Weekly Roundup: Trump, Vance, and Just War Theory + Pete's Pulp Fiction
Brad Onishi and Dan Miller dissect the clash between Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Pope Leo XIII over just war theory, noting how Vance and Mike Johnson dismiss papal authority while failing strict criteria like proportionality. They analyze Pete Hegseth's "Pulp Fiction" prayer, arguing it exemplifies a "nation as God" worldview where leaders assume divine roles to justify power. Ultimately, internal fractures within the MAGA movement threaten Christian nationalist cohesion, yet legal challenges and judicial rulings offer potential hope for democratic resilience ahead of the midterms. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Catholic Quagmire00:12:05
Axis Mundi.
This week, the quagmire in Iran turned into a Catholic quagmire in the United States as the Pope received attack after attack from not only Donald Trump, but remarks from the Catholic Vice President JD Vance and the Protestant Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.
This was one of those weeks where it was hard to keep up with the various religious and theological conflicts happening here in the United States.
Luckily, we are two religion scholars trained in theology, ready to break it down for.
You and anyone who will listen.
Lots to cover.
Let's go.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, author of American Caesar, How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning the United States Into a Monarchy.
Founder of Axis Mundi Media, here today with my co host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Lamar College.
Glad to be with you, Brad.
Getting over like my third cold of the season.
So just in case anybody hears me coughing or wheezing or anything, that's what that'll be.
So good times.
You ever had a dean or a smart business school person or a Arrogant scientists say, Oh, who needs religion majors?
That's the stupidest department on campus.
Why do we have the humanities?
And I don't know.
Just weeks like this, I just don't even need to say anything.
We just hold up the week and be like, Hey, here you go.
We kind of need people who know about this stuff.
And that's what we do.
We've been studying this stuff for two decades.
We lived it.
This is who we are.
And even more importantly, Brad, if we get to it, if we get far enough to delve into the world of Pete Hegseth this week, some of us are old enough to remember Pulp Fiction.
So I think that that just feels relevant this week as well.
So, you know.
This was like a.
If you are a humanities person who is a like elder millennial, this week was just for you.
This was your week.
You know what I'm saying?
Because the pulp fiction, just war, it just, whew, it's hard to keep up.
Okay.
So everybody is aware that Donald Trump attacked the Pope and has started a quagmire of his own doing here at home.
And I'll say quickly, Dan, I think he did that because he got his ass handed to him in Iran.
He did not.
He started a war he couldn't finish.
He tried to bully Iran.
Iran didn't back down.
They had one Trump card, pun intended, in their back pocket, which was the Strait of Hormuz.
The war just sort of turned into something real.
I will say this later, but I'll say it now.
The Trump administration has no just war theory.
They just thought, oh, it's just a war.
How hard could it be?
And it turned out it was a lot harder than they thought.
And so I think what Trump did is what he always did.
He's like, well, this isn't going well.
I didn't win.
Rather than admit I didn't win and fix it so people don't suffer.
I'll just start a fight with someone else.
I will argue that this quagmire of his own making in the United States, which is an attack on the Pope, is going to cost him as much or more as what happened in Iran.
And we'll get there.
Before we do that, run us through the summary so people are kind of caught up on what happened this week and some of the back and forth.
We'll get to JD Vance.
We'll get to Mike Johnson.
We'll get to the U.S. Catholic bishops responding, blah, blah, blah.
Let's get it.
What have you got?
Most of what sort of started here is Pope Leo issued a statement.
He did not cite the Trump administration.
He didn't specifically talk about Iran, but I think everybody knew what he had in view.
And I will read his statement because this is what sort of started the whole thing.
He said, God does not bless any conflict, anyone who's a disciple of Christ.
The Prince of Peace is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.
Military action will not create space for freedom or times of peace, which comes only from the patient promotion of coexistence and dialogue among peoples.
That's what he said.
Trump, being Trump, couldn't let it go.
And so he came unglued, issued us like a 335.
Four word truth social diatribe says that the Pope's weak on foreign policy and weak on crime, and that he fears the Trump administration and a whole bunch of stuff like this.
He then followed that.
This is almost an aside, but one of the other weird things this week with the AI generated image of him as Jesus, like healing someone, and that created a bunch of backlash from everybody, including even a lot of conservative Christians.
He later deleted it.
That's just another thing.
We can do what we want with that.
The Pope then responds, and I think this is what's kind of remarkable that you get this back and forth.
The Pope basically said that they're not afraid of the Trump administration and they'll speak the gospel, and that's what the church works for, and so forth.
Trump then convenes like a QA session where he refused to apologize for the comments.
And among other things, he said this, and I think this is what's going to be a theme as we go along and we look at how other politicians responded to this.
He said, He went public.
I'm just responding to Pope Leo.
Like, you know, he started it, I'm just responding.
Even though, to reiterate, Leo never mentioned Trump by name, he never mentioned the Iran conflict and so forth.
Trump then also responded to the image of him as Jesus and said that he thought it was like he was a Red Cross worker in it and didn't know he was Jesus.
Another aside thing to Trump, it's like either you make yourself look like the 25th Amendment should apply when you say things like that, or you're just the liar that you are.
Yeah.
Well, so Caroline Leavitt said that that was a doctored image.
So, you know, I think everyone, a lot of folks listening have seen this already, but I'll just reiterate it.
I'll pause in Google real quick.
Take a look.
Cool.
Well, like, It seems like the talking point that Trump was supposed to say is that it was a doctored image, but he went with, I was a doctor.
So it seems like that.
But I think, secondly, it's like, Caroline, the image is AI.
Of course, it's a doctor.
It's like an invented image.
Yes.
Thank you for that.
It's not a photo, Caroline.
It's not something that's been altered.
It's a doctored image.
So there's that.
I think, third, and I don't think we're going to just spend tons of time here, but there was real backlash to the Trump as Jesus thing.
There was a split in MAGA Christianity over this.
Some people said it's blasphemy.
He should take it down.
Franklin Graham said, Oh, I believe him when he said he thought he was a doctor.
Megan Basham said, I believe that too.
So, anyway, that happened this week.
It deserves five hours of analysis, but nonetheless, we're going to keep going.
So, what else?
Yeah.
So, this brings us to JD Vance.
And first, you know, Trump spokesperson, as you mentioned, he's the Catholic vice president on Fox News.
He sort of took a softer line, said the Pope should stay in his lane, said he should stick to matters of morality, as if war and conflict is not related to morality.
But then later, or in another event, I forget actually which one came first.
It's no, the event came first.
Yeah, so the TP USA, Turning Point USA, channeling his inner Charlie Kirk.
He still wants to be the heir apparent of that movement.
I think we have a clip of part of what he had to say there where he took a much firmer line.
Number one, when the Pope says that God is never on the side of those who wield the sword, there is a thousand year, more than a thousand year tradition of just war theory, okay?
Now, we can, of course, have disagreements about whether this or that conflict is just, but I think that it's important, in the same way that it's important for the Vice President of the United States to be careful when I talk about matters of public policy, I think it's very, very important for the Pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.
And I think that one of these issues here is that there has been, again, hey, random dude screaming, I told you I'd respond to your point.
I just want to respond to this question first.
But I think one of the issues here is that if you're going to opine on matters of theology, You've got to be careful.
