Mother Jones
Trump’s Iran War Is Tearing Apart His Catholic–Evangelical Coalition
Last week, in a prime-time speech that was confused and discursive even by his own standards, President Donald Trump attempted to justify the current war in Iran. US attacks, he assured the American public, were “an investment in your children and your grandchildren’s future,” adding for emphasis, “There’s no country like us anywhere in the world, and we’re in great shape for the future!”
Just hours after Trump spoke, Pope Leo XIV expressed skepticism about Trump’s triumphant speech. God, he said, “rejects the prayers of those with hands full of blood.” An escalation, he warned, would be a “tragedy of enormous proportions.”
Over the weekend, the conversation continued, with Trump posting on Saturday on Truth Social, “Time is running out—48 hours before all hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD!” Then, on Easter Sunday, the president became even more agitated and launched a profanity-laced post on Truth Social. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
In his Easter address, the Pope, unsurprisingly, preached a very different message: “Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace! Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue!”
Pope Leo’s comments reflect the growing uneasiness that many Catholics feel with American aggression in the Middle East. Just days before, Leo XIV had warned, “We cannot remain silent before the suffering of so many people, helpless victims of these conflicts.” Prominent Catholic leaders—including Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Archbishop of Washington Cardinal Robert McElroy—have echoed those sentiments, arguing that the war in Iran doesn’t meet the conditions for the doctrine of “just war,” meaning one that, according to Catholic teachings, is morally defensible, such as, say, World War II.
“Conservative Catholics who spent years building an alliance with evangelical Protestants, are waking up to find that their allies consider their faith a species of paganism and their sacraments a blasphemy.”
Over the last few months, some right-wing Catholics who disagree with Pope Leo XIV on almost everything else have come to his side on the Middle East conflict. “There was an effort among church leaders in Rome and here in the United States to highlight the suffering in Palestine,” Michael O’Loughlin, executive editor of the progressive Catholic news outlet National Catholic Reporter, told me. “I’m wondering if that broke through traditional political barriers, if some Catholics on the right, who might generally be more sympathetic to Israel, if they heard those messages and started to look at the whole situation more critically.”
But what may have started as an intra-Catholic reckoning on Palestine has spread far beyond the confines of the Catholic faith. The conflict has emerged as the latest—and possibly largest—crack in a powerful religious alliance between pro-Trump evangelical Christians and Catholics that has defined the conservative movement for decades, one that McLoughlin noted may have always been uneasy, yet also “hugely important.”
In a Substack post last month about the complex interfaith dynamics surrounding the Catholic response to the war in Iran, religious and political commentator Christopher Hale put it in stronger terms. “Conservative Catholics who spent years building an alliance with evangelical Protestants,” he wrote, “are waking up to find that their allies consider their faith a species of paganism and their sacraments a blasphemy.”
Pope Leo XIV presides over the Easter Mass in St. Peter’s Square on April 05, 2026 in Vatican City.Antonio Masiello/Getty
Given the centuries-long divisions between Catholics and Protestants, the alliance between American Catholics and evangelicals has been a relatively recent phenomenon, one that was forged in the late 1970s largely over the groups’ shared opposition to abortion. Over the following decades, their bond as allies deepened in the fight against gay marriage; more recently, it further solidified in the anti-trans movement.
Yet evangelicals and Catholics have always been strange bedfellows; not only do fundamental theological differences divide the two groups, but in the political sphere, they often disagree on matters including immigration and the death penalty. “It was always a fragile and improbable alliance,” Robert Orsi, a scholar of American history and Catholic studies at Northwestern University, told me, because the bond was “born of [the] political, and not the religious.”
After the Hamas attacks of October 7, the fissures between the two camps began to deepen—and one major reason has to do with their differing visions of the end of the world, or eschatology. Many evangelicals—especially those who are part of the rapidly growing charismatic movement—are Christian Zionists, meaning that a victorious state of Israel plays a central role in their dramatic and troubling end-times scenario, which is, put simply, that Jews return to Israel, usher in the second coming of Jesus, and then convert to Christianity or perish.
Evangelicals and Catholics both believe that a special covenant existed between God and the Jews; one need only read the Old Testament to see that unfold. But for Catholics, the restoration of Israel predicted in the Bible is more symbolic than literal—they generally don’t believe that the state of Israel must prevail politically to usher in the second coming of Jesus.
Catholic teaching strongly rejects antisemitism and the insidious and pervasive old trope that Jews were responsible for killing Jesus. Yet embedded in the criticism by Catholics of Israel’s attacks on Gaza and, more recently, the war in Iran, some evangelicals see a threat to the very existence of Israel, the Jewish people, and their own deeply held beliefs about the end-times.
Last month, weeks after the US attacked Iran, an anonymous account on X called Insurrection Barbie posted a screed against traditionalist Catholics, or those who favor a return to Catholicism as it was before the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council. The post falsely claimed that Catholics see “Jews, Israel, and Protestants not as covenant partners but as adversaries of Christian civilization.” The post has been viewed 4.1 million times. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, an evangelical Christian and strong supporter of Israel, reposted it, urging his 7.1 million followers to “READ every word of this. It’s the best & most comprehensive explanation of what we’re fighting.”
Then there was the widely publicized incident involving Carrie Prejean Boller, a conservative Catholic activist and former Miss California who has vociferously opposed the war in Iran. Boller, who converted to Catholicism in 2025, served in Trump’s White House Religious Liberty Commission until February, when she was removed because of her comments during a hearing on antisemitism. “I’m a Catholic, and Catholics do not embrace Zionism,” she said, “so are all Catholics antisemites?” Other members of the panel pushed back, but she was resolute.
At the same hearing, she also stood up for the far-right influencer Candace Owens, a recent convert to Catholicism who has defended Hitler and referred to Israel as a “synagogue of Satan” against allegations of antisemitism. “I would really appreciate it if you would stop calling Candace Owens an antisemite,” she said. “She’s not an antisemite. She just doesn’t support Zionism, and that really has to stop.”
In response to Boller’s removal, Owens fired off a post on X. “You hosted a performative Zionist hearing meant to neuter the Christian faith,” she wrote. “Carrie spoke truth, as a Catholic, and Christians, the Truth cannot be defeated. Zionists are naturally hostile to Catholics because we refuse to bend the knee to revisionist history and support the mass slaughter and rape of innocent children for occult Baal worshipers.” Last month, the right-wing group Catholics for Catholics held a gala to honor Boller “in recognition of her courageous defense of the Faith.”
Another recent flashpoint in the tension between evangelicals and Catholics came when Israeli police stopped Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, head of the Catholic church in Israel, from entering Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where he was planning to celebrate mass on Palm Sunday. “That was shocking,” said Orