The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 9 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
MAGA personalities are very, very unhappy about the new pope. Right after the news broke that Robert Francis Prevost was elected as pope of the Roman Catholic Church, the internet produced lots of evidence that he has promoted articles critical of JD Vance and Donald Trump, and even expressed sympathy for George Floyd. That prompted MAGA figures to erupt in anger, attacking the new pope as anti-Trump, pro–open borders, a Marxist, and soft on thugs and drug dealers. All this is fraught territory for people with godless upbringings like myself. So we figured we’d talk it through with someone who was both raised in the Catholic Church and is an excellent political theorist. Matt McManus regularly wrestles with the intellectual roots of today’s right wing, including in his excellent 2023 book, The Political Right and Equality. Matt, it’s great to have you on, man.
Matt McManus: Yeah, it’s a real pleasure to be here.
Sargent: So the first American pope has taken the name Pope Leo XIV. He has apparently shared a number of articles critical of JD Vance; in particular, one that said Vance was wrong in claiming that Catholic teachings support the MAGA worldview and agenda. The pope also shared an article criticizing Trump’s hostility to immigrants and shared a tweet about the need to pray for George Floyd. Matt, what do we know about this new pope’s views, and how do they fit into Catholic teaching more generally?
McManus: Well, I’m sure we’re going to learn a lot more about the new pope’s views over the next couple days as people scour everything he is ever written and everything that he is ever said. The choice of the name Leo is itself significant. Pope Leo was widely regarded as the “People’s Pope” or the “Workers’ Pope” because he is one of the founders of Catholic social teaching. Now, to be clear, the O.G. Pope Leo was by no means a socialist or a Marxist, the way they, say Laura Loomer, is trying to imply that the current Pope Leo is a Marxist. But he did stress that there were significant problems with capitalism that led to the emergence of things like atheistic socialism and atheistic Marxism and called for a conciliation between workers and capitalists that would favor the workers—or at least better their conditions. So I think that in itself is telling about the direction that he is planning on going in.
But if you look at some of the stuff he said over the past couple years, he is very clearly pro-immigrant. Back in 2015, he stated that he was opposed to the death penalty. He spent a long time in Peru, by all accounts living in quite modest circumstances and demonstrating an unusual level of concern for the poor. So that’s all a positive sign.
Sargent: Well, MAGA is not happy about any of it. Charlie Kirk accused the pope of “retweeting George Floyd propaganda.” Laura Loomer erupted over the idea that the Pope seemed to endorse the need to pray for Floyd, calling him a “career criminal” and “drug addict.” MAGA figure Sean Davis called the Pope anti-Trump and pro–open borders. Listen to this from MAGA influencer Jack Posobiec.
Jack Posobiec (audio voiceover): What I’m seeing from his social media does not bode well for Trump supporters, because we’re seeing things here where he’s attacking JD Vance and not years ago, very recently, promoting anti-Trump and anti-Bukele articles regarding the deportations of criminal illegals to the United States. He was attacking that less than three weeks ago. We even see him posting anti-Trump articles from when Trump first ran for office. I’m not going to mince words, folks. I’m not going to mince words. This is not the election that conservatives wanted. God save the church.
Sargent: So the problem with the pope is apparently that he doesn’t hate criminal illegals enough and attacks the idea of states having borders. Matt, I don’t claim to know that much about Catholic teaching, but it sure seems like these MAGA types don’t know much about it either. Can you talk a little bit about what Catholic doctrine says about our duty to immigrants?
McManus: Sure. Well, I don’t think you can do better than the late Pope Francis; my grandmother was a big fan of, not coincidentally. Francis stresses that it is important for states to have borders and for those borders to be taken seriously, but he also points out that Christ himself was a refugee to the kingdom of Egypt when his family was under significant threat and calls upon us to remember the Samaritan lesson. That when asked, “Who is our neighbor?” our neighbor is anybody who follows religious teachings and demonstrating the level of care and love to another person that we’re supposed to. And not coincidentally, the pope in February implied very strongly that Vance and the current administration, put it gently, weren’t exactly living up to these Catholic ideals.