You've got to make sure it's anchored in the truth.
And that's one of the things that I try to do.
And it's certainly something I would expect from the clergy, whether they're Catholic or Protestant.
Now, what I want to pause on here, and this is a thing that's going to come up, is there at the end where he basically is like, Yeah, you know, the Pope just doesn't understand Catholic theology.
I, JD Vance, lay Catholic without any formal training.
I've been Catholic for 10 minutes.
I can't believe he doesn't know what just war theory is.
And this concept of just war theory is where I want to hover for a bit and turn into the geeky.
Academic religion scholar that I am, this is where we can sort of earn our money today.
Let me play you a clip here first of what Pope said yesterday.
So this was after JD.
So we got JD on Fox News, we've got JD at TPUSA, and then here's the Pope yesterday after all of that.
Woe to those who manipulate religion in the very name of God for their own military, economic, or political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.
The masters of war pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy.
Yet often, a lifetime is often not enough to rebuild.
They turn a blind eye to the fact that billions of dollars are spent on killing, on devastation.
Yet the resources needed for healing, education, and restoration are nowhere to be found.
The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters.
They are the descendants of Abraham, as numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the seashore.
So he says a handful of tyrants are destroying the world.
It takes a few seconds to destroy, it takes a lifetime or a generation to build back up.
So, all right.
So that leads into this whole just war theory.
Before you give us just war theory, can I also give you Mike Johnson on this?
Yes, by all means.
All right.
So here's Mike Johnson, who is Protestant and it brings up just war theory and says, I'm kind of surprised the Pope got involved.
Mike Johnson has never looked more like a weasel than in the last six months.
Like he looks like a little weasel who gets sent out every time JD Vance and Donald Trump do something.
He has to go out there and be like, didn't see it.
I don't know.
Or he says things like, well, I'm kind of surprised that the Pope got involved.
I mean, the leader of a wide world church with 1.2 billion members that's been a political entity for 2,000 years.
Oh, I can't believe he would have something to say about somebody threatening a nuclear winter on an entire civilization.
But that's just me.
It's just like, he's a weasel, and he looks more and more like a weasel every day.
He said, I think he said several days back, that something about those who engage in war, you know, that Jesus doesn't hear their prayers or something.
You know, it is a very well settled matter of Christian theology.
There's something called the just war doctrine.
There's a time to every purpose under heaven.
I think what the president's comments was.
What the Vice President's comments reflect is their understanding deep in the SCIF and the classified briefings of the stakes that are so high and the situation that we're facing, and the fact that you had the nation that was the largest sponsor of terrorism now having had that ability taken away from them.
That means potentially millions of innocent people will be able to keep their lives and not be killed by terrorists.
That's a good thing.
That's what's come out of this, okay?
I set the table for you.
We got JD, we got the Pope, we got Mike.
So, what's up?
What is just war theory?
People are wondering and they hear this term, you know, just war theory, and people arguing about whether or not the Bible talks about war and whether God is ever on the side of warriors and so forth.
Defining Just War Theory00:06:01
So, here it is.
So, for the first two or three hundred years of Christian history, it was actually common church teaching that Christians were required to be pacifists.
The understanding of Jesus' teachings was that they had to be pacifists.
Roman soldiers, for example, there were all kinds of debates about can somebody who's been in the Roman army become a Christian?
Can a Roman soldier be a Christian?
If they've been in the army and been part of a warrior culture like this, what do they have to do to atone?
All of these kinds of questions.
But then the church runs into this problem.
Christianity becomes the favored and later official religion of the Roman Empire, which, of course, was the world's most powerful empire built and maintained through military conquest.
So the church around that time had to basically come up with a way to make war okay.
You get this like, it's my very sort of cynical take on Christian doctrine and the history of it.
Suddenly the church is the church of power.
And it has to find a way to make warfare all right.
And it's an actual doctrine developed primarily by Augustine.
That's the name that will really get attached to this.
Later thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, some of the big hitters in the history of specifically Catholic theology, developed this theory.
But just war theory has become influential far beyond the confines of narrow theological discussions.
If you take an ethics class and you talk about conflict or warfare, just war theory will be brought up.
You find a lot of public figures that just talk about this, or even A lot of international conventions on warfare are arguably built around the concept of just war theory.
So it's a really significant theory.
But here's what it is.
I'm going to be really nerdy for a minute and just lay it out.
Basically, there are sort of two main pieces of this that we're concerned with.
The first is that it's supposed to give a justification for going to war.
In Latin, it's the use ad bellum, which basically means you have to have good reasons, moral reasons for going to war, and that you have to have just conduct in war or use in bello.
So basically, it's saying there are moral reasons for going to war, and there are sort of parameters you have to operate within.
The conduct of warfare to make it just.
What are some of the reasons that would make it just to go to war?
You have to have a just cause.
You have to have a real wrong, such as self defense.
And that's typically, self defense is usually like the standard sort of piece of this.
There has to be a legitimate authority declaring war.
You have to have right intention that you have to be seeking to redress injustice, not to seize territory or power.
It has to be the last resort.
You have to have exhausted all peaceful alternatives.
Proportionality that the benefits of the war have to outweigh the potential destruction.
And you have to have a reasonable chance of success.
Those are all things that are supposed to go into justifying a war.
And then the conduct in the war is that combatants have to be distinguished between enemy combatants and civilians.
The concept of proportionality that the violence used has to be proportionate to the objective, and there should be no intrinsically unethical means that are used.
So, and the way that that's interpreted now and it's going to be interpreted is methods that are forbidden by international law, such as atrocities or certain weapons and so forth.
So, that's just war theory.
And if you look at that, you can see why people would question whether or not this meets any of those parameters.
Was there a legitimate authority in the US?
It's supposed to go through Congress, not the president.
We've talked about that.
Was it the last resort?
It wasn't.
The proportionality ad bellum, that is, proportionality in the justification and in the conduct.
Trump has been threatening war crimes for weeks.
We talk about the way that Hegsteth talks about raining down destruction and disproportionate attacks and all that.
So, all of that is why you would get those in the Catholic tradition who would say, this is not a just war.
And then to back that up, at the same time, you've got JD Vance telling the Pope, well, I guess the Pope doesn't understand just war theory.
That's kind of weird, or referring to him as a Catholic clergy member.
When he's in fact the head of the Catholic Church.
On Thursday, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops posted a statement on their website in response to public comments, like the comments made by Vance.
And this was really interesting.
The statement was offered by Bishop James Massa, I believe is how you say his name.
He's the chairman of the Committee on Doctrine.
So, what is the Committee on Doctrine?
It is the committee tasked with upholding, interpreting, and teaching the Catholic faith.
So, in other words, to the JD Vances of the world who say, I can't believe the Pope doesn't understand just war theory.
The Council of Bishops says, so hey, we've got our Catholic theology experts, and here's what they had to say.
So I'm just going to read through this, and then we can sort of dive in from there.
They say, for over a thousand years, the Catholic Church has taught just war theory, and it is that long tradition the Holy Father carefully references in his comments on war.
A consistent tenet of that thousand year tradition is a nation can only legitimately take up the sword in self defense once all peace efforts have failed.
And it cites the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
That is the official teaching of the Church.
That's a direct quote.
