Belief

Speaking to several federal workers, Wired revealed that the Department of Agriculture, Office of Management and Budget, Department of Labor and Department of Health and Human Services have all ramped up references to religion.

According to one person at the Department of Labor, the new focus on religion left a bad taste. “The vibes are bad, and people don’t like it."

“They always spend a lot of time carrying on like, ‘No one's forcing you to pray, these are voluntary,’” the employee told Wired. “But it's happening in the middle of a government workplace.”

They were particularly concerned about Alveda King, niece of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. She manages faith and community outreach at the USDA.

In January, King made comments about atheists and nonreligious people, saying they were going to Hell.

“We have different denominations, different faiths, and some have no faith — and those are the ones I would be more concerned about. If someone is totally without hope, can’t believe in anything, think the world is just falling apart, then that’s when we want justice to stand. And you bring justice every day you come to work," King told staff.

An employee told Wired, “People are uncomfortable. I know several who are offended and angry. These [worship services] are very Christian in nature.”

“I've thought about complaining, but I would worry about some form of retaliation if I were to do that, to be honest,” an employee at the Department of Labor said.

The Small Business Administration launched a Fellowship Prayer Service in March, something that staff there found "weird" and "uncomfortable."

“Honestly, I don’t know anyone who actually went to them because they are optional but it’s still uncomfortable to know that there’s a Christian prayer service happening in a government building, which is supposed to be religiously neutral," said the SBA employee.

A spokesperson for the DOL made it clear that the events are voluntary and that the service was nondenominational.

However, it has been clear to non-Protestant Christians that they aren't part of the services. On Good Friday, the Pentagon sent an email about a service and specifically called out Catholics, saying there would be no Mass. Catholics don't typically have a Mass on Good Friday.

“I guess so the Catholics know their kind ain’t welcome,” an employee, who requested anonymity, told the Huffington Post. “It’s so ridiculous.”

The Pentagon confirmed to HuffPo that there was no additional service for Catholics.

“The Protestant service is the only service scheduled in the Pentagon chapel today,” they said in a statement.

The report noted that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, "a far-right evangelical Christian, has tried to infuse his religious views into Pentagon activities."

He has openly hailed President Donald Trump as divinely appointed. The report came a week before Trump posted an AI image depicting himself as Jesus Christ. Trump claimed he thought it was a "doctor."

Even Trump's own allies questioned the move, with one far-right pastor questioning if Trump was the anti-Christ.

Meanwhile, Trump has been in his own war of words with Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope. It has played into anti-Catholic sentiment, one historian explained.

Wired cited recent data from 2025 showing that only 22.5 percent of federal workers feel safe reporting wrongdoing without fear of retaliation from superiors. In 2024, that number was 71.9 percent.

“This has never happened before,” said a USDA employee, who, like others who spoke to Wired was too fearful to have their name disclosed publicly. The Ag. Department got an email from Secretary Brooke Rollins celebrating Jesus as "the greatest story ever told."

"I have never gotten a message like this from anyone," the employee said, noting that even military chaplains don't operate like this and it's part of their job.

President Donald Trump is suffering from what one expert on Catholicism called "pope derangement syndrome," causing him to lash out against "God's messenger" Pope Leo XIV with bitter, politically charged jabs due to his fundamental misunderstanding of the role.

James V. Grimaldi is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of The National Catholic Reporter. On Tuesday, he published a piece in the New York Times calling out Trump's recent feud against the pope and accusing him of "missing the point" when it comes to the pontiff's actual role within the church.

Leo, who ascended to the head of the Catholic Church last year following the passing of Pope Francis, has emerged as something of a thorn in the side of the MAGA movement due to his statements calling for the humane and compassionate treatment of immigrants, among other issues. Most recently, his opposition to armed conflicts has drawn the ire of Trump amid his spiraling with Iran, prompting the president to lash out against him in a Sunday Truth Social post, bafflingly accusing the pope of being "WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy."

This latest escalation also came on the heels of a bombshell report revealing that the Pentagon had seemingly threatened military action against the Vatican in response to Leo's comments.

In his piece, Grimaldi stressed, as many have, that Leo's comments are not driven by partisan antipathy for Trump and MAGA, but rather by an accurate interpretation of Catholic teachings. He also noted that the cardinals who elected him last year did so with an eye to "the future in terms of the unity and strength of the Roman Catholic Church," not because they were "designating a foil for Mr. Trump."

"Pope Leo’s statements aren’t partisan barbs; they are expressions of his understanding of the Gospel and Catholic social teaching," Grimaldi explained. "For Mr. Trump to respond to them as potshots or challenges to his authority reflects a misplaced obsession with the pope and a misunderstanding of his role as the spiritual leader of more than a billion Catholics worldwide — call it pope derangement syndrome."

He continued: "For many Catholics, myself included, Leo’s words make us proud of our faith and thankful to have a pope who isn’t afraid to clearly and powerfully articulate a vision of what we consider morally and scripturally right, even if — or especially if — the church’s teaching clashes with the views of a president. But that’s not necessarily because we are Democrats or disaffected Republicans (I am neither), nor because we’re reflexively anti-Trump. It’s not because we secretly hope Leo was elected to hector the president. It’s because we Catholics believe that the pope is the Vicar of Christ, in essence God’s messenger on earth. It only follows that he would proclaim God’s message, particularly when it matters most, regardless of the political fallout."

Catholics are by and large reacting very negatively to President Donald Trump’s repeated attacks on Pope Leo XIV.

Despite denying reports that Trump officials tried to bully a Vatican representative several months ago, on Sunday the president posted a lengthy diatribe lambasting the Pope. Denouncing him as “Weak on Crime” and “Weak on Nuclear Weapons,” Trump included an AI-generated image of himself as a Jesus-like figure healing the sick with patriotic iconography in the background. He later claimed he thought the image showed him as a doctor and promoted the Red Cross before taking down the post entirely.

