Transatlantic Trumpism
The Arizona memorial service for slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, with its heavy Christian nationalist overtones, didn’t go unnoticed by European Catholics—including by well-known moderate bishops like Stefan Oster of Passau, Germany. He distanced himself from some of his brother bishops in the United States, writing of his hopes that “more people have finally understood” that the U.S. president “only cares about faith when he can use it for himself.” This, he added, is “the exact opposite of Christian discipleship.” Oster is no left-winger; he’s a well-known skeptic of the German Synod and the same bishop who read the laudatio for Bishop Robert Barron at the award ceremony of the Josef Pieper Foundation in July.
Other Catholics in Europe have seized on Kirk’s assassination for inspiration amid the continent’s evolving culture wars. These include not just social-media personalities and provocateurs but also politicians and government leaders like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. What this points to is a new ideological alignment between political and theological conservatism in the global Catholic Church. In the early 2000s, around the end of John Paul II’s papacy and the start of Benedict XVI’s, an alliance was developing between Catholic neoconservatives in the United States and the so-called “devout atheists,” i.e., nonpracticing, nonbelieving “political Catholics” in Europe. Today, in the transition from Francis to Leo XIV, this is changing—the basically inclusive “civil religion” of twentieth-century America is giving way to a political-religious messianism embodied by Donald Trump. This messianism represents a theology that contradicts the basic values of ecumenical dialogue between churches and redefines, for political purposes, the parameters of Jewish-Christian and interreligious relations.
After 9/11, U.S. secretary of state Madeline Albright called America the “indispensable nation.” In the twentieth century, the United States was certainly one of the most important countries in terms of encouraging ecumenical and interreligious conversation, serving as an inspiration for the doctrine of religious liberty. From the perspective of global Catholicism, that makes its turn to nationalism especially troubling. MAGA’s daily trampling of Catholic social teaching poses immediate concerns, but will also have a subtler, though no less insidious, impact on Catholicism in the long run.
This points to an ecclesiological (theological) break—an unbridgeable divergence over ideas about the Church. First, Catholicism in the United States is built on a series of assumptions being undermined by the current political regime, including a president intent on prosecuting political opponents. The concept of religious freedom depends on the rule of law and the separation of powers. As Cardinal Robert McElroy said in his homily for the October 5 Red Mass in Washington D.C.: “The law occupies a uniquely foundational position within American society.” Second, the Catholic Church tends to resist being swallowed by political messianism because it’s aware of the cost of becoming a “political religion” (which is different from “civil religion”); when the tests for securing membership in the Church are political and ideological, they cease to be theological and sacramental.
Trumpism also threatens the ecclesiastical (institutional) order, in the sense that it disrupts familiar dynamics in the relationship between religion and government. The right, which had long complained about government overreach and infringements on religious freedom, now welcomes government intrusion into (and dismantling of) the institutional infrastructure, while remaining silent on the inability of Catholics to attend Mass for fear of being detained by masked government agents. That some U.S. dioceses have formally lifted the obligation for Catholics to attend Mass because of this speaks to the degree of disruption already being realized—not to mention that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops as a body hasn’t even acknowledged it properly. Anti-immigration tactics that are intended to terrorize—as Cardinal Blase Cupich said about what is happening in Chicago—are not compatible with the right to religious freedom.
Then there’s the ecclesial (internal) breach, as seen in the rush by some prominent Church leaders to join in the overtly political adulation of Charlie Kirk. The fact that some of Kirk’s views on race have become mainstream among Trump supporters and top advisors, and that his work has been endorsed as prophetic by Catholic leaders, speaks to the absorption of right-wing Catholicism into the new nationalist right and to the inability of dissenting bishops to make their voices heard. Pope Leo XIV, in a book-length interview published in September, sent a message to the U.S. bishops encouraging them to deal first with American issues: “It would be much more appropriate for the leadership in the church within the United States to engage him [Trump], quite seriously.” It’s hard to imagine how the U.S. episcopate can engage the Trump administration when some of its prominent members behave like megaphones for the executive branch and the MAGA movement.