That is, they go on, to be a just war, it must be a defense against another who actively wages war, which is what the father actually said.
Quote, he does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.
So they're contextualizing what they say Pope Leo said, highlighting the ways in which the current Iran conflict violates the tenets of just war theory.
And they go on to say when Pope Leo speaks as supreme pastor of the universal church, that's sort of his official title.
He is not merely offering opinions on theology.
JD Vance, he's not just a Catholic clergy member.
He is preaching the gospel and exercising his ministry as the vicar of Christ.
The consistent teaching of the church is insistent that all people of goodwill must pray and work toward lasting peace while avoiding the evils and injustices that accompany all wars.
End quote.
Not saying we all need to be beholden to Catholic theology or anything else, but this all sort of contextualizes this language of just war and the mire that the Trump administration has now created with the Catholic Church, and I think opens up a number of pathways for us to reflect.
Contextualizing the Mire00:02:51
reflect on what's been going on this week.
Yeah.
Well, let me take off my, like, you know, I teach Catholic just war theory hat.
Take a breath.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and we'll analyze everything that we just heard from Dan about all these events.
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Okay, Dan.
So here's a couple of ways for me to start on this.
Trump and Vance and Johnson, and now they're lackeys who we'll get to later.
We'll get to the sort of third rate backbench Republicans who are jumping into the fray here.
They've started something that I think was inevitable, but I did not think we would see this early.
And what I mean by that is I have said for a while, That there are potential fissures in the Christian nationalist coalition in this country because there are actual differences theologically, doctrinally, ecclesiastically, and just in terms of lived experience, networks, money, et cetera, between Catholics and Protestants in the United States.
Okay.
And I said that, you know, if the dog ever catches the tail, if they ever can appoint their American Caesar or their Protestant Pinochet or their American Franco, whatever.
Somebody's going to be disappointed because it's going to be a Catholic appointment, a Protestant appointment, a technocratic appointment, whatever.
Trump has only sped that up.
I think what has happened here, and I'll just say something I said already, is that because Iran has gone so poorly in terms of approval numbers, in terms of losing service members' lives, in terms of killing 16, 17,000 civilians, in terms of a $20 to $30 billion bill.
It's all gone so bad.
There has been such lack of support at home and abroad that he had to pick another fight.
Moral Authority in Play00:10:53
And now we're all talking about the other fight.
So, in some sense, we're doing exactly what he wants.
We're not talking about the Epstein files.
We're talking about Iran.
We're not talking about Iran.
We're talking about his fight with the Pope.
But this has real world consequences, and we'll get there in a minute.
So, I think that's number one.
But I think one of the reasons that this is getting underneath the skin of people like Vance and Trump and Johnson is that there's a moral authority coming into play here.
That other people will listen to.
Okay.
And I'm not the first one to say that, right?
There's been a lot of folks who've offered that idea.
If we go back to just war, we have this sort of framework of like, well, if you have to wage war, here's how you do it.
Okay.
And it is a long tradition and it does offer a kind of way to understand how to engage in conflict if that's what you have to do.
Now, I don't think you or I are here to defend the Catholic Church.
We're not here to defend Augustine.
But I want to just go through like a very, you know, we don't get to do this very often.
Can I just take you through like a very basic Thomistic point?
Thomas Aquinas.
Are you ready for this?
So excited, Brian.
So, Augustine's pretty much the progenitor of the just war theory.
You know, there's a lot of other folks to pick up on it, but I'm going to mention Aquinas and then I'm going to mention Lombard.
This is just a great day.
It's really great.
So, Aquinas works on this idea that like evil and sin are a lack.
I'm wondering if your Thomistic ears agree with me.
But basically, for Thomas Aquinas, sin is a lack.
The privation theory of being it's a lack of the fullness of being.
It's not a substantive being in its own right.
Yes.
Just come on.
Just a total pro on the other end of the mic over here.
Evil is a privation of being, it's a lack.
It is something that you don't have.
Okay.
So, war for Aquinas and war for the just war tradition is always a lack of peace.
Now, it may be a necessary evil, but it is always an evil.
It is always a lack of peace.
Necessary or unavoidable, but always, it's never good.
It's never a positive.
And there were even medieval theologians like Lombard and others who would say, look, yes, if you have to go into war, you go into war.
But if you kill someone in war, you might have to do penance for quite some time within the confines of, or the setting, I should say, of your spirituality and within the church because you've killed someone.
Okay.
So, what we get with just war theory is the idea that you, I mean, you know, you already did this, but we can go point by point.
You only wage war if you have to.
You only wage war if you've been attacked first.
You only wage war, or, and waging is even the wrong word.
You only enter into war if you have no other, no other, you know, viable alternative.
And when you do that, you don't kill civilians.
When you do that, you use proportionality.
You don't threaten to drop bombs such that you end somebody's civilization.
So, If we wanted to do a scorecard and like have, you know, Dana White at the podium there, like, you know, scoring the whether or not this lines up with just war theory, Trump's conflict in Iran, I think it would get a zero out of 10 in terms of its like checking any of the boxes for a just war.
So there is no sense in which JD Vance, a Catholic, has any ground to stand on, or Mike Johnson, a Protestant, when they mention the Pope and just war.
Not only is it an affront as a Catholic from JD Vance to the Holy Father, but it is also just their theology is poor here because there's no stick to stand on here when it comes to arguing that whatever is happening in Iran is a just war.
There's just not.
And Trump can say all the time, well, I guess the Pope wants a nuclear weapon.
And that's just, that's not at all what the Pope's saying.
Nobody thinks Iran has a nuclear weapon right now.
Their capability has been diminished.
I mean, it's a complete false, it's a red herring.
It's not real.
So those are my initial thoughts on this does not line up with just war in any sense, it does not fit any of the criteria.
And I think that Johnson and Vance kind of think that they can just fire back here at the Pope in a way that might be effective.
And I think this is going to truly backfire on them, like truly.
But anyway, further thoughts on this?
I want to get into a couple more things here when it comes to the Pope and Trump.
But what else you got after taking a breath in your summary there?
There are a couple of things I think related to what you're saying.
One is, again, being a person of a certain age.
The last time this came up in the US context was with the war in Iraq, the United States led and so forth.
And the same question came up then because it was a war of preemption.
And folks might remember and then go back and look, the just war thing came up and it was much more muddied for people because there was this argument that there was kind of an imminent threat from Iraq.
The difference is the Trump administration keeps saying that, but they haven't given any evidence of anything.
So you had the Bush administration trying to show that there were WND in Iraq and all of that.
Of course, that all ended up being false and misleading.
Questions about whether they knew it was false or not.
But the point is, there was an effort to meet the standard of just war theory and say it was preemptive, but it was an act of self defense, et cetera.
You don't even have that here.
You've just had this blind invocation of the concept.
And I think there are a number of things here, but one is that, quite frankly, I think Mike Johnson and JD Vance are like the undergrad who, you know, I don't know, they read the intro textbook thing and they throw out some big words.
Yeah.
And maybe to some regular person out there, they're like, oh, oh, just war theory.
Oh, just talking about the Ordo Amoris.
You're using Latin terms and things.
Oh, that must be big.
Only this time they went up against the PhD, like professor, the person who teaches the doctor.