Trump is criticizing the Pope because Leo XIV, who was born in America as Robert Prevost, has urged him to treat immigrants more humanely and cease his unprovoked wars against Venezuela and Iran. In response to Trump’s recent posts, the Pope noted that the president did so on a social media platform he owns called Truth Social.

"It's ironic, the name of the site itself,” the Pope said. “Say no more.”

Speaking to AlterNet about Trump’s anti-Pope statements, Christendom College associate professor of history Dr. Christopher Shannon explained that he is participating in a larger history of U.S. anti-Catholic sentiment.

“Anti-Catholicism is baked into Anglo-American political culture,” Shannon told AlterNet. “During the Revolution, patriot leaders from [future president] John Adams to Thomas Paine repeatedly denounced British oppression in language drawn directly from earlier denunciations of the Catholic Church. For example, in Common Sense, Paine likened monarchy to ‘popery.’”

Shannon elaborated on how the so-called American Party thrived during the mid-19th Century on a platform of opposing mass immigration, especially from Catholics. Millard Fillmore, then a former president, won the second-highest vote ever accrued for a third-party candidate (22 percent) when he ran in the 1856 presidential election on an explicitly anti-Catholic ticket.

“Even up to 1960, [America’s first Catholic president John] Kennedy had to respond to a fear of a papal takeover of America were he to be elected,” Shannon pointed out. “Popes [e.g., Leo XIII (1878-1903)] sometimes had good things to say about America, yet no pope clearly endorsed modern democracy and religious pluralism, so the papacy was always suspect in the eyes of non-Catholic Americans. In 1965, the Second Vatican Council, under Pope Paul VI, issued a document that finally affirmed the legitimacy of democracy and religious pluralism. After that, tensions greatly decreased.” Yet even then, President Ronald Reagan aroused controversy from anti-Catholic groups when he appointed an ambassador to the Vatican City in 1984 — the first such diplomat in US history.

It is into this fraught context that Trump stepped when he attacked the Pope, a decision Shannon speculated was made because “Trump thinks [it] is about him. He thinks everything is about him.” He disagreed with Trump’s insinuation that Leo XIV owes his papacy to the idea that he would somehow be a pro-Trump pope.

“As far as Leo XIV, I suppose his status as an American had something to do with his election, but it is important to remember that he is as much the second Latin American pope (after Francis) as he is the first United States pope,” Shannon wrote. “Most of his episcopal career has been in Peru. He certainly had no public profile in the Church in the United States. He cannot be pigeon-holed into either of the ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ sides of the internal Catholic culture war. Though American by birth, he is perhaps the least American of bishops because he refuses to take sides in what, considering the global nature of the Catholic Church, is a very petty squabble.”

Given that Pope Leo XIV has a global rather than specifically American outlook to his papacy, American Trump supporters (including, as the president pointed out, the Pope’s big brother and Navy veteran Louis Prevost) now need to choose between their loyalty to basic Catholic principles and their loyalty to the president. Drawing from recent history to understand precedents, Shannon predicted they would do so by ignoring seeming contradictions between their religious and their political beliefs.

“John Paul II and Benedict XVI both spoke out against the second Iraq War [when they were popes], but American Catholics did not, as a unified people, follow their lead,” Shannon told AlterNet. “Conservative Catholics supported the war for conservative reasons, liberal Catholics opposed the war (mostly) for liberal reasons. I do not see the recent dust up between Trump and Leo changing this. Catholic Trump supporters will likely dismiss this as ‘Trump being Trump,’ and anti-Trump Catholics didn’t need any more reasons to oppose Trump.”

Landon Schnabel, an associate professor of sociology at Cornell University, argued that Trump’s attack against the Pope could fray the already-tenuous alliance between Christian evangelicals and Catholics.

“The Catholic-evangelical alliance that anchors the religious right was always more fragile than it appeared,” Schnabel said in a statement. “Catholics and evangelicals were adversaries for most of American history — John F. Kennedy had to reassure voters his pope wouldn't run the country. They eventually built a coalition around shared cultural traditionalism: abortion, family, sexuality, and religious authority in public life. That project held for four decades.”

Schnabel added, “But coalitions forged on one set of issues are vulnerable when new issues expose the theological differences underneath. The Iran war is doing exactly that. Defense Secretary Hegseth prays at the Pentagon for ‘overwhelming violence’ in the name of Jesus Christ and frames the war as divinely ordained. Pope Leo quotes Isaiah in response: God ‘does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.’ Two traditions that agreed on abortion have very different theologies of war. Conservative Catholics who have supported Trump may now feel the need to decide between him and the pope.”

Kim Haines-Eitzen, a Cornell professor of ancient Mediterranean religions and expert on early Christianity, had a scathing assessment of Trump’s AI image of himself as Christ.

“Throughout Christian history, there have been many who claimed to be Christ or claimed Christ’s divine authority,” Haines-Eitzen explained in a statement, citing infamous cult leaders like Sun Myung Moon, Jim Jones, Charles Manson and David Koresh of the Branch Davidians.

“The question now is whether Trump’s so-called Christian base will be willing to speak out against what has long been considered blasphemy throughout Christian history,” Haines-Eitzen added. “It is one thing for Christian preachers and leaders to encourage fellow Christians to live in Christ-like ways — giving to charity, caring for the poor, offering forgiveness. It is another thing for a president to present himself as Christ.”

Speaking to ABC 7 Chicago, a major regional news network from the Pope’s home (the Chicago metropolitan area), a pair of ordinary Catholics expressed dismay at Trump’s statements about the Pope.

“As a Christian and a Catholic, I've had enough,” said one man wearing a Chicago Cubs cap. (The Pope’s favorite baseball team are the Cubs’ crosstown rivals, the Chicago White Sox.) “I've just had enough. I've supported many things he's done. I'm actually in favor of what we're doing in Iran, but this country needs real leadership, and what we're getting now is an absolute disgrace. And Americans need to stand up because it's disgusting.”

Similarly a self-described Catholic parishioner said “I think it's deplorable that the President of the United States would take aim at our first American pope. And instead of working together and having an understanding, to attack is the wrong way to do it.”

