William Lindsey 
"Though I’m not certain how 'ecumenical' it is that, again, one of their main guys thinks Catholics shouldn’t be allowed to have parades or that pretty much everyone I know who grew up in that environment also grew up believing that Catholics practice witchcraft and the Pope is the antichrist."
"I guess it’s a good thing, then, that no evangelical Protestants ever weigh in on politics or try to dictate our foreign policy or try to use said foreign policy to bring about a literal apocalypse. That would be bad!"
Robyn Pennacchia notes that Pope Leo's statements about war and peace have some MAGA white evangelicals now saying they understand why questions have been raised about electing a Catholic president (like, say, Joe Biden). Megan Basham of Daily Wire writes that she doesn't want a pope dictating US foreign policy.
Pennacchia responds sarcastically:
"Hegseth’s persistently unconstitutional, aggressive insertion of evangelical Christianity as motivation for the military is dangerous enough, but he’s also set up a kind of holy war within his holy war—between Protestants and Catholics. The Friday morning before the war began, Hegseth held a Christian prayer meeting in the Pentagon—but only for Protestants. Catholics were not invited."
~ Jim Stewartson
#Trump #Hegseth #PopeLeo #WhiteEvangelicals
/21
https://www.mind-war.com/p/avignon-presidency-popes-antipopes
"A big part of Trumpism is Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism is not primarily a flavor of Christianity. It is a sub-brand of nationalism.
Christian nationalism cannot abide Catholicism—no matter what the Catholic integralists insist, the two must inevitably fall into conflict."
#Trump #Hegseth #PopeLeo #WhiteChristianNationalism #WhiteEvangelicals #war #morality
/18
"Why are Pete Hegseth and—of all people!—Donald Trump invoking God so much lately?
What kind of Christianity—or more specifically, what kind of Christianity-adjacent traditions—are they invoking?
How is the Trump/Hegseth brand of Christianity threatened by Pope Leo’s Catholicism?"
~ Jonathan V. Last
#Trump #Hegseth #PopeLeo #WhiteChristianNationalism #WhiteEvangelicals #war #morality
/17
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-department-of-war-vs-the-pope
For further discussion of the role that white Christian nationalism is playing in generating a chest-beating macho lust for war and violence in the Trump administration, see this discussion bewteen Katherine Stewart and Robert P. Jones.
#Trump #Hegseth #WhiteChristianNationalism #WhiteEvangelicals #war
/13
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2026/04/07/religious-fundamentalists-christian-extremism-trump
What happens when religious fundamentalists come to power? (Part Two)
Military service members are filing a flood of complaints about religious justifications for the U.S. war in Iran. How Christian extremism came to influence the Trump administration and offer moral underpinnings for the new war in the Middle East.
"That theology that you're talking about is a kind of evangelical theology that really is only about 150 years old. And it's particularly a kind of American and European, very recent construction. And it has this idea that, yes, there should be this battle of Armageddon in the Middle East where Jews take back over Jerusalem. And so it's a kind of Christian Zionism."
~ Robert P. Jones
#Trump #Hegseth #WhiteChristianNationalism #WhiteEvangelicals #war
/12
https://www.contrariannews.org/p/hegseth-wants-an-america-at-war
Hegseth Wants An America At War
Robert P. Jones explains the toxic theology permeating this administration
(continued from 10)
'"whose family is corruptly amassing huge riches, and who has broken sort of every norm of America’s democratic traditions. There they are, praying for him; this sort of ghastly religious zealotry is precisely what they decry when they see it in Iran or Afghanistan with the Taliban.'”
#Trump #Hegseth #WhiteChristianNationalism #WhiteEvangelicals #war
/11
"[Former UK diplomat Alexandra] Hall Hall describes the overtly religious overtones of Hegseth’s language as 'stomach churning and nauseating' and decries the 'sanctimonious bigots who claim to be Christians, laying hands on Donald Trump and praying with him; a man who is a serial adulterer, has had multiple divorces,'" (continued in /11)
~ Adrian Goldberg
#Trump #Hegseth #WhiteChristianNationalism #WhiteEvangelicals #war
/10
https://www.bylinesupplement.com/p/wheres-the-adult-in-the-room
