholicism and Orthodoxy are simply more embedded in their cultural contexts — part and parcel with an ethnic identity — and less ideologically driven than the Enlightenment era-born faith traditions of the US. Within these communities, belonging has been more important than believing correctly. This is not to say that the Pope doesn’t care about theological concerns. It means that your average Catholic grandmother in Spain is less likely to be a Catholic because she feels strongly about the Treasury of Merit than because Catholicism is simply part of who she is.

So how did someone like Vance, previously most famous for being “an Appalachian,” find his way into a tradition like that?

The online-to-convert pipeline

These converts are characterized by a simultaneous search for community and for answers. Nearly everyone recognizes that young men are in crisis. There is widespread disagreement as to why this crisis is happening, but it is difficult not to suspect that a lack of belonging, or rather a pervasive sense of loneliness, is at least part of the problem. Loneliness, and the desire to solve it, seems likely to be part of what drives these men into communities defined by nearly unconditional belonging. 

But belonging is clearly not enough. A lot of young men are looking for answers as well as community. And like lost generations before them, they are finding it in “ideology.” The new converts want their community and their ideology to fit.

What does this ideology look like? Many are disillusioned with what they see as the products of “modernity,” specifically the fruits of feminism and, in many cases, the civil rights movement. To their minds, feminism and racial equality have rendered white men — particularly working- and lower-middle-class white men — less socially and economically powerful. As a result, they have turned to “traditionalism,” a worldview that combines conservative views of gender and sexuality with fear of immigration and increasing multiculturalism, often overlaid with back-to-the-land living and large families. 

Their ideal is a white, English-speaking, Christian, American straight couple living on a homestead, raising a dozen children. Its public face online is largely female: the  “trad wife” influencers. But make no mistake: Despite its TikTok and Instagram aesthetics, this is primarily a men’s movement. It frames the personal and social crises facing white American men as part of an imagined broader crisis of “Western civilization,” a crisis that, in their view, inevitably includes a “crisis of Christianity” — an idea pushed by no less than the likes of right-wing celebrity Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist turned media pundit. 

But not a crisis of just any Christianity. For many of these young men, the perceived crisis of Christianity and of Western civilization itself has led them to question Protestantism as a whole, from far-right evangelicals to liberal mainline beliefs. If Christendom is in decline, they reason, how can its dominant tradition in American society not be to blame? 

This is shown by the fact that a lot of “trad” content is dedicated to how masculine the respective traditions are. For instance, the Russian Orthodox Church website ran (on its English channel, notably) a piece titled “Why Orthodox Men Love Church.” The piece makes liberal use of the work of Leon Podles, whose work includes The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity and Losing the Good Portion: Why Men Are Alienated from Christianity. And even the relatively liberal, Jesuit-run Catholic magazine America has run an article titled “Men and boys are lost. The Catholic Church can give them a better model of manliness.”

The “crisis of Protestantism” is a reality that evangelicals themselves have been most apt to acknowledge.  There is also the example of Rod Dreher, the Protestant-turned-Catholic-turned-Orthodox convert and American Conservative editor whose book The Benedict Option is premised on the idea that society has devolved so completely that the only choice Christians have is to flee from it. 

This reasoning, combined with what one must imagine is not a little bit of video game and fantasy movie-inspired nostalgia for an imagined Middle Ages, has led many of these young men to Catholicism and others to Eastern Orthodoxy. By converting to these faith traditions, they wrongly think they are converting not only to a liturgically and theologically conservative tradition, but also to an explicitly politically conservative one in the American tradition.

And like the rest of the culture surrounding the Lost Young Men of Postmodernity, this religious dimension has taken place largely online, with many of these converts encountering the academic theology of these faith traditions on YouTube, TikTok, and forums, long before they become connected to any living communities. This is very evident this time of year in online Orthodox circles, as converts gather on Facebook and Reddit to discuss the nuances of how to apply medieval fasting rules in a way that would never occur to those from traditionally Orthodox backgrounds. There is also Matt Fradd’s YouTube series Pints With Aquinas that regularly brings obscure Catholic theology to upward of half a million viewers or Rev. Chad Ripperger’s channel Sensus Fidelium, where medieval theology meets anti-vax modernity.  

The mix of obscure academic theology and very modern politics doesn’t stay online. Vance, for example, has cited the influence of the French Catholic philosopher René Girard as an impetus for his own conversion. Vance has also referenced St. Augustine as a major source of his personal theology. And it was to Augustine that he turned to in his spat with the bishops, telling his X followers to “google ‘ordo amoris.’” A request one can only imagine most cradle Catholics (ones born into the faith) responded to with a resounding, “Huh?”