Like the distinguished professor who's written 10 books.
Yeah.
Who's like, oh, okay, let me tell you what that means.
And so I think they're just, on one hand, they're just telling them where they're in over their heads.
I think that they picked the fight with the wrong person.
You want to argue with somebody about just war theory?
Don't go like poking at the Pope of all people or the U.S. Council of Bishops.
So I think that there's that piece.
I think we've seen this play before, and it's interesting.
I think it's worth noting and shows all kinds of things about the Trump administration, whether it's just hubris, whether it's a disinterest in learning lessons from the past, of not having looked at the Bush administration and what happened with the war in Iraq on this very issue, and so on.
To your other point, though, about the sort of division within MAGA land, I think it's significant because you have a weird coalescence here.
On one hand, you had already a lot of that super hardcore America first piece of MAGA that never liked.
This military action in Iran.
They saw this as a violation of what Trump said, America first, not being interventionist and whatever.
And you've also had a certain subset of American Catholics who have sort of been moving in the mongus circles.
You've got the hardline JD Vance, rad trad Catholics, but you've got some others who are sort of like there, but they care about what the Pope says.
They have an intuition that this feels weird.
And so you have this, an expansion of some of those schisms or those splits that you're talking about.
On one hand, a kind of super nationalist America first piece.
But also a certain kind of Catholic American, a certain kind of Catholic voter who now is not comfortable with what is going on, partly because the Pope said this, but partly because Trump and Vance are busy yelling at the Pope.
And I think that that's an interesting dynamic to continue watching as we go forward and see what the outcome of this can be.
Well, and if you don't think that's real, Robert P. Jones has a great piece at Substack today about this.
And he shows you that white Catholic voters are people that do flip.
We've talked a lot about Latino voters.
We've talked a lot about religious Latino voters and black voters.
But white Catholic voters are not white evangelical voters.
If you look at 2016, 2020, and 24, there is some movement there.
We'll see that, I think, now into the midterms.
I think we're going to see some of that movement at play.
So, if you think that this is just a lock that a white Catholic in Worcester, Mass., or in Pittsburgh, or wherever across the country is just going to be on the side of the president here, there is a sense of like, well, no.
And I think before we move on, I want to touch on JD Vance.
And I think this is going to play into some stuff you've been talking about with Josh Hawley.
Why would JD Vance say this so flippantly?
Like, can he be this dumb?
So, I just want to take a minute on JD Vance here, if you don't mind.
And, like, why would JD say this?
Like, for even for a Catholic convert who's not been a Catholic for very long to come out and say that the Pope should be careful or the Pope should stick to matters of morality is just breathtaking in its imbecility.
But also, it's like, read the room, drizzler.
Like, the drizzler just is the kind of guy that, like, walks into a funeral and is like, oh, bad traffic getting here, huh, everyone?
And you're like, bro, what?
Aunt Joan died.
Shut up about the traffic.
Why would he say this?
And I think one thing that you and I really want to touch on, and we've touched on for a long time on this show, is that for a certain person, Christian nationalism, the conversion to Catholicism on JD's part, the 36 year old dad who goes to the mega church in his neighborhood, even though he's never been a Christian, and now all he can talk about is I am Charlie Kirk.
There's a deep sense to me there that especially men in those categories are buying into a worldview of authority, of order, of a sense that, oh, as a man, I have a great place in this framework.
I'm the head of the household.
I have power.
I have reverence.
And I get to impose on the world what is this sense of like right and wrong, good and bad, clean and dirty, us and them.
Like when I see the Mark Wahlbergs of the world out there being super Catholic these days.
Or the Chris Pratts, when I see like especially white men, but not just white men who are in their 30s and 40s and 50s going down this road, I always think, oh, your Christianity is going to be a Christianity of order and authority and imposition.
Christian Nationalism Extols Power00:13:00
It's never that like contemplative, vulnerable.
Oh, you started reading Thomas Merton?
Oh, you discovered Meister Eckhart?
Oh, you really got into the idea of peace and a radical kingdom of God?
No, it's always going to be these dudes who are super into.
A certain way of being hit.
And here's the word like, if we did a little word bubble, the words we would get would be like father, husband, Christian, American, patriot, heritage, tradition, history, bourbon, whiskey, cigar, mahogany.
Like, these are the words that would come up.
Anyway, you've been talking about this with Josh Hawley.
Like, I'm sure you've got more eloquent ways to say this than me.
Yeah, there's a few things.
One, you know, when you You talk about why would JD Mann say this?
I think one thing is also the way that he says it, that the sort of casual drop is one piece of it is just the casualness that like is supposed to pass his knowledge.
I can just throw this out because I know a lot about it.
And you're like, cool, like, what do you know about it?
Like, what is it?
Can you explain it to me?
And of course, he wouldn't be able to.
But I think there's this thing.
So I'm going to back up again.
Like you said, this is the religious scholars' day, you know, here.
There's an old, old, old kind of philosophy of religion.
Kind of question or conundrum.
It predates Christianity.
Ancient Greek thinkers posed this question, but it's one that comes into Christianity too.
And it was the question of does God do what is right because it's right?
Or does something become right because God does it or God wills it?
And it's this fundamental debate that cuts through the whole Christian tradition and it's still sort of there.
In other words, when God commands something, does he do it because it's the right thing to do?
And if God is supremely good, et cetera, of course he's going to will the good.
Or is it just because he is all powerful, so anything he wills, by definition, is good because he wills it?
JD Vance and his Catholicism, lots of forms of Protestantism, the Pete Hexess of the world, so many of the bro y kind of return to Christianity that you're describing, it answers it that latter way.
Whatever God does is good because God is a God of order and power.
Not God is a good God who uses order and power to bring about the good.
God is all powerful, God is power.
And so anything that God wills or powers becomes good.
And I think, in my view, what that means is that once you adopt that theology, it's not a long stretch to say, well, whatever is an exercise of power is good.
If God is power and God does things and that makes it good, then if we exercise power and we impose order through power, that becomes good.
That becomes our God.
And I think that that is part of the draw of this when you have the most privileged segments of society and so forth latching onto this theology, as you're highlighting.
But I think that's why you also get this notion that I think it is inconceivable.
They're not interested in considering the possibility, but I think it's inconceivable to JD Vance or Mike Johnson or Pete Hegseth that you could have an American war that would be unjust.
Why?
Because it's an act of power.
The fact that it's an act of power and it's something that America is doing, imposing an order on the world, bringing order into chaos, or all the language that they'll use, that means that by definition, it becomes good.
And it's just a simple slide of the idolatry of Christian nationalism.
It's the nation as God.
That's what Christian nationalism extols.
Not really, we're a bunch of Christians, we're going to retake our nation, but the nation becomes God.
American power is the God of Christian nationalism.
And that's what we see.
Dare I say, the leader becomes Jesus?
I don't know, Dan.
Is that, I mean, that's crazy, Brad.
I'm crazy here.
Come up with a bunch of documents and images.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Yeah.
All right.
I didn't mean to cut you off.
No, that was just it.
It's just that you get this kind of inversion of just war theory, where by definition, anything America does is just.
And we could just go from there.
I think that's right.
So, one thing that JD asks in his typical reply guy manner in this whole thing is, you know, did the church oppose World War II and fighting the Nazis?
Okay.
You know, did the church oppose D Day and liberation and all that?
And, you know, there's Vincent Miller, you know, is a Catholic theology chair at the University of Dayton.
And he spoke to America Magazine this week.
And he says, look, the church condemned the conduct of total war in World War II, such as the obliteration, bombing of cities.
Exactly what Trump was threatening to do to Iraq.
Yes, exactly.
Like Miller goes on, the vice president's answer shows he has much to learn about what the church actually teaches about peace and war.
So, like, JD wants to give you the reply guy, like, whoa, what about D Day?
Is the Pope going to be against that?
What about deliberating Dachau?
Is that what about, you know?
And it's like, actually, when the grownups do theology, it's nuanced and it's complex.
When the grownups do ethics and try to figure out right and wrong, it's nuanced and complex because that's how the world is.
But additionally, JD tried to reply Guy the Pope, and like he can do that in sometimes, but he just looks like that smug 41 year old who thinks he knows everything.
And I think he looks really, really stupid here.
I want to take a break and then I want to come back and take exactly what you said about the nation becomes God and I want to apply it to Pete Hegseth and his viral pulp fiction moment.
We'll be right back.
Okay.
So everybody by now has seen the fact that.
Pete Hexeff prayed a prayer that came from Pulp Fiction.
And first of all, shout out to the guy who's been on this from the beginning, and that is Brian Kahler.
Brian Kahler broke the story.
He's been paying attention to the worship services at the Pentagon.
He is the guy.
If you want to thank anybody, it's Brian Kahler at Word and Way.
He is the one.
So, Brian Kahler, come get your flowers.
Come to the podium, please, because you're the one who gave us this.
So he says, Hegseth, when he prays the prayer, the prayer is titled CSAR 2517, which stands for Combat Search and Rescue and alludes to the fact that it borrows some wording from Ezekiel 2517.
So the prayer that Hegseth prays in the viral clip is Combat Search and Rescue 2517.
It's like a stock prayer that's sort of part of the practice of this and so forth.
Yeah.
Now, here's my wager, Dan, is that most people watching or listening to this have seen Colbert make the joke.
They've seen YouTube videos.
They've heard podcasts.
Everybody is making fun of the memes, the Facebook, the Instagram.
It's everywhere.
Pete Hegseth dressed in all manner of different pulp fiction characters, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis, everybody.
Okay.
Good for you, Pete.
I'm going to be a little bit of the stick in the mud here and point you to something that I think is the actual story.
And that is yes, it's funny.
Make fun of him.
Pulp fiction, go for it.
I don't think he thought this was a Bible verse.
I think that's wrong to say that.
I think if you see like a YouTube video or a And Instagram.
I don't think he was actually thinking this is a Bible verse.
I think he thought it was a stock prayer, as you just said, Dan.
Let me read you from Brian Kahler's Substack on this at Worden Way or his newsletter on this at Worden Way.
The last two sentences of the prayer do mirror language from Ezekiel, except the speaker is changed from being God to the commander of the U.S. mission.
So when the prayer is prayed, I will execute great vengeance on them.
I will lay vengeance on them.
When you get that language about vengeance and me delivering pain, right?
In Ezekiel, it's God.
Okay.
But in the prayer, it's the commander of the U.S. mission, ostensibly the president.
Dan, I don't know.
I think I heard you say five minutes ago that in the Christian nationalist understanding of Hegseth, of Vance, of Mike Johnson, the nation becomes God.
The leader of the nation becomes, right, the representative of God.
And so even Hegseth's prayer, to bring in a prayer where the person speaking about the vengeance is not God.
Who is the creator of the universe and the one who will decide, the judge, the Alpha and the Omega, but is the commander of the U.S. mission?
Is an even further revelation of how these guys think about faith, the divine, and their ability to say, yes, we will go kill people, we will go destroy civilizations, we will attack girls' schools, we will end the lives of 17,000 civilians.
And yeah, that's what God wants because we represent God and we pray in the voice and name of God when we pray.
Sorry, I know Dan, we would probably get more clicks and we would get more likes and we'd get more people if we just did a whole make fun of Hegseth as Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis pulp fiction thing.
I think the actual story is this.
I got a lot of weird questions, man.
So when I first came across this, I first saw the headline of like Pete Hegseth channels pulp fiction, whatever.
And I start looking at it and then I find out that there is this like search and rescue prayer that's like a stock thing that's clearly modeled on pulp fiction.
I'm like, The hell did that come from?
Like, I don't know.
I had not had time to go into the background of like who wrote this and like who was the Pulp Fiction fan that was like, but you know, was somebody trolling Pete Hegseth?
Did they want him to look like somebody?
There's the whole why is the search and rescue thing all about killing people and stuff?
That's a whole, that's just a separate whatever.
But also, once upon a time, when I watched Pulp Fiction and that scene with Samuel L. Jackson where he says this, I remember as a Bible student at a Southern Baptist college, I was like, Is that what Ezekiel says?
I don't feel like that's what he's.
And I remember I went and looked it up.
It was like, oh, it's like mostly a bunch of made up stuff and then like an allusion to Ezekiel.
Cause like, let's face it, it sounds cooler than what Ezekiel said.
Okay, fine, whatever.
I personally actually think that there's a good chance that Hegseth, like the pulp fiction version, he might well have thought that's what the Bible says.
Cause I don't think Pete Hegseth actually cares what the Bible says.
I think like most of these Christian nationalists, when they appeal to the Bible, it's usually virtue signaling.
It's like, it's like a stating their tribe.
They don't actually know what the Bible says.
But.
To your point, this isn't isolated to this.
I tell undergraduates all the time when they're reading text, you got to be really careful to look for the quotation marks sometimes, because like what you're reading, is it what the author is saying?
Are they quoting what somebody else is saying?
Like who's the speaker in the text?
And in the Hebrew Bible, there are lots and lots and lots of passages where you have the prophets who it's in quotation marks and ostensibly they are conveying a message from God.
That's what a prophet is, a messenger.
And this is one of those things.
And so there are often places in the Hebrew Bible where God is the speaker.
And even though, so you get all that first person language, I this and that, whatever, but it's God.
But conservative Christians and Christian nationalists do this all the time, where they just invoke the passage, I will, blah, and be like, this is how we've been empowered as Christians to do this and whatever.
You're like, whoa, that was actually your quoting God.
Like you are abrogating the role of God.
Is that, are you sure?
You sure that's okay?
Like you wanna go that direction, you can.
So I think that you're exactly correct to pick that up in that prayer.
I think you're exactly correct to pick up Heg Seth's use of it.
I just want to amplify that and say if we were to do like a full discourse analysis of the kinds of passages the Christian nationalists like, all these violence and, you know, violence and executing judgment and wrath and so forth, it'd be interesting to go and do a deep dive on how many of those are prophetic quotations of things that God has said that are then simply picked up as the mission of the nation.
And the nation becomes God.
That is the highest good, is the nation.
God just becomes a kind of empty vessel that you can fill up and try to make it seem legitimate.
That you're doing that.
But nationalism is just a form of, you know, the worship of the nation, among other things.
That's all it is.
And we see that on a regular basis.
But there's this assumption by these men that, of course, they have the right to put themselves into the place of the God who's saying in the first person, I, you know, the first person singular, I wage war.
Of course, that's what God exercises power, wages war.
Turning the Nation into God00:14:44
And that's it.
I can wage war and exercise power.
Therefore, yeah, I'm a divine figure.
Here we are.
That's exactly right.
Now, I do want to say this is just worth pointing out, and it may seem silly, but whatever.
JD Vance once again continues to attach himself to TPUSA, as you said.
So he made these comments about the Pope at a TPUSA event at the University of Georgia.
And Matthew Bode was there.
He's somebody who wrote a book on Charlie Kirk, and he was the first one on social media who I saw talking about this.
The TPUSA event was like one tenth full.
Nobody was there.
Erica Kirk pulled out.
Okay.
Ostensibly and saying fears of threats and so forth, but they've said that there was no sign of any indication of threats to her.
If I recall, Dan, and I'm working on memory here, it's not in front of me.
I do believe that Vice President of the United States has a Secret Service detail.
Does that strike you as true?
It does.
I think I've heard that.
It does.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right, good.
Yeah, we'll have to check it later.
But I do think he has a secret service detail.
I do think they're probably abreast of all of the threats and intelligence that might come through when it comes to him.
They'll let somebody else get assassinated, like, you know, on stage.
But they're just, yeah, they're not going to sweep the building or anything.
They're not going to check everybody for weapons.
They're not going to do any of that.
No, they're just, yeah, it was a ridiculous notion, which I'm suggesting means I think there were other reasons why Erica Kirk backed out of the event.
Well, because no one was there.
And I think that.
I think that's all clear.
I think one of the things that we should notice here is that a year ago, it felt as if the onslaught from the Trump administration was unbearable and unrelenting, and we would never be able to fight back.
And a year later, we are in a place where there is utter chaos in this administration, period.
I mean, the numbers for the midterms look terrible.
There is no momentum on any front the economy, on foreign policy, on the religious front.
I mean, there is just, there's division.
All over the board.
And TPUSA, which was once the beacon and the hope of the younger generation of Christian nationalists in this country that looked after Charlie Kirk's death like it was going to be this behemoth, this juggernaut, is having things like this happen.
And JD Vance has continued to attach himself to it.
Who has not lashed out at the Holy Father, Dan, after being stood up on a date?
I mean, if you're trying to cheat on your spouse and meet up with your paramour and they don't show up, you're going to get mad and you're going to start yelling stuff you don't mean.
And I think maybe we should just give JD a benefit of the doubt.
Erica Kirk didn't show up.
He was hurt.
He was feeling vulnerable.
He started saying things he didn't mean.
Maybe he'll realize that later.
I don't know.
Let's take a break.
And last one of the day, we'll come back and we'll do an extended segment here on Hegseth and then on the backbench Republicans trying to defend Trump.
Okay, Dan, here's a piece of what we just talked about nation as God, men of authority who take the role of God in the nation because they think they represent power and authority, a deity that is an empty vessel just for men to wage war and imposition and conflict.
And I can already see the emails now, I can see the folks in our mentions on Facebook.
People who are like, you guys are ridiculous.
You have Trump derangement syndrome.
You're just angry ex evangelicals.
And I just, you know, maybe they're right.
So I want to give Pete Hegseth a chance to defend himself and just see if he would even ever consider comparing Donald Trump to God or Jesus.
I mean, I just want it like, you know what, Pete, let's be fair.
You have your say.
Go ahead.
Here's Pete talking about it.
Our press are just like these Pharisees.
Not all of you.
Not all of you.
But the legacy Trump hating press.
Your politically motivated animus for President Trump nearly completely blinds you from the brilliance of our American warriors.
The Pharisees scrutinized every good act in order to find a violation, only looking for the negative.
The hardened hearts of our press are calibrated only to impugn.
I would ask you to open your eyes to the goodness, the historic success of our troops, the courage of this president, and this historic moment for a deal that could end the Iranian nuclear threat, the incredible battlefield victory laid before your eyes, the not one, but two incredible rescue missions, miracles, you might say.
So, according to Pete Hegsteth, the press in the United States are the Pharisees.
Now, I want to just say clearly that his conception of the Pharisees is a supersessionist, borderline anti Semitic understanding of the Pharisees.
In certain brands of Christianity, the Pharisees are always sort of seen as these enemies of Jesus and God.
And the Pharisees historically were much different than that.
There's a much more complex picture to the Pharisees than whatever Pete Hegsteth or Christian nationalist pastor is telling you.
So, that's one.
I'm not going to go in on that forever.
But, two, Dan, he says, like, the press doesn't recognize basically the miracles that are happening.
Like, the Pharisees are the ones who see Jesus heal people and are like, nah, he didn't do that.
The press sees the miracles of Trump?
Huh.
So, in this story, Pete, Trump is Jesus.
I mean, Trump wouldn't dare compare himself to Jesus.
Wait a minute.
Okay.
It seems as if, Dan, it kind of seems as if the nation is God, the leader of the nation is the Messiah.
And Hegseth and Johnson and Vance are willing just to go into a kind of public sphere and argue for that on a Christian nationalist basis.
Pete Hegseth said it himself.
Thoughts here before we go to the backbenchers and they're telling the Pope to stay out of politics.
Just to add that, again, this isn't new.
We've heard the messianic stuff about Trump since the first administration.
He's Cyrus the Persian, who allowed the Jewish people to return to their homeland.
He's going to bring religion back to America.
It was explicitly messianic language that was used about him.
Remember the whole thing with him signing the Bibles, autographing Bibles, and all of that stuff?
And now we have this like, this is not new.
This is just, it's just more.
And so it's almost weirder that people like this week are like, oh my gosh, how dare you compare Trump?
I'm like, they've been comparing Trump to Jesus for like 10 years, man.
Like, this isn't new.
It's maybe more explicit, but it's not going anywhere.
And as you say, it's like example after example, we could not make it up if we had to.
Franklin Graham, Twitter.
I do not believe President Trump would knowingly depict himself as Jesus Christ.
That would certainly be inappropriate.
I'm thankful that he took it down or made it clear that that's not what he said.
Sharp rebuke.
Sharp rebuke.
Okay.
Cool.
Megan Basham said the same thing, paraphrasing.
So, whatever.
I just think that if you want to take a thesis away from today, it's this idea that if you turn the nation into God, you turn the leader of the nation into the Messiah and into the The divine figure, and then you have to defend that.
And if anybody says otherwise, like the Pope says, this is immoral.
This is not right.
Actually, God is not with you on this.
You get so threatened that if you're JD Vance or you're Mike Johnson or you're Pete Hegseth, you just start losing it.
And that is what I think we've seen this week.
So that's there.
All right.
Now, this all trickles down.
We all know that once Trump says something, they have to write up talking points and then they have to like go find people out to sort of defend this and articulate like, You know, some sort of like rationale for what is happening.
So, Trump's picked a fight with the Pope.
Here's Troy Niels, a representative from Texas, talking about his take on what's happened with the Pope and Trump and the back and forth of comments and so on.
Any reaction to Donald Trump's comments on the Pope over the weekend?
I'd probably say the Pope needs to keep his business into leading his flock, so to speak, leading the church, and probably stay out of the political arena.