Among Catholics in Long Island — which is home to 1.2 million baptized Catholics, one of the largest dioceses in the country, and is near Trump’s childhood home of Queens — there is similar disapproval. Bishop John Barres, head of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, said that his diocese joins "Pope Leo XIV in calling for peace, especially in the Middle East and in places where Christians are persecuted for their faith. We pray for and support our Holy Father in the mission of Christ's mercy and the proclamation of the Gospel—Blessed are the peacemakers."

Richard Koubek, a former public policy advocate at Catholic Charities on Long Island, told Newsday that "President Trump, who revels in the support of Christian nationalists, thinks Pope Leo is ‘too liberal.' That is quite ironic since Leo is simply proclaiming ancient Christian values that emphasize peace, care for the poor and marginalized. ... Does he think the Gospels are too liberal?"

A pro-Trump Catholic named Mike Ferrara said that while he agrees with Trump over the Pope on specific policy issues, he is unhappy with Trump’s disrespectful tone.

"I’m a Trump supporter,” Ferrara said. “I like Trump. But the way he talks about the pope, I’m not really thrilled about that. The pope is the leader of our church. As a Catholic, I don’t want to see the pope get attacked."

Regarding the AI image, Ferrara argued that "you don’t emulate Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is Jesus Christ."

Trump’s attack on the Pope is also unpopular in Nashville, a Tennessee city with a large Catholic population and influential Catholic voices like right-wing commentators Michael Knowles and Candace Owens.

“I assumed someone has already told him, but it behooves the President both spiritually and politically to delete the picture, no matter the intent,” Knowles said on social media. Meanwhile Owens, reflecting on the rumored 2028 presidential ambitions of Trump’s Catholic vice president, posted on social media that Trump’s war with the Pope “will be consequential for JD Vance.”

Even in Italy, the nation where the Vatican is effectively located, the Italian prime minister disregarded the fact that both she and Trump are right-wingers to slam his attacks on Pope Leo XIV.

“I find President Trump’s remarks about the Holy Father unacceptable,” Meloni said in a statement. “The Pope is the head of the Catholic Church, and it is right and proper that he call for peace and condemn all forms of war.”

Italian politicians across that country’s political spectrum agreed with Meloni’s position.

During the 1980s, the late Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr. said of President Ronald Reagan's foreign policy, "God is on our side." And one of the people who called out such rhetoric as dangerous was arch-conservative GOP Sen. Barry Goldwater, himself an ardent Reagan supporter. Goldwater was known for his hawkish views on foreign policy, but he had no use for far-right Christian fundamentalists who saw the Pentagon as a vehicle for "holy war."

Many years later, in 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others in the MAGA movement are promoting President Donald Trump's war against Iran as a fight for fundamentalist Christianity — which New York Times columnist Frank Bruni views as a dangerous trend.

Bruni, in his April 13 column, warns, "I guess a zealot, by nature, can't hide — too extreme are his convictions, too grand his designs, too consuming his arrogance. And so, over recent weeks, Pete Hegseth has fully revealed himself. He has made clear that every missile the United States fires, every bomb it drops, every Iranian it kills, is for Jesus. Praise be the Lord, who has given America the power to wipe out an entire civilization. That's what President Trump threatened to do — in an intermittently jaunty social media post, no less — and Hegseth gave no indication of unwillingness to execute that order."

Bruni continues, "He brandishes assertions about God’s will with the exaggerated brio of an electronics merchant pressing fliers on pedestrians passing by his new megastore: Have I got a holy war for you. Embrace the death. Exult over the destruction. What only looks like hell is a ticket to heaven."

The Times columnist stresses, however, that not all Christians share Hegseth's view that the Trump Administration is fighting a "holy war" in the Iran conflict.

"In this era of the extraordinary," Bruni observes, "Pope Leo XIV has taken the unusual step of publicly and specifically rebuking the Trump Administration's assertion of divine approval for the war against Iran…. In a social media post on Friday, (April 10), he wrote: 'God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.'"

Bruni continues, "That was hardly the Pope's first reprimand. During a mass just before Easter, he voiced his concern that the Christian mission had been 'distorted by a desire for domination, entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.' And before that, he cautioned that Jesus 'does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.' The Pope's preoccupation obviously reflects all the talk of God, God, God from Hegseth and from Trump, whose piety is profound when that's convenient."

In recent days we learned that Pope Leo will likely not visit the United States during Trump’s presidency and declined an invite to the 250th birthday celebrations.

The tensions between the Vatican and the U.S. have been clear as Leo has slammed Trump for his brutal attacks on immigrants and, now, his reckless war in Iran, in which Trump threatened to “wipe out” an entire civilization.

A report has now surfaced that the Pentagon—not the State Department—called the Vatican’s ambassador in for a meeting in January after the pope’s state of the world speech in which he criticized Trump’s military moves. And the Vatican emissary was given a stark warning. From AL.com:

A Trump administration official gave the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States a “bitter lecture” about America’s military might and suggested the Catholic Church get on board with American foreign policy after Pope Leo XIV gave a speech condemning use of force and preaching diplomacy, according to a new report.
Cardinal Chrisophe Pierre, who at the time of the January meeting was the Holy See’s ambassador to the U.S., was summoned by Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby to the Pentagon in an unprecedented move, the Free Press reported Monday.
Pentagon officials “picked apart” the American pontiff’s January speech, “reading it as a hostile message directed at Trump’s policies,” according to the outlet’s sources. The Pentagon was reportedly furious that the speech challenged Trump’s so-called Donroe Doctrine that the Western Hemisphere should be controlled by the United States.
At one point during the meeting, according to the Free Press, “one U.S. official went so far as to invoke the Avignon Papacy, the period in the 1300s when the French Crown leveraged its military power to dominate the papal authority.”

Pope Francis was preparing for just this kind of battle before he died, seeing Trump as a threat to the world. I wrote back when the conclave chose Leo in May of last year about how Francis shepherded Leo into the job. I figured this was a good time to repost it.