Sargent: Well, I want to bring up JD Vance here because he got into a direct dustup—if you can get into a dustup with a pope—with Francis. Vance is a high-profile convert to Catholicism. Recently, he claimed that the Trump-MAGA agenda can be defended with the Catholic doctrine known as ordo amoris, which refers to the ordering of our ethical obligations outward. The basic idea is that even if God calls on us to love all people, the practical limitations on the help we can offer to others requires us to prioritize aid to those nearest to us. That’s theoretically the idea anyway. Now, the previous pope criticized this and the new pope tweeted out an article that also criticizes it. Matt, it seems to me that you can’t defend the Trump-MAGA agenda this way because it’s not as if Trump is carefully ordering our ethical obligations outward. He systematically abandoning any and all obligations to the global poor across the board. Can you talk about that in the context of Catholic teaching?
McManus: Well, there’s a lot of controversy about how ordo amoris is meant to be interpreted and, indeed, how far back the history of the idea goes. Some people relate it back to the Pauline kind of dictum about looking after your family and those close to you. A lot of people associate it with Thomistic thought—the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas as it developed in the medieval ages. In a lot of ways, ordo amoris is pretty commonsensical—this injunction that we should look after those close to us as a practice become more ethical and spiritually aligned persons strikes me as extremely wise. But the pope, quite rightly, chastised Vance and Trump for interpreting “ordo amoris” in this miserly way: the idea being that we only have so much love that we have to give so we have to prioritize who we’re going to give it to.
Let’s be very clear, even by this constipated understanding of what ordo amoris stands for, the current administration isn’t doing a particularly good job ’cause it’s not exactly like JD Vance and the Trump administration are showing an awful lot of love to their fellow American citizens. I don’t think that shopping Medicare and Medicaid benefits to the very poor or sending American citizens to rot in jails far away from here is exactly expressing a great deal of love to our fellow citizens.
Sargent: Well, there are basically three lanes you can criticize Vance on, and I’d like to try to work through each of them. The first is the one you just said, which is that it’s not as if Trump and Vance actually recognize moral obligations to all Americans. Trumpism, and as you’ve written in one of your great pieces, is really all about casting a large segment of American citizens as an internal enemy and really, essentially, turning loose the state on them. So there’s that one. The second is that Vance basically, as you say, offers a miserly interpretation of Catholic teaching. But then there’s a third, which is that there’s no way to actually say that what Trump has done is in any sense an ethical obligation ranking outward, right? He suspended all refugee admissions. He’s ending protected status in the U.S. for hundreds of thousands of immigrants facing disasters in their home country, trying to deport millions who are not serious or violent criminals. They’re absolutely slaughtering foreign aid, creating deaths abroad, humanitarian horrors. Is there any way to describe that as a concentric ranking of obligations outward? It’s a foreswearing off of ethical obligations entirely. That’s MAGA.
McManus: Yeah, absolutely. There’s always a way of defending anything, right? There are people who have defended Nazism, fascism, you name it, over the course of history, Marxist authoritarianism. But I think that any person who is genuinely concerned to get Catholic social teaching, or just basic ethics, right will look at what the administration is doing and say, Not no way, not no how. Just to give one good example, one of the greatest Catholic thinkers of our current age is Charles Taylor from McGill University, formative influence on me amongst others. Taylor has reprimanded the Trump administration time and time again for a lack of ethical seriousness. And that’s not meant to be a joke, right? It’s not like there’s anything funny about this. These are people who just think about the basic moral duties that most of us have and see them as not applying to them. And I think that any person who is concerned to be a good person—let alone a good Christian—should take a pause and think about whether or not it’s right to support this administration given all that.
Sargent: OK, I want to talk about what Pope Francis said about Vance in the context of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. In his letter criticizing Vance’s ordo amoris statement, Francis questioned the whole ethical schema by saying that an extended meditation on the Parable of the Good Samaritan will undermine what Vance was saying. Now, what I took from that—and again, I was raised godlessly, and I don’t claim to have a lot of knowledge of this topic, but what I took from what Francis was saying is that the good Christian attempts, through reflection, to expand his or her appreciation of the situation of others, to evermore distant and far away rings of strangers and others because of the dignity of every human person. Can you talk about that? Is that an interpretation of the Parable of the Good Samaritan that’s fair? And doesn’t it cut pretty strongly against MAGA generally and against Vance’s theology particularly?