He doesn't need to be getting involved in the political arena.
Go lead your church, but stay out of the politics.
We didn't elect the Pope to be the president or be anything else.
So just keep his nose in the church's business and stay out of the political arena.
What if he sees his role as sort of leading his flock away?
No, lead his flock.
Well, let's focus on just behavior, doing everything else.
Just focus on your flock.
And Donald Trump is our president, it's not the Pope.
I didn't elect the Pope to be president.
Thank you, Carolyn.
Smoking a cigar, looking smug and tough and machismo as he walks up the steps.
Swagger, John Wayne.
I just think he should stick to his own flock.
Lead your church and we'll take care of the world.
The Marlboro man walks into Congress.
Thanks, Troy.
Appreciate that.
Here's Elise Stefanik, who lost like three jobs after I think Elise thought she was going to be in the Pambondi role or the Marco Rubio role.
And now she's on CNN arguing with Deborah Brown about the Pope.
But it is notable.
He's attacking the first American Pope.
And it is Republicans who are Catholic who are also coming out of the Senate.
The Pope should not be attacking.
The Pope, from my perspective, should not be engaging in political attacks.
I don't want to see the Pope.
As a politician, I want to see the Pope continue to focus on this resurgence that we're seeing in the United States.
I'm not focusing on the gospel, as he has said.
He says, I'm not getting involved in politics.
I'm focusing on the gospel.
You don't see it that way.
I don't believe that the Pope should function as a politician.
President Trump is a political leader, and he is a strong political leader.
So I was disappointed to see that attack from the Pope.
And I know CNN wants to continue to focus on these tweets.
This is what has been happening for the past 10 years.
Look at the results.
Look at historically the historic number of support from Catholics for President Trump, from Catholics for House Republicans as well.
No.
If we want to top it off, here is Donald Trump's really good friend, Sean Hannity, theologian par excellence.
Give it to us, Sean.
Change that law.
But right on cue, Pope Leo XIV is now seemingly more interested in spreading left wing politics than the actual teachings of Jesus Christ.
As the AP put it, quote, Pope Leo amplified his condemnation of America's conflict with Iran, saying that God does not bless any conflict and certainly doesn't side with those who drop bombs.
Well, first, that is simply not biblically accurate.
The Bible contains over 400 references to war, frequently depicting God as authorizing, commanding, intervening in battles like one that we all know the battle between David and Goliath.
Why is the Pope twisting religion to specifically attack only President Trump and the U.S.?
Why did he recently meet with top Obama advisor David Axelrod and the far left governor of Illinois J.B. Pritzker?
Is it because he's a run of the mill Trump hating?
Democrat that lacks moral clarity about radical Islam.
By the way, did he talk to them about abortion?
Well, in that case, you know, where are the pointed words for Iran, this evil regime, the number one state sponsor of terror?
All three of them are giving us the line that the Pope should stay out of politics.
And I could talk for 16 hours about this.
I want to make a very clear point as we start to head toward the last 15 or 20 minutes of today.
Christian nationalists will always say things like, We didn't elect a pastor, stay out of politics.
But they will never say, We did not elect a pastor, Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, Mike Johnson.
So you stay out of theology, you stay out of faith.
Christian nationalism works on a one way street.
It gives more and more theological and religious authority to the government.
And it takes less and less and less away from actual Christian institutions.
And Christian nationalists, Are so happy when the government, the leader of the nation, which, as you just said, Dan, represents God, the nation as God, they're so happy when they get the approval of the leader of the nation.
So, yesterday, Sean Foyt, the Christian nationalist troubadour with sideshow Bob Hare, was at the White House leading worship, and they're singing in the White House pray songs that come from Bethel.
They love when the government as God approves of them.
Mike Johnson, do you remember Dan when he became Speaker of the House?
Compared himself to Moses.
Pete Hegseth is praying prayers where the commander of the war is in the place of God and saying, We will get vengeance on you.
But when the Pope says something about morality, war, ethics, it's like, bro, stick to your lane.
Christian nationalism is bad for the religious and the non religious because what it does is it gives all the power to the government to decide what is good religion and what's good Christianity.
And it says, That the politician, the president, the congressperson can tell the religious leader, stay in your lane over there.
But we are going to take over your lane and ours.
We're going to be theologians.
We're going to be politicians.
We're going to be ethicists.
We're going to be totalitarian in terms of our approach to what we tell people and how they should live.
But you have one single lane.
That's kind of what they tell everybody, right?
They told LeBron James to shut up and dribble.
They kind of just told the Pope to shut up and shepherd this week.
What do you think?
I think you got another t shirt.
Shut up and shepherd.
Shut up and shepherd.
We have all these.
Shut up and shepherd.
We have a closet full of t shirts that you and I and two other people wear.
And nobody knows what they mean.
But when the four of us get together at a live event, it's going to be awesome.
We'll just have like a nice.
It's just like LeBron James' body.
LeBron James' body, but with the Pope's face.
And he's not dribbling.
He has like the staff.
He has the coach cook kind of thing.
Yeah.
So.
Yeah, I think it circles around to another point when we talk about Christian nationalism.
And I know you've gotten this question.
I've gotten this question where people say, well, how come other Christians don't speak up?
How come other Christians don't get involved?
How come other Christians don't, like, you know, why do they let them speak for them?
Why Other Christians Stay Silent00:09:36
And what it highlights is Christian nationalism is not about Christianity.
It's about a very certain conception of Christianity.
And only that kind of Christian gets to play a role.
And that's what we see when, you know, I don't want to, I'm not going to take sides in Christian sort of, I don't know, Quick Christian debates about true and authentic Christianity or whatever, but it would be a weird statement for most people to be like, yeah, the Pope's not Christian.
I understand certain kinds of religionists would do that, but I'm like, yeah, okay.
Like, I'm not going to question his credentials to call himself a Christian.
But the Pope doesn't matter.
The Pope's not the right kind of Christian.
Christians protesting in Minneapolis are not the right kinds of Christians.
Christians decrying immigration policies, they're not the right kinds of Christians.
Christians who affirm the LGBTQ population and help relocate them to cities and states where they can be safe, not the right kinds of Christians.
Not real Americans.
They're all fake.
So there's that piece of this too that when people say, well, why don't like other Christians who think things sort of change things?
This is why they get defined out of Christianity, out of American identity, and so forth.
So much so that Trump, in his long response, even said that he's the only reason that there is an American Pope.
The church just wanted to come after him and thought they could control Trump with an American Pope.
Yeah.
So other Christians need not apply.
There is no space for any other kind of vision of Christianity.
And so Yeah, I have students who ask, like, well, wasn't Obama a Christian?
Yeah, it still is, probably, as far as I know.
Biden, Christian, right?
But not the right kinds.
And so they don't count.
The Pope of all people, not the right kind, doesn't count.
And so they're just dismissed.
And when people wonder about the obvious hypocrisy of that, how in the world does a Mike Johnson of all people or somebody like him be like, yeah, you really ought to keep religion out of politics?
You're like, really?
You're like legislating from the Bible, man.
Like, what are you talking about?
That's the one.
Somebody asked him, What is your worldview?
Somebody said, What's your worldview?
And he's like, Bible.
And you're like, Well, okay, what?
Yeah.