May 9, 2025

With the arrival of Pope Leo XIV, much of the media has emphasized the mystery of the papal conclave, focusing on cryptic rituals, traditions shrouded in secrecy, and deep solemnity—which sells and keeps people riveted—when there are some things that are pretty clear as day regarding the politics of the selection of Chicago-born Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost. And even MAGA world sees that, and is in a full-blown meltdown over it.

The Catholic church is a global institution with huge cultural impact. As a nation state, The Vatican, with embassies and diplomats all over the world, and a presence at the U.N., has a head of state who has outsized power. The pope has a massive political platform. Certainly Francis sought to influence public policy, in the U.S. and in countries around the world.

And, as I noted last week, Francis was a smart politician—unlike his predecessor, Benedict, who was a lousy politician, a man led by the impulsiveness of his zealous conservatism, rarely making strategic decisions.

It’s clear that Francis knew—or certainly tried to ensure—that Prevost would be the next pope, desiring to have someone who would continue his direction for the church, away from the conservative American church’s ideologies and emphasis. Francis had named the vast majority of the cardinals who voted on his successor, and they were loyal to him—and likely loyal to his wishes if indeed he’d lobbied them prior to his death.

Francis brought Prevost to the Vatican in 2023—making him a cardinal, and thus eligible to be pope, only two years ago—to further learn the intricacies of the Vatican (and, by default, the papacy), obviously grooming him for the job. Francis put Prevost in charge of the office in the church that vets bishop nominations from around the world, one of the most powerful offices in the Vatican, tasked with reshaping the church’s leadership.

It involved choosing new bishops upon retirements, but also sometimes removing church leaders and replacing them because they were trouble. Prevost worked alongside Francis in the two years before his death, a critical time. That was when Francis was seeking to reshape the American church’s hierarchy, as I wrote at the time, which for years has been deeply enmeshed in GOP—and MAGA—politics.

It was during that two-year period when there were big moves, such as Francis’ firing of Bishop Robert Strickland of Tyler, Texas—an icon of extremist MAGA Catholics—who defied Francis’ teachings. It was also during that time that Cardinal Raymond Burke was booted from his palatial Vatican apartment and sent packing. He was a Trump-supporting Covid denier who was making a fortune on the MAGA speaking circuit in the U.S.—and someone who also defied Francis’ reforms.

Prevost was there for all that and was deeply involved in helping carry out those decisions.

Before taking that job in Rome, however, Prevost, who was born in Chicago and educated in the U.S. and had spent his early years as a priest in the Midwest, was in the field as a missionary in Peru, where he also became a citizen of that country. He was Apostolic Administrator of Chiclayo, then named the Bishop of Chiclayo by Francis in 2015, where he served until Francis brought him to Rome in 2023 and made him a cardinal.

He got the experience as a missionary—a life experience that was vital to Francis’ outlook in reaching the people and getting beyond the church’s stone buildings—and then came to the Vatican to work with Francis in his last two years.

Francis may have had a few people in mind whom he was preparing over the years, but it was Prevost he clearly seemed focused on near the end of his life. The cardinals’ selection of Prevost, an American, sent shock waves through the world of church scholars and pundits, since no one expected an American to become pope because the U.S. has traditionally been seen as having too much power already.

But I believe having an American as pope at this point in time was part of Francis’ plan. Prevost was active in recent months on X. He hadn’t posted in all of 2024, but this year he slammed JD Vance, among other posts criticizing the Trump administration. I don’t think any of this was an accident, as these social media posts would become big news—which they are—upon the pope’s death and Provost’s becoming Pope Leo, sending a very clear message.

One opinion piece from The Catholic Standard that Provost re-posted just a few weeks ago was written by the auxiliary bishop of Washington, DC, Bishop Evelio Menjivar, who is from El Salvador and had been an undocumented immigrant himself for many years. It’s a powerful piece slamming the Trump administration:

The video of a student being accosted by masked agents after her visa was revoked without notice – apparently because of an op-ed she co-wrote years ago – is horrifying. Most egregiously, the government has now claimed the authority to unilaterally seize certain people based on mere suspicion, or because of their tattoos, and send them to a prison in El Salvador accused of human rights abuses – all without review by a court to even determine their identity. The government admits some have been wrongfully deported, but officials are fighting attempts to right these wrongs.
More than a few natural-born Americans are saying they do not recognize their country anymore, but many of us from other lands recognize all too well the terror of people being snatched by secret police and disappeared. We left our former countries precisely to get away from it.

It’s also noteworthy that Prevost chose Leo for his name, meant to signify his carrying on the work of Pope Leo XIII, who was known as the father of social justice. In his 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum, Pope Leo outlined the rights of workers to a fair wage, safety in the workplace, and the ability to form labor unions. Interestingly, the previous Pope Leo served from 1878 to 1903, during the entire presidency of Trump’s favorite president, William McKinley, the fanatic on tariffs who also emboldened big business to trample on workers.

Provost also criticized Trump often in his first term, on issues such as gun violence and immigration. I believe Francis understood the need for a pope who is from this culture, who speaks English fluently, who spars in his own voice on social media, and who could sit down with American television interviewers and lay out the case against harsh policies and attacks on the marginalized.

While the U.S. is just one country among many, and while the church is growing much more in Asia and Africa, Francis had to see—as many of us have—that right now Trump is an existential threat to everything in the world that is held sacred, including the Catholic church itself. The Vatican is smack dab in the middle of the European Union, under attack by Trump’s trade war and by the U.S.’s encouragement of Vladimir Putin’s encroachment on Europe. And the Vatican is surely impacted by any weakening of NATO.

But it’s, of course, beyond self-preservation. The causes that Francis promoted—supporting migrants, helping the poor and marginalized, saving the planet—are under assault.

We don’t know a lot about Leo’s recent beliefs and positions on women in the church, LBGTQ rights and other issues. Like Francis himself, he showed some hostility to gay rights many years ago—almost 15 years ago, in fact—but like Francis, he likely evolved, like many other leaders.