McManus: Oh God, yes, to coin a bad pun there. The Parable of the Good Samaritan is taught to every Christian child from a very young age; I think I got my first crack at it when I was four or five or something when they gave me one of those kids books on the Bible. And the basic injunction there is: Someone is attacked on a road and several of his own countrymen basically walk by and don’t want to have anything to do with them, and then the Samaritan comes and sees that this person needs help and helps him out. And the lesson is, according to Christ, when you’re asked, “Who is my neighbor?” the answer is anyone who acts like your neighbor. And you’re supposed to act like everyone’s neighbor, if at all possible, right? Now again, that does not mean that you’re supposed to be so self-denying that you don’t look after yourself or you don’t look after your family or you don’t look after your kids or whatever it happens to be ’cause you’re so busy sending money to someone else’s kids. It’s Mrs. Jellyby altitude like we find in Charles Dickens.
But it suggests that what we’re supposed to do is, again, not be miserly in our love and in our generosity, but instead use those who are approximate to us in our ethical relationships to then cultivate a richer love that then flows outward—like a river, to invoke a metaphor that’s often used—and becomes richer and more developed over time. And again, can’t really see that very much with MAGA, which seems to be trying to restrain or constrain how many people we’re supposed to care about a little more every day.
Sargent: Right. Isn’t the basic concept that you’re supposed to, through meditation and reflection, try to appreciate the situation, the plight, the humanity of people on evermore distant rings of these concentric circles? Isn’t that the concept?
McManus: Yeah, that’s exactly right. So you have kids, you have a wife, you have a family. Interacting with them every day is very important, and treating them well is exceptionally important. But you’re also supposed to start to think, Well, there are other people and other children and other families all around the world that are an awful lot like mine and are equal to mine. It’s certainly in the eyes of God. Maybe I should be concerned about them. And you’re supposed to cultivate in yourself the spiritual and emotional attitude that enables you to love more effectively—and for that matter, also your social and physical capabilities to love people more effectively.
Sargent: Well, let’s close this out by talking about post-liberalism more broadly, which you write wonderfully about. Matt, I thank you for all your work on that stuff. I have learned so much from it, I can’t tell you. I recommend it to people. So what would the post-liberals say in response to us? Obviously, there’s a heavy Catholic component to a lot of the post-liberal thinkers. What would they respond to our characterization of MAGA and the inapplicability of Catholic doctrine to it?
McManus: Well, I think a lot of them would say just what JD Vance tried to say in that interview, which is that fundamentally we have duties to our families, our neighbors, our communities, and then our nations and our nation citizens first, and only then should we show any concern for people in the rest of the world. I think what’s wrong with that argument is if you actually look at this administration, again, it’s very clear that they don’t particularly care about the poorest American citizens and they definitely don’t give a damn about other people in the rest of the world. If anything, their attitude is, We are allowed to do whatever it is that we want to the people of the rest of the world to advance our interests. And if that screws them over in any way, shape, or form, then tough shit. And you can call that whatever it is that you want. I like to quote Thucydides and the Melian Dialogue to say that it basically boils down to them saying “the strong will do as they will and the weak will suffer what they must.” But it is not a Christian ethic. I wouldn’t even call it an ethic of any sort whatsoever.
Sargent: Matt, what happened to Athens after that?
McManus: Athens was defeated by its enemies, humiliated, and collapsed into the ash heap of history. That should be a caution to anybody who decides that that’s a dictum that is worth following.
Sargent: Well, MAGA is certainly not a movement that embraces humility in any sense, is it?
McManus: No. No. I think that if you were to say anything about Trump, humility would be very far down the list of the very few virtues that he happens to have, if any.
Sargent: And Trumpism as well. I just want to make a point about this, which is that MAGA and Trumpism thrives—it gets its energy, its spiritual energy, if that’s the right term for it—from meanness to the outsider, hostility to the outsider, demonization of the outsider. The post-liberal rights simply won’t reckon with this in any real sense, will they? What do they say about that obvious fact? Do they have anything to say about it at all?
