Confronting deep-rooted Evangelical hostility in Trump vs. Leo fallout

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | May 05, 2026

Catholics were in near unanimity in opposition to President Trump’s social media attack on Pope Leo a few weeks ago. Even Catholics like me, who are otherwise often on Trump’s side. It was different for Evangelicals. Except for those who were already critical of Trump, not a single prominent Evangelical defended the Pope. Many, in fact, cheered Trump on.

There are many reasons why. Some reasons are specific to the moment. Some reasons date back centuries. Neither Evangelicals nor Catholics are entirely blameless for those reasons. But for the sake of the causes we share, Evangelicals should know how their recent cheering for attacks on the Holy Father looks to their Catholic allies.

First, a throwdown between President Trump and Pope Leo is sort of like the Protestant Pope vs. the Catholic Pope. Appearing in New Haven in 2008 shortly before his death, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus was asked why Evangelicals felt such consternation about the possibility of a Mormon (Mitt Romney) becoming President that year. It’s because Evangelicals with a low church theology don’t have the same ecclesiastical structure that we do, Neuhaus said. As a result, they see the nation itself as the church and, well, “You don’t want a heretic to be the head of your church.” So in backing Trump against Leo, Evangelicals are in some sense backing their pope against our Pope.

Second, there is a new tension between Evangelicals and Catholics regarding Israel. Evangelicals and Catholics have always had theological differences, of course, but in recent decades our differences had no public policy consequences. With Israel, they do. Christian Zionism is incompatible with Catholicism and many Catholics believe it to have a disproportionate influence over U.S. foreign policy. Even pro-Israel Catholics like me share these concerns. This seems to infuriate some Evangelicals, and they have lashed out in bizarre ways.

Third, the Iran War has increased that tension. Most especially, Pope Leo’s criticisms of the Iran War. Even before Trump’s intemperate response, the Pope’s criticisms of U.S. policy seemed to stir in Evangelicals an atavistic anti-Catholicism of a kind not seen since before the election of JFK:

Megan Basham would be the first to point out—has been the first to point out—her love for Catholics, whom she’s “honored to lock arms with,” and that she is not singling out Catholics for special treatment. She has made a career out of calling out skullduggery in the high places of Evangelical Protestantism. All true. I have followed Basham since she was the movie reviewer for World Magazine and we are fortunate to have her as an ally.

But to the Catholic eye, Basham’s tweet has a “You’re likable enough, Catholics” vibe. Catholics are welcome here in the U.S. and will be considered as American as anyone else—if we know our place. Not being pro-Israel to the nth degree or having a Pope who dares to criticize the Iran War, means that maybe we don’t know our place. That maybe we have reneged on the terms by which we are accepted as fully American and maybe Catholics shouldn’t be elected to high office anymore and maybe Evangelicals can’t be so locked in arms against common foes with us as they once were. To pro-life Catholics, in particular, this is a familiar vibe. It’s what the pro-abortion Democratic Party has been telling Catholics for over forty years, ever since Mario Cuomo handed them the rope by which to strangle our participation in public policy. We’re welcome here, if we know our place.

Basham and the Democrats are both wrong to condition Catholics’ Americanness on whether we sing their tune. But that slight whiff of disloyalty to the regime that seems to hang over Catholics and never truly goes away is, in the deepest Christian sense, true. We seek the welfare of the city where God has sent us into exile (Jeremiah 29:7) but our true homeland is in heaven. And as Catholics we do belong to a universal Church that transcends nation-states.

Even apart from that, the suspicion of Catholics has deep roots in Anglo-American history. I don’t think we ever fully recovered from Pope St. Pius V’s 1570 bull Regnans in Excelsis, in which he called for Queen Elizabeth I’s removal and for English Catholics to treat her as someone who could be lawfully overthrown. When reading Stephanie Mann’s splendid book Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation, I could not help but contrast St. Pius V with Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, who showed that “Catholics could be loyal to faith and to their country,” whose family’s service to the King earned his favor and the founding of Catholic Maryland. How differently might the subsequent history of Catholics in the English-speaking world have gone for us if we had followed more the political path of Lord Baltimore, rather than that of St. Pius V?

To be sure, “English Protestantism was organized and defiant, publicly blasphemous and often violent” as Patricia Snow wrote in a recent First Things piece and Catholics were justified in attempting to restore the Church. But “those burnings” under Queen Mary, Snow asks, “are we really to suppose that God approved of them?” Noting the failure of the Catholic cause in Reformation England, Snow writes, “it is as though God simply said, No not in this way will my Church be restored.” Snow’s son, Ross Douthat, expanded on “God’s veto” in a letter to the editor.

These missteps were exploited to great effect by anti-Catholic propagandists throughout Anglophone history. In Joseph Bottum’s book An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America, Bottum discusses how St. John Henry Newman and others observed the enduring influence of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs on Protestant culture, characterizing it as having “stained the Protestant imagination.”

More recently, I don’t think the vogue in some Catholic circles for an American Integralism and related philosophies have helped matters much. The idea that the American founding itself was flawed, and that today’s evils inevitably flow from that flawed founding, is what led to some Catholics embracing Integralism, monarchy, and other ideas that are completely opposite to the long tradition of Catholic attempts to show that we are good Americans and loyal citizens of the Republic. It was low-hanging fruit for anti-Catholics like Insurrection Barbie to latch onto, even though Catholic interest in Integralism seems to have peaked.

Evangelicals remain indispensable partners in the defense of unborn life, religious liberty, parental rights, and the moral foundations of civil society, and Catholics should continue to stand with them wherever we can. But friendship requires honesty. Evangelicals should understand that Catholics do not forfeit their citizenship by belonging to a universal Church, and we do not become suspect Americans simply because the Pope criticizes a war or questions a political program. We have the right—indeed, at times the duty—to disagree, even publicly, and to do so without having our patriotism or eligibility for public office called into question. The work ahead is too important for old prejudices to be revived, and too urgent for Catholics and Evangelicals to turn on one another when the real enemies of Christian civilization are not in Rome or in the pews, but in the culture that increasingly rejects the authority of God altogether.