In the first half of 2026, tensions rose between political leaders in the Trump Administration and Pope Leo. This became a battle of theological rhetoric and what seemed to be an inappropriate use of Christian theology to support the United States’ still-ongoing war with Iran.
U.S. military strikes against Iran began on February 28, 2026, killing Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. By early May, just two months later, an estimated 3,300+ Iranian military casualties had been reported; and by September the number escalated to estimates up to 7,600. Iranian civilian deaths are reported to be around 3,600. This includes the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, for which the Trump Administration has yet to release the investigation findings. The conflict, of course, continues, and some media outlets are now projecting a long-term war.
Less than two months after the conflict started, on April 10, 2026, Pope Leo posted on his Twitter / X feed, “God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” It appeared to many that Leo was responding directly to U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who had claimed that the U.S. military action against Iran has the stamp of divine approval.
Vice President J.D. Vance weighed in a few days later at a Turning Point U.S.A. rally where he infamously suggested that the Pope be more careful when speaking on matters of theology. Likewise, Hegseth responded, “The pope’s gonna do his thing, that’s fine … We know what our mission is, we know what authority we have. We’re very clear about that, we follow that—the order of the president.” For Hegseth, the ‘thing’ that the Pope will do, is to advocate for peace and justice, not to meddle in the domestic or international policymaking of the United States. For the Secretary of War, the U.S. answers to a different authority. Meanwhile, President Trump was posting an AI image of himself as Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday.
Some of the commentaries on the U.S. / Vatican relationship balked at these politicians. They mocked that the Trump Administration has no real authority to speak on theological matters, especially not when the Pope is involved. Others commentators were so distracted by the tension between Pope and President that, when Pope Leo published his landmark encyclical on artificial intelligence, Magnifica Humanitas, they could not divorce it from his fight with Donald Trump.
When putting together this collection of essays, I wondered about discourses that are left out when we presume theological authority exists in binary fashion—that is, the Pope has it and Trump does not. It seems to me that the boundaries of theological authority are not so clearly defined. When authority is reduced to the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’ we also reduce the figures within these debates to mere political caricatures of one another, trapped in a cat fight from which there is no escape.
I asked the contributors to consider how authoritative uses of theology in U.S. politics get shrouded when the focus remains on the presumption of proper theological authority in the Pope / Trump Administration conflict. I was especially thinking about how President Trump functions as a theological figurehead, even if many would prefer otherwise, and how his Administration utilizes theological argument (often successfully) to support their agendas.
When I received the early drafts of the essays, I was pleased to find that each challenges us to move away from the Trump Administration to see how theology and Pope Leo are woven into other forms of political discourse in the United States and globally. Each responds to what I think now is a more basic question that was sitting underneath the ones that I asked in my original proposal to them. They ask, “What nuances are ignored, what groups are affected, or what other political theologies might receive our attention if we readjust our focus?”
Sean Martin begins our discussion with an ‘autotheoretical’ reflection on his own entanglement with a theo-politics of demonization, simply asking “how did we get here?” Martin writes that he grew up with evangelical-inspired apocalyptic literature that drew on spiritual warfare imagery and blurred the lines between the spiritual and the temporal.
Reflection on his personal history has helped him contextualize the current trend among Christians either to support warfare or to turn a blind eye to it. As he argues, what allows U.S. military expansion to exist within the moral framework of Christianity is the legibility of warfare within Christian spirituality. As if a mirror, Martin’s essay encourages the reader to consider how they themselves participate (or have participated) in what they consider opposable discourses.
Leigh Greening applies Pope Leo’s stated preference for disarming language, which he articulates in Magnifica Humanitas. The Pope uses disarmament (in both militaristic and conversational senses) as a solution to the problems of just war theory, which he argues has recently been placed in service of harming others rather than of serving them. Greening asks whether linguistic disarmament may also be employed in how the Church has often spoken about LGBTQIA+ persons.
At the end of the essay, they take up the question of “looksmaxxing” among younger men—like the use of testosterone supplements by male members of the military, lauded by Pete Hegseth. We might ask why Hegseth remains disarmed for these men while LGBTQIA+ persons seeking gender affirming care get treated as soldiers of an ongoing culture war.
Evan Marsolek provides a compelling shift away from the usual political suspects. He turns attention to Peter Thiel, someone he imagines as a rising political figure, in his critique of technocratic regimes and threats to democratic governance. Similar to Greening, Marsolek draws on Magnifica Humanitas to elevate how Pope Leo and the Vatican have provided a strong defense of the value of the human in the wake of democratic decline and the rise of generative artificial intelligence. Thiel is certainly not the only technocrat, but he recently has been engaged in anti-Vatican discourses, suggesting that Leo is colluding with Chinese Communists.
Marsolek’s essay is a welcome, if challenging, contribution that reminds us of the various discourses—outside of the Trump Administration—to which Pope Leo is responding. Democratic decline, he reminds us, is happening not only in the siloed political arena. Technology is politics, and tech CEOs and the rising stars of GenAI have serious implications for how we understand ourselves, our relationships, and our political power.
Leo Mendoza challenges all of us to consider how theo-political discourse in the United States ignores the global other. Although certain U.S.-based Roman Catholic theologians and commentators have cast Pope Leo as a respondent to U.S. political tensions, Mendoza clarifies that the Pope has explicitly rejected participation in this political game. Mendoza repositions Leo—although a U.S.-born Pope—primarily as a global Pope. Not every statement he makes, one might say, puts America first.
I find Mendoza’s essay to be a striking contribution alongside the first three, each of which is grounded in U.S. socio-political discourses. It is easy from our positions in the U.S. to read Pope Leo with these in mind, but as Mendoza writes at the end, “The erroneous assumption … is that Rome is solely focused on Washington.” This is not to say that Pope Leo has no words for the U.S., nor that his work ought not be placed in service of U.S. political critique. Pope Leo’s emphasis on human value, however, must be understood to respond to more than the exact happenings of U.S. politics.
Again, each of these essays insists upon a thematic bridge. Who (or what) is missed or left out of our theo-political analyses and commentaries when we hyper focus on only two actors (Donald Trump and Pope Leo)? While three essays still engage with the Pope and the Vatican, their foci are starkly different from recent engagement with the theological tensions and negotiations between two leading world leaders.
At our own peril, we elevate only Donald Trump and Pope Leo in theological negotiations. This causes us to ignore the overall devaluation of the human person at the global scale (Mendoza) and of democratic society (Marsolek), as well as those whose lives are often illegible in Vatican theo-politics, who are likewise being erased within U.S. politics—LGBTQIA+ persons (Greening).
Together, these essays remind us that Rome is not solely focused on the White House, the Pentagon, the U.S. Catholic Church, or Silicon Valley, nor even only on communities and nations outside the United States. When we restrict our vision to two actors or a few locations, we claim the right to ignore how we ourselves have been intertwined with and complicit in discourses that we try to critique (Martin). We negotiate ourselves out, and in doing so create a condition for asserting our own authority over our opposition. When we refocus on those things and persons we miss, however, we might find that we too are those to whom the Pope speaks.