McManus: Sure. A lot of them will point out that the Lord works in mysterious ways, that sometimes a very imperfect vessel can nonetheless be a vehicle for advancing justice. Pat Deneen sometimes even talks about using Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian virtues. And my response to that would be that ethics, and Christian ethics particular, is an ideal. You don’t achieve an ideal by compromising it every chance you get to obtain power—let alone to try to do the cruel things that are on display to everyone day in and day out. So I just can’t think that there’s any way of making this intellectually palatable, even if it is something that is deeply desired by a lot of people on the Christian right, who, again, seem much more concerned with worshiping America than with worshiping anything that actually looks recognizably like the Christian God, as far as I’m concerned.
Sargent: Well, MAGA America, anyway. That’s the topic of worship.
McManus: Yeah, exactly. David Bentley Hart put this very well where he said that for a lot of people on the Christian life, what they’re concerned with and what they worship is America first, or at least their own understanding of it, America tomorrow, and America forever. And you could say whatever it is that you want about this, but it is not an ethically demanding outlook.
Sargent: Well, just to finish up, all these MAGA influencers are not what you would call intellectuals, but they actually do drink pretty heavily from the stream of post-liberalism in some sense, right? If you look at someone like Charlie Kirk or Jack Posobiec, or even Laura Loomer, the ones we talked about and the things they’re saying now, what’s the continuity between the intellectual roots of the post-liberal right and what we see from these rather colorful figures there?
McManus: I think that the core continuity is this connection that they draw between their understanding of Christianity and nationalism and American nationalism in particular. Now again, I want to be clear. Some of the more intellectually refined post-liberals have a different idea of where they think the administration should go than maybe the people in the administration themselves. But that is not stopping them from getting behind and offering a theological and a philosophical gloss on these really contemptuous policies. And that’s picked up by a lot of the people who are downstream, the more intellectually rarefied ends of this movement. It’s why you see people like Charlie Kirk or Chris Rufo echoing, or JD Vance, a lot of these post-liberal ideas. And that’s why I think we need to take this movement seriously but very critically, because it’s had a very negative effect on justice in this country.
Sargent: When these right-wingers say things like the new Pope is a George Floyd fanatic, and George Floyd was a drug dealer and a criminal, and that the new pope is pro–open borders and pro-illegals, isn’t that itself downstream from these intellectual movements? How do you draw that link from the intellectual roots of the new right, the post-liberal right? How does that flow right into the ugliness we see from these influencers?
McManus: I think that what you see in a lot of forms of Christian nationalism is a distinct sense of moral superiority. Angelia Wilson wrote about this very artfully in her book, The Politics of Hate, which I recommend people look at. If you have this sense of moral superiority, which may Christian nationalists do, it becomes very, very easy to judge others in a way that you’re not supposed to. If you take Christian ethics seriously, and I don’t mean to judge them but to suppose that you are entitled to condemn them and to treat them in the worst possible terms … And again, you can call that whatever it is that you want, but you can’t characterize in any honest way as a Christian ethic. Certainly, it’s not the Christianity that I was brought up in or that my grandma taught me to take seriously.
Sargent: So the heaping of disdain and abuse on immigrants illegals, George Floyd, that’s downstream of Christian nationalism, basically.
McManus: Absolutely, right? Look, I’m not opposed to a gentle kind of patriotism, right? I’m from Canada, and I, myself, I felt a little bit patriotic recently. But that’s very different than this ethnochauvinist attitude that says because we are the best or because we are better, we are entitled to do whatever it is that we feel we need to not just in order to protect ourselves but to advance our interest. And if that means being extraordinarily selfish and extraordinarily cruel, then so be it. We’re entitled to do that. Well, to go back to that Melian doctrine, we’ve seen time and time again where that leads a country, and it is never to a good place.
Sargent: Matt McManus, thank you so much for coming on. I recommend Matt’s books to all of you, and his articles. Like I said, I’ve learned a ton from him. Thanks so much for coming on, Matt.
McManus: Yeah, thanks buddy. Let’s do it again sometime.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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