But let's keep religion out of politics.
As the Speaker of the House, as the highest ranking Republican in Congress, I'm going to invoke not the Constitution, the Bible, but nope, nope, nope.
Hey, keep religion out of politics, Brad.
It highlights.
But what I'm always trying to explain is like, they will tell pastors and the Holy Father, keep yourself out of politics.
But nobody's allowed to tell them to keep religion out of their politics.
It's a one way street.
Yeah, absolutely.
And what I think, what I'm trying to say about everyday Catholics is what they are feeling, if you wanted to give an analytical category to it, is.
JD Vance, Mike Johnson, and Donald Trump are saying to you, your religion is not legitimate.
It is not authorized.
It is not good religion because it comes from the Pope, who we have just defined out of actual, true gospel Christianity.
Sorry.
And that's the position you're putting Catholics in is like, okay, so now if I go that way, it's not real Christianity and it's bad Christianity.
It's not authorized by the divine figure who's the head of my country.
Ooh, okay.
And some of them are going to go with Trump.
Don't get me wrong.
I've already seen the post.
Some of them are going to go MAGA on this.
But not all of them.
And this is just not like this is this really, you know, do you remember way back in Easter, like two weeks ago when Pete Hegseth had a Protestants only service?
Like the fissures of the Protestant persecution of Catholics in the United States, the ghosts of that are here in real ways.
I just think that's like, you know, undeniable.
So I think that's part of it.
It is incredible to hear Mike Johnson, the leader of the, you know, Congressional caucus of the GOP say, Like, stay, you know, stay here late or like JD Vance.
Like, these are guys that want to legislate birth control and, and they want to legend.
I mean, they, JD Vance wants there to be blue laws.
JD, you know, and you know what I think we kind of need, Dan, and I will close on this and then we'll go to reasons for hope.
I just wonder if it's maybe time in this country for a task force, you know what I mean?
To really investigate this because it seems dangerous.
Like, we have the vice president, the speaker of the house, the press, they're all, They're all saying negative things about a Christian leader.
And, you know, Troy Niels, the Marlboro man, and Elise Stefanik and Sean Hannity, they're also picking on Christians.
Do you think it is time for an anti Christian bias task force or something like that that could really get to the bottom here of just this political persecution of American Christians?
Because it feels dangerous.
We might need a task force.
Have you heard of anything like that in the past?
Yeah.
The Pope is an American Christian, they're limiting his religious freedom.
Yeah.
So, yeah, we ought to go.
Yeah.
If only there was a task force to try to defend the violations of Christian conscience and freedom in America.
If only some administration could do that.
As silly as I'm being, the point is made that, like, the Christian task force only investigates anti Christian rhetoric or actions that the state and the godlike figure at the head of it deems to be anti Christian.
They decide what's anti Christian.
And then when you attack them, when you criticize them, when you critique them, Even if you are the Pope, they're like, oh, no, no, no, you're not Christian.
You're not Christian.
We will persecute you.
And the task force is actually going to come after you rather than try to defend you.
Do you see how Christian nationalism works?
Do you see why it's bad for atheists, for Hindus, for Buddhists, for agnostics, for humanists, but also for Christians?
It's bad for everybody because you turn the nation into a God and you turn the leader into a Messiah.
What's your reasons for hope, Dan?
So, I'm going to make one more point.
Then I'm going to segue into my reason of hope.
I'm sure it's going to be smooth and seamless as all of my segues are, as we know.
A privation of being.
You know?
That's right.
Like, whenever my daughter's like, what's wrong with what I did?
I'm going to be like, that was a privation of being.
And I didn't appreciate it.
Yeah.
It was not approaching the highest good, it was not approximating that.
So, you know?
Yeah.
There was.
So, you talked about the loss or the potential erosion of Catholic support.
I think one piece of this is, for example, Catholic blue collar Americans.
All those union members, all those blue collar Americans in Catholic districts that used to be reliably Democratic that have shifted Republican over time.
And why do they vote for Trump?
They voted because of the economy.
Some of those Catholics, when they're now being told you're not really good Americans because you're Catholic.
And oh, by the way, the same Pete Hegseth who's busy not having Easter Mass, who's not doing these things, is also the same one who this week invalidated union contracts in the Department of Defense.
So you get the You get the intersection of these things.
Not only is there the anti Catholic piece, but you have the utter failure of the Trump administration to deliver on its economic promises, which is what drew a segment of that Catholic population to Trump in 2024.
And I think that that's a real thing.
That leads me to my reason for hope, which just basically, and I want to preface this by saying I am aware that all of these things have a real human cost, and I am not saying that they are good things.
But we are looking for reasons for hope.
Here is one the Trump administration has lost the plot.
They have, they continue to be lost.
As you're saying, they're foundering.
It looks like the wheels are coming off.
This week, another story that went almost completely unnoticed was tax day.
And tax day, I'm just going to throw this out there, sucked for me this year.
We owed a lot of taxes.
So I was aware that it was tax day.
But the Republicans are trying, they're trying to tout the one big, beautiful bill, which it turns out didn't give the kind of savings that they thought it would and didn't do the things that they thought it was going to do.
But they were supposed to be pivoting and emphasizing that.
And Trump was, remember, we were going to be talking about affordability and all of these things.
We have been hearing that for months and months at this point.
And I remember, you know, when you would hear this, like, well, you know, it's still a year out from the midterms.
There's a lot of time to turn this around.
We're confident that American voters are going to get behind.
Well, we're now like almost halfway there.
Still seven months from the midterms.
And there's just no sign of being able to recover those themes that they want to recover because they're busy picking fights with the Pope.
They're busy participating in unpopular wars.
And again, there are real costs to those things.
I'm not celebrating that.
But I do think that as we continue to sort of swing toward the summer and then into the fall and the midterms, I think that watching this administration be as rudderless and aimless and incapable of doing anything that it needs to do, I think it continues to be a reason for hope as we look to what I think is a really, really important election in the midterms.
All right, I'm going to give you some reasons for hope from our Discord.
Our Discord is lit and we got a lot of amazing people in there every week.
So Dawson says, not says, but posts an article from The Guardian about the Trump administration agreeing to keep flying the pride flag at Stonewall at the monument, which is awesome.
Andrea posts that a 96 year old woman has enlisted her 150 pound dog to plant her spring flowers.
You know, that may seem small, but Barbara Collins and Chewy, her dog, they're getting the flowers planted and in a year that has felt like Little beautiful, joyful things like planting flowers is not going to happen.
Reasons for Hope00:01:08
Barbara and Chewie are doing that this year.
Something that is a little more on brand for us Democrats have filed articles of impeachment against Hegsef.
We'll see what happens there.
The special election in New Jersey happened, and predictably the Democrat won.
That's to replace the now governor of New Jersey.
Nathan put in that the Montana Supreme Court rules that it's entirely constitutional in their state to protect.
Trans people.
So those are all great things.
There's more that we could mention, but I'll stick to those.
All right, y'all.
Thanks for being here.
Thanks for your support.
We can't wait to see you next week.
I'll be at an event on April 23rd with Matt Taylor, Julie Ingersoll, Sarah Posner.
You can find that at accessmoondy.us if you want to come hang out.
Be back next week with the Sunday interview with some great content early in the week.
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