He recently remained open—though not fully committed—to Francis’s having allowed blessings of same-sex unions. And he has supported Francis’s commitment to “synodality”—diverse inclusiveness from grassroots lay people in the church—which the American conservatives in the church have fiercely opposed. My hunch is that Francis told him to keep his powder dry on the issue—as Francis did before he was pope—but we’ll know in time.

What is true is that there is no going back now to the archconservatives. Francis’s legacy lives on. And there is now a voice in the Vatican who is both a citizen of Peru and the U.S., someone whose maternal grandparents were Creole people of color from Louisiana. And he is someone with an enormous platform, who looks like he will be an outspoken home-grown counterpoint for all Americans—and the world—to the brutality of the Trump era.

When U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to destroy "a whole civilization" in Iran in an April 7 post on his Truth Social platform, the comment drew scathing condemnation not only from countless liberals, progressives and centrist Democrats, but also, from many Never Trump conservatives and libertarians. Even some far-right MAGA influencers, including Infowars' Alex Jones, former Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), are calling Trump out.

Yet in far-right white evangelical circles, Trump still has plenty of loyal supporters.

In a biting article published on April 10, Salon's Amanda Marcotte argues that white evangelicals' feelings of "persecution" are helping fuel a "disastrous" war.

"For over a decade now, the Christian Right has deflected criticism of Trump's immorality and sadism by insisting they are facing persecution for their religious beliefs," Marcotte explains. "In their minds, they are the real victims of a culture gone to hell, and they see the president as their only hope to beat back these imaginary forces of oppression. Nothing, it seems, can shatter this persecution complex. As the Iran war continues to become an ever-bigger disaster, evangelicals are clinging harder than ever to the notion that because they need to defeat their fictional persecutors, Trump's myriad flaws are excusable and forgivable."

Far-right white evangelicals' "paranoid anger," Marcotte argues, is so extreme that they even view "devout Catholics" like Pope Leo XIV as persecutors.

"Regardless of what is being said in private to Catholic leaders," Marcotte observes, "it's clear that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his allies are furious at the pontiff for undermining their efforts to frame this war as a Christian enterprise — and are suggesting that those who oppose it are the equivalent of Christ's persecutors…. (Pastor) Doug Wilson, who heads the denomination Hegseth belongs to, demonstrated how valuable the phony Christian persecution narrative is for conservatives who need an excuse to stick by the (Trump) Administration amid the Iran debacle…. In the real world, Hegseth is a belligerent official who relishes threatening Iranians with 'death and destruction from above.' But in Wilson’s telling, the defense secretary is a humble servant of God, besieged on all sides by the faithless in their ongoing war against Christ's followers."

Marcotte adds, " As the administration's skirmish with Pope Leo shows, though, it's getting harder for the Christian Right to package the Iran war as a product of God's love — even to followers who have a long history of swallowing all sorts of cruelty in the name of Christ…. Some who have been among the president's loudest supporters in the past, like former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and podcaster Tucker Carlson, are now proclaiming that this war goes against everything Christians should stand for. In an effort to bring critics like these back in line, many evangelical leaders are clinging to false narratives of religious persecution."

A journalist with The Catholic Herald has confirmed that the Pentagon attacked Pope Leo XIV and the Catholic Church. What appears to be in dispute, however, is which U.S. Pentagon official made the threat.

Niwa Limbu, an accredited Vatican correspondent, wrote on X that two sources said it was not Elbridge Colby who threatened the Vatican in a closed-door meeting this week. The DOD's undersecretary of defense for policy had been accused by The Free Press of being the source of a "bitter lecture."

"The United States has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side," he was accused of saying.

But Limbu said that details about Colby are now in dispute.

In a post on X, Limbu said that Cardinal Christophe Pierre suggested over the phone that there was a media blackout over the topic. His Eminence commented, "I would prefer not to speak."

Holy See Press Office aide Matteo Bruni also declined to comment on the Pentagon meeting.

Writer and humorist Emily Zanotti, who is Catholic, argued that it isn't unusual for the Vatican to screw up PR.

She also had a few comments on getting down to the truth on Vatican issues.

"A few things can be true here: 1) It doesn’t quite make sense why the PENTAGON summoned a Vatican ambassador; 2) Bringing up Avignon is straight up insane, if it happened, which seems likely, and that’s aggressive towards Catholics," she wrote.

She also pointed out that she doesn't believe Christopher Hale is a reliable source. She wondered if "the Vatican probably just went 'WTF' and moved on, and until an actually reliable source, like @PillarCatholic confirms any Vatican response, you simply shouldn’t believe any suggestions."

Vice President JD Vance told reporters he wants to get the situation sorted out.

“I would actually like to talk to Cardinal Christophe Pierre and, frankly, to our people, to figure out what actually happened,” he said. “I think it’s always a bad idea to offer an opinion on stories that are unconfirmed and uncorroborated, so I’m not going to do that.”

There is a larger conversation in the Catholic community because Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's brand of Christian nationalism, and the broader evangelical-focused "MAGA" movement, has made Catholics feel unwelcome. The DOD was criticized last week for having a "Protestant-only" Good Friday service. Typically, there isn't a mass on Good Friday. What was odd to some, however, is that the email sent to all staffers singled out Catholics when it didn't need to.

"There will be a Protestant Service (No Catholic Mass) for Good Friday today at the Pentagon Chapel,” the email read last week.

Anti-Catholicism dates back generations. President John F. Kennedy's candidacy was in question as voters wondered whether he was loyal to the U.S. or the Vatican.

Hegseth's pastor, Doug Wilson, has a history of anti-Catholicism that is well documented. As Right Wing Watch reported in March, Wilson explained in his ideal Christian nation, “public displays of idolatry” would be banned, including Catholic parades. Wilson is one of many in the Trump administration with some anti-Catholic sentiment and antisemitic beliefs, an MS NOW column explained.

Amid the escalating attacks against Pope Leo XIV by the Trump administration, a Jesuit priest hit back, claiming that the conflict was not the result of the religious leader being "woke," but rather American conservatives "veering deeper into heresy."