To save you the internet search, “ordo amoris” is a concept first attributed to Augustine and picked up by St. Thomas Aquinas, who laid out a list of the order in which we should love people and things, starting with God. But Aquinas doesn’t stop there. As the Pope — I know how absurd this sounds — explained in a letter to the American bishops following the clash with Vance, while there is an order in which we should direct our affections, any person’s pressing need should take precedence, so it is not a violation of Catholic teaching to help refugees and the poor. 

This is the way most cradle Catholics probably learned this (perhaps these days sans Latin). Whether Vance was personally aware of the normal way the ordo amoris is taught is irrelevant, because the entire incident demonstrates an important point about these new ideological converts: They have encountered largely medieval theological traditions in a vacuum devoid of community and when they do encounter these living communities, made up of people for whom community is usually much more important than the medieval theology, they are frequently surprised. 

And when this happens the response has not been to change their views — Vance expressed “surprise” at the pushback from the Pope and then doubled down on his position. 

This is not the “done” thing.  It is, in fact, a very Protestant way of viewing church hierarchy, whereas one might argue that since the Reformation, Catholicism and Orthodoxy have been defined by a refusal to break from the powers that be. The vice president of the United States and many of his fellow new converts have nonetheless sought to change the views of the hierarchs of institutions they have joined in no small part because of their hierarchical nature — and in doing so remake these organic communities in their own idealized, ideological image.

This dynamic won’t stay in the church

While many are not yet ready to put it in this stark of terms, the “cradle” vs. “convert” divide in Catholicism and Orthodoxy is very real and it can become a problem for those outside the traditions as well as inside. These emerging, highly politicized conflicts inside what were once communities largely bound together by family and cultural ties are only accelerating the political division of American religion. 

This is not a good development for civil society, because houses of worship were places where people once regularly and peacefully encountered those with different political views. Slavery and prohibition did cause schisms but, for the most part, until the middle of the 20th century, American churches were politically diverse. (While Protestantism was about believing correctly, the beliefs in question were nearly always about one’s theological beliefs. Over time, the requirement extended to political beliefs too.) This possibility has already largely vanished within most Protestant circles as evangelicals moved ever more right and mainline Protestants more left over the past 50 years, simply breaking apart (as in the case of the United Methodist Church) when their culture war differences became too grave. Now, largely as a result of these new converts, Catholicism and Orthodoxy are also becoming more polarized.

But perhaps even more important is the dangerous lesson these converts are learning from their challenges to the hierarchy and cultural traditions of their new faiths: Namely, that even some of the most ancient existent authorities do not have real control over them and that, with enough noise and obfuscation and with enough requests to “Google that,” they can create a version of reality where a recent convert’s opinion of Catholic theology is as valuable as the Pope’s. 

Thus, when the Pope declares a more kind approach to LGBTQ Catholics, online influencers like Taylor Marshall feel comfortable simply saying the Pope is wrong, that the successor of St. Peter “persecutes the good and promotes evildoers.” Or the pseudo-anonymous writers of the Orthodox Reflections blog can attack the decision of the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of America to march with Black Lives Matter. It’s why Michael Warren Davis, another Orthodox convert at the American Conservative, could directly call the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of America a CIA asset without any evidence. 

Laypeople attacking their hierarchs is about the least “trad” thing one can do. It reveals just how little these conversions have to do with anything organic to these traditions, but are instead an act of rebellion against the American mainstream, with a dose of cultural appropriation thrown in.

This is not just a challenge to the institutional power of the Catholic Church but a reminder of the ways this milieu of young men seeks to challenge authority and to remake our institutions in the image of their ideological aims — the ecclesiastical wing of DOGE’s engineers if you will. It is not a great jump between Vance challenging the Pope on the meaning of St. Augustine to Vance challenging the Constitution on the meaning of citizenship. 

It can be difficult for many secular progressives to care much about the inner workings of religious — particularly Christian — institutions. “It’s all bad,” is a common refrain. But considering the central role religion continues to play in our politics, wishing it would just not is not a helpful way to approach the problem. This religious conflict between “cradle” and “convert”  is shaping America’s political institutional authority, as religious identity becomes yet another front in the battle over America’s political future — at a moment when that war could probably do without another front.