Could Catholics be the key to Trump’s opposition?

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, saidin 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.

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