President Donald Trump and his allies have been in a feud of sorts with the American Pope since he ascended to the role last spring and began espousing views counter to the MAGA agenda, including respect and dignity for immigrants, as well as opposition to armed conflicts. The feud reached a new high this week after Christopher Hale, a chronicler for Pope Leo XIV, revealed that the Trump administration has effectively threatened to declare war on the Vatican over the pontiff's stances.

"In January, behind closed doors at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre — Pope Leo XIV’s then-ambassador to the United States — and delivered a lecture," Hale explained.

Colby is purported to have told the ambassador, "America has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side."

The ongoing tension between the administration and the Pope has sparked widespread debate, with Trump loyalists claiming the Catholic leader has abandoned the church's ideals in favor of the MAGA movement's much-hated "woke" ideologies, while critics have argued that Leo and his predecessor Pope Francis have merely been correctly embodying the church's teachings about compassion.

Those arguments were embodied on Wednesday evening in a post to X by Jeremy Zipple, a documentary filmmaker and associate pastor for the St. Martin de Porres Catholic Church in Belize. Zipple responded to a post from another user, also arguing against the "woke" characterization of Pope Leo XIV.

"The Pope is not 'woke,'" user Scott Barber wrote. "What you’re witnessing is a millennia of Catholic social teaching developed over countless encyclicals and the lifework of a vast cloud of witnesses to the love of Christ towards the whole world."

"The Pope is not 'woke' so much as US evangelicalism has been veering deeper into heresy for quite some time now & dragging too many Catholics along with it," Zipple added in his own post. "And the Church is finally saying enough is enough."

President Donald Trump’s Christian nationalist supporters see that their most powerful leader is “falling apart” and now must believe he is “persecuted like Jesus,” according to an expert on religious studies.

"They need to make sure that, lest their followers hear an anti-war message from another MAGA figure, that their allegiance remains to Trump, who God sent to save Christian America, and who demands your adoration no matter what,” journalist and Christian right expert Sarah Posner wrote for Talking Points Memo on Monday. Posner was describing the Trump administration’s unexpected and unprovoked war against Iran, one that many Trump supporters would otherwise oppose given their usual stance against foreign interventionism. To square that circle, though, they argue that Trump is in power through divine will.

"As Trump flounders in the prosecution of his war on Iran, his evangelical loyalists are feverishly closing ranks, including during a Holy Week marked by Trump’s and Hegseth’s Christianity-infused bloodlust, which prompted papal rebukes,” Posner wrote. “But Trump’s evangelicals are facing multi-front challenges to what they would like to portray as their dominance in the MAGA coalition, and their claim to represent the ‘true’ American Christianity. That is why they are intensifying their messaging that Trump is divine, that he is persecuted like Jesus was, that his war is destroying Iran and protecting Israel from Iranian savagery, all while igniting a Christian revival in America.”

Posner added, “They need to make sure that, lest their followers hear an anti-war message from another MAGA figure, that their allegiance remains to Trump, who God sent to save Christian America, and who demands your adoration no matter what."

At the same time, despite their desperate attempts to shore up Trump’s reputation, "the problem for them is that Trump, their anointed one, is falling apart,” Posner wrote. She later observed that “their pursuit of Christian supremacy through Trump now depends on their followers continuing to accept their reality-defying portrayals of the president at war."

This is not Posner’s first takedown of Trump and the Christian nationalists that keep him in power. Last month she told The New Republican that their religiosity fuels their acceptance of war crimes.

"Christian reconstructionism holds that biblical law is superior to civil law and that the Bible — biblical law — should govern every aspect of life: your personal life for sure, but also political life, military life,” Posner said. “So to Hegseth, this biblical law — the interpretation of which would be contested by different scholars or adherents to the Bible — but his version of biblical law is superior to the Pentagon's own internal military law, American civil law, and also, importantly, when we're talking about Hegseth and the prosecution of this unjust, illegal war, that it is superior to international law and the rules of engagement in war and military conflicts.”

Posner has also argued that the Trump/Hegseth version of Christianity can be inherently violent.

"Hegseth is expressing an extreme version of Christian supremacy, where America, a Christian nation, is entitled, and in fact probably, in his mind, required by God, to smite America's enemies — or to smite the enemies of Christianity, even,” Posner explained. “When we talk about Christian nationalism, this is exactly what we're talking about. But the important thing to remember with Hegseth, in contrast to other versions of Christian nationalism that we see more commonly in the Republican Party, is that his is a very extreme version of Christian supremacy where we Christians are entitled to go out and take dominion over the world, to vanquish enemies, and to do so violently — and even when they do so violently, with the express mandate from God."

Perhaps as a symbol of their opposition to secularism, Trump announced in March that he is ripping out White House fixtures installed by President Thomas Jefferson, who famously insisted on a strict separation between church and state. While serving as president from 1801 to 1809, Jefferson famously wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptists that “believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

President Donald Trump is forcing “religious nuttery” on the rest of the United States through the military, according to an ex-adviser to a different Republican president.

“I want this religious extremism, I want this religious nuttery, I want this religious nationalism, I want this evil buried under a concrete f—— sarcophagus,” Steve Schmidt, a podcaster who was once a top adviser to President George W. Bush, said on Sunday. “Do not disappoint the president. Tell me how you do that. How do we get this out?”

Ken Harbaugh, a former United States Navy pilot and Democratic congressional candidate, told Schmidt that Hegseth’s attitude demoralizes more than a quarter of US troops.

“I think one of the things that Hegseth clearly does not understand is how demoralizing his Christian nationalism is — how the military, while they used to laugh at him, are now appalled when he gives these speeches about ‘the lamentations of our enemies’ and ‘God will not hear their prayers,’” Harbaugh told Schmidt. “I don't know how someone has not briefed him that fully 30 percent of the American military identifies as non-Christian. And of the remaining 70 percent, I don't think most of them are hearing speeches about ‘Bashing your enemies’ heads against the wall’ and thinking, ‘Let's go kill some bad guys.’ They see the problem in that.”