There is an international dimension to this problem. Over the course of the Trump era, the confessional boundaries that once defined the differences between Catholics and Evangelical Protestants in the U.S. have been blurred in order to strengthen other boundaries—ideological and national—in an exclusivist way. Extra Americam, nulla salus (outside America, there is no salvation) has become one of new heresies of the day. The Catholic Church has, over time, adopted a posture of suspicion toward cults of political personality, and Trumpism demands the personal allegiance and loyalty of citizens, Catholics included, to the leader. This doesn’t go unnoticed among Catholics in other countries—or in the Vatican. Skepticism of authoritarian nationalist and populist governments goes back to the Gospel admonishment that “you cannot serve two masters.” But it’s also a natural development of Catholicism’s acceptance and teaching of the fundamental tenets of political modernity: constitutionally guaranteed rights, separation of powers, religious liberty, and respect for minorities, all of which are under attack in the United States right now.
Trumpism also turns familiar notions of ecumenism on their head. The classical ecumenism of the twentieth century was a reaction to the authoritarian and fascist regimes of Europe—an antinationalist theology—and to the state control of the Eastern European church under Communism. Following Kirk’s death, there are signs of something like a “nationalist” ecumenism linking strains of right-wing political Christianity. When prominent Catholic politicians and clerics compare Kirk to St. Paul or celebrate him as an apostle of civil discourse, they cast Catholic targets of his invective in a negative light that comes close to a form of informal excommunication.
Finally, Trumpism reframes Catholic-Jewish relations in ways that prescind or contradict 1965’s Nostra aetate and its implementation by every pope since. Though we are seeing a return to the mid-twentieth-century political concept of Judeo-Christianity as a pillar of the Western world, the thrust of it is an emergent American Christian nationalism that in many ways distorts Jesus’ teaching. The Israel Allies Foundation’s “Top 50 Christian Allies” list puts Paula White, senior advisor to the White House’s Religious Liberty Commission, at the top. In his speech at the Knesset on October 13, President Trump said that “this is not only the end of a war. This is the end of an age of terror and death and the beginning of the age of faith and hope and of God.” He claimed credit for settling a three-thousand-year war in the Middle East and accused the Obama and Biden administrations of “hatred toward Israel…absolute hatred.” Trump’s performance in Israel and Egypt since the ceasefire marks a turn in international diplomacy: political-religious messianism cloaked in post-ideological pragmatism. This politicization of interreligious relations undermines the credibility of Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Catholic dialogue.
In his speech to the European Parliament on in October 1988, John Paul II articulated a historical-theological critique of political and religious extremism that has renewed relevance today:
After Christ, it is no longer possible to idolize society as a collective greatness that devours the human person and his inalienable destiny. Society, the State, and political power belong to the changing and always perfectible framework of this world. No plan of society will ever be able to establish the Kingdom of God, that is, eschatological perfection, on this earth. Political messianism most often leads to the worst tyrannies. The structures that societies set up for themselves never have a definitive value; they can no longer seek for themselves all the goods to which man aspires. In particular, they cannot be a substitute for human conscience or for the search for truth and the absolute.
John Paul II was referring to the political messianism of Communism. Today, that warning can be applied to the political messianism that characterizes Trumpism. The narrative of the religious right in America was that religion unified the country. Now it could break it. It would be the fruit of an ideologization of Christianity that many U.S. bishops seem unable or unwilling to defend their Church or country from. These tensions affect the ways Catholics see themselves in the Church—in unity in the profession of faith, communion in the sacraments, and subordination to proper authority.
European history shows how political messianism can destroy the souls of churches. Could that happen in the United States? There was once a “civil religion,” a shared system of myths, symbols, and rituals that provided an inclusive and unifying moral framework for the political-religious project of America. But the “political religion” now emerging is different: nationalist and exclusivist in character, embracing a dark idea of Christianity that distorts the Gospel. Between the 1920s and 1940s, the papacy learned the cost of this kind of political Christianity the hard way. Today, the Vatican finds itself in a particularly delicate position, especially with a U.S.-born pope rightly worried about the Church’s unity. The Vatican knows that the political-religious upheaval in the United States could have long-term effects not just on American Catholicism but on the global Church. The difficult relations between right-wing American Catholicism and the Vatican under Francis might not have been a one-off exception, but rather the establishment of a precedent.
No comments:
Post a Comment