After adding that even most military chaplains understand that Christianity should not be preached by people in charge, even as they also agree it is perfectly okay to pray in uniform.

“The job of the chaplaincy — the job of even a committed leader in the military, someone committed to their faith — is the mission first, and you have to find a way to subordinate your personal feelings to that mission,” Harbaugh told Schmidt. “And when you don't, you get what you see in Pete Hegseth, which is someone who puts his own... He's exorcising his own personal demons using the most powerful military force in the world. And I think that is especially dangerous.”

Hegseth has also been criticized by veterans for abusing his office to settle political scores.

"The very first sentence of Secretary Pete Hegseth's cover memo…. is retrospective and retributive, rather than prospective and mission-oriented," wrote retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling for The Bulwark in January regarding an explicit partisan document attributed to Hegseth. "Strategy documents…. are not vehicles for settling political scores; they are meant to speak to a professional force tasked with executing national objectives under extreme risk."

Hegesth is not the only Christian nationalist in a position of power in America’s military-industrial complex. Trump’s billionaire ally and military technology supplier, Palantir Chairman Peter Thiel, insists that he is an expert on the Antichrist and his version of Christianity is literal truth.

“Thiel’s evangelism is another example of how the right has strategically co-opted Christian religious teachings to provide support for their autocratic tendencies, as well as their fears about technology being limited through ‘woke’ beliefs,” Anthea Butler, chair of the University of Pennsylvania Department of Religious Studies, explained in a Tuesday editorial for MSNOW.

U.S. President Donald Trump is defending his war with Iran as a campaign against terrorism and extremism, repeatedly saying that the regime in Tehran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. But critics of Trump's Iran policy, including retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling — former commander of U.S. Army Europe — believe that he is only adding to the instability in that part of the world.

Another critic is Virginia-based counterterrorism expert Erfan Fard.

In an op-ed published by The Hill on April 3, Fard argues that Trump's war could leave Iran with a militarized regime that is even more dangerous and fanatical than the current Shiite fundamentalist government.

"In public, the Shiite mullahs dominate Iran, but operational authority has, over time, concentrated within the security apparatus — the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the intelligence services and the security networks," Fard explains. "War has only accelerated this shift. Under external pressure, the regime has thus moved not toward reform or negotiation, but toward militarization. The decapitation of senior commanders and the targeting of main hubs has weakened the system, but it has also created an opening for radical elites to move up."

The U.S. has a long history of pushing regime change in Iran. In the early 1950s, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, a socialist, was overthrown with the help of the CIA.

After that, the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, ruled the country for many years before his overthrow in 1979. Pahlavi led a dictatorship, yet he favored a modernist view of Islam and had close relations with the United States and other western democracies. The Pahlavi government, in 1979, was replaced by a severe theocracy based on Shiite Islam and led by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Trump's war, Fard emphasizes, won't be the end of strict Islamist rule in Iran — and could make it even worse.

"Paradoxically, U.S. and Israeli air power may succeed in degrading the regime's forces and nuclear infrastructure while failing to reduce — even increasing — Tehran's leverage," Fard writes. "The result will be a weaker but more radical and authoritarian state sitting astride the Strait of Hormuz. This could prove even more dangerous to regional stability and the global economy than the system it is replacing."

MS NOW host Joe Scarborough started off Friday's show by discussing the Thursday firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi, noting that she is another example of people who still didn't last in President Donald Trump's world of demands.

Former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said that stand-in Todd Blanche should understand the Justice Department, given that he cut his teeth in the Southern District of New York. Swapping Bondi with Blanche is only shuffling the chairs it won't get Trump to his desired demands.

"Well, yeah, and Jeanine Pirro thinks that she may, you know, she's pitching herself," said Scarborough. "I mean, you look at what's happened with her and, you know, she's running rightfully into the same brick walls Pam Bondi did legally when she tried to go after six U.S. Senators for stating the law."

Trump has an enemies list that reporters have said he wants action on, but the problem is that there is no evidence to secure an indictment against the list of people. That's why Bondi was fired. which includes Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calf.), New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey. Two of those three were indicted, but the indictments were dismissed. Pirro hasn't been able to secure an indictment in several cases, including those at the local level, where individuals insulted federal agents on the ground in Washington, D.C.

Scarborough recalled when she tried to go after Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, Pirro failed there too.

Powell is "somebody who's doing his best day in and day out to keep this country and its economy moving forward despite a lot of erratic decisions that are being made out of the White House, that are making the feds challenge all the more greater."

"But, you know, Rev. Al [Sharpton], it seems that — here's the cover of the Times," he said, holding up the front page of the Friday headlines, announcing Trump's firing of Bondi.

"It seems that Pam Bondi learned the same lesson that [Gen.] James Mattis learned, that Gen. John Kelly learned, that Gary Cohn learned, and that Bill Barr learned. You go down the list of all the people who have been fired from the Trump administration in the first and second terms, and there's no amount of kissing up to him. There's no amount of biting your tongue. There's no amount of putting up with it because of your fears that the next person is going to be worse. That will ultimately save you from firing and humiliation," Scarborough said.

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MS NOW host and former GOP congressman Joe Scarborough ripped into President Donald Trump's spiritual advisor over her recent comments comparing his life to the struggles of Jesus Christ.

Pastor Paula White-Cain is a television evangelist known for her various faith advisory roles across Trump's political career, dating back to his 2016 presidential campaign. She currently serves as a senior advisor for the White House Faith Office, which did not exist until Trump created it in the first month of his second term.

White-Cain gave an address at the White House on Wednesday during an event commemorating Easter, where, alongside Trump, she compared his recent troubles to the life of Christ, raising the eyebrows of more than a few observers in the process.

"Jesus taught us so many lessons through his death, burial and resurrection," White-Cain said. "He showed us great leadership. Great transformation requires great sacrifice. And Mr President, no one has paid the price like you have paid the price. It almost cost you your life. You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It's a familiar pattern that our lord and savior showed us, but it didn't end there for him and it didn't end there for you. God always had a plan."

One of those stunned observers was Scarborough, who, during a Friday broadcast of his MS NOW show, Morning Joe, tore apart White-Cain for comparing Trump to Jesus, something he called "grotesque" and "unchristlike," and saying that he would "pray" for anyone else who might think similarly, not just about Trump, but for any politician.

"Let me just say, as someone who grew up in the church [since] probably the week I came home from the hospital, that may have been one of the most grotesque, unchristlike things I've ever heard in my life," Scarborough said. "To compare any politician to Jesus Christ. It's just grotesque."

He continued: "She's a heretic. It certainly sounds like a heretic there... Again it shows us what a bizarre age we are in. That is, there are no words. And for evangelicals out there still pretending that this is normal, that would pretend that that is normal,
just know I will be praying for you tonight."

Scarborough then welcomed a panel of guests for a segment on religion, including author and political commentator John Fugelsang, whom he pressed for a reaction to White-Cain's comments.

"You know, watching that, I'm reminded that the only way you can support both Donald Trump and Jesus is if you've never read either one of their books," Fugelsang said. "Because, friends, the only things Donald Trump has in common with Jesus are that they both spent a lot of time with prostitutes, and they both use ghostwriters."

In the late 19th Century, women gained the right to vote in some states and municipalities. But it wasn't until the U.S. Constitution's 19th Amendment was adopted in 1920 that voting became a national right for U.S. women — millions of whom voted for the first time in the 1920 presidential election, which found Republican Warren G. Harding defeating Democratic nominee James M. Cox by roughly 26 percent (Cox's running mate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, went on to enjoy a landslide presidential victory in 1932).

The 19th Amendment has been considered settled law for more than a century. But during Donald Trump's second presidency, more and more evangelical Christian nationalists are seriously calling for the 19th Amendment to be abolished — including Pastor Doug Wilson, a close ally of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

In an article published on April 2, New York Times reporter Vivian Yee takes a look at Christian fundamentalists who believe women should lose the right to vote. This proposal, according to Yee, is now "gaining adherents beyond the fringe" — and they believe that The 19th Amendment "drove America into national decline."

"Instead, they support 'household voting': one household, one vote — the husband's," Yee explains. "While many Americans would see this as an unthinkable regression to a time when women were treated as second-class Americans, proponents of the concept believe deeply that this arrangement is what God envisioned in a marriage. If, a decade ago, the idea was just another extreme provocation, today it is gaining adherents beyond the fringe."

Yee adds, "Male influencers and podcasters in the ultra-conservative corner of the internet known as the Manosphere often push to 'repeal the 19th,' and far-right young women have also backed the idea…. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared a clip, last summer, of pastors in his ultra-conservative denomination, which holds that America is a Christian nation whose laws should reflect Christian tenets, arguing that women should be barred from voting."

Beth Allison Barr, a history professor at Baylor University, has changed the way she discusses fundamentalist proposals to repeal the 19th Amendment.

Barr told the New York Times, "I used to teach this as, 'This is this fringe thing that's out there.' Now, I teach it as, 'This is no longer fringe.'"

Yee notes that while "repealing the 19th Amendment would require approval by three-quarters of the states," other MAGA proposals — including the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (the SAVE or SAVE America Act) — wouldn't make it illegal for women to vote but would make it more difficult.

"Some obstacles to women voting could come sooner," Yee observes. "President Trump and Republican allies are pushing legislation that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, a restriction that opponents say could disenfranchise the many women whose married names do not match those on their birth certificates or other documents."

President Donald Trump and his advisers forget that America was not founded as a Christian nation, a former aide to a different Republican president warned on Tuesday.

“The separation of church and state is foundational to American civilization,” Steve Schmidt, who advised President George W. Bush, said on his Substack. “In fact, on the list of the greatest American inventions, the two at the top — competing for gold and silver — are the peaceful transition of power and the separation of church and state. These are brilliant ideas, the greatest in all of history.”

Yet according to Schmidt, Trump is violating this separation in dangerous and deliberate ways. Specifically, he called out Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt for explicitly citing “our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ” when justifying America’s recent invasion of Iran.

“Do you see all the Stars of David in the Normandy cemetery?” Schmidt said. “World War II was not a Christian mission. The United States Army is not a Christian organization. In America, we have a right to freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech — and all of it is under threat from Donald Trump and his administration.”

Ultimately, Schmidt refused to classify America’s war in Iran as being motivated by any form of respectable Christianity.

“This is not religion,” Schmidt said. “This is a scam. This is a con.”

Schmidt is not alone in critiquing the Trumpist version of Christianity. Religious studies scholar Sarah Posner recently spoke with The Daily Beast's Greg Sargent about Pope Leo XIV, the American-born Pope who denounced warmongering interpretations of Christianity in a speech delivered shortly after Hegseth's breakfast prayer.

"Hegseth is expressing an extreme version of Christian supremacy, where America, a Christian nation, is entitled, and in fact probably, in his mind, required by God, to smite America's enemies — or to smite the enemies of Christianity, even, Posner said. "When we talk about Christian nationalism, this is exactly what we're talking about. But the important thing to remember with Hegseth, in contrast to other versions of Christian nationalism that we see more commonly in the Republican Party, is that his is a very extreme version of Christian supremacy where we Christians are entitled to go out and take dominion over the world, to vanquish enemies, and to do so violently — and even when they do so violently, with the express mandate from God."

Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2024 about historian Federico Finchelstein comparing Trump’s far right “rhetorical violence” to that of Nazi German dictator Adolf Hitler, Leavitt replied that “it's been less 72 hours since the second assassination attempt on President Trump's life and the media is already back to comparing President Trump to Hitler. It's disgusting. This is why Americans have zero trust in the liberal mainstream media."

As Schmidt pointed out, America was founded as an explicitly secular country. The First Amendment to the Constitution states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” while President Thomas Jefferson — who also co-authored the Declaration of Independence — wrote in 1802 that “religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God” and as such “the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions” because the American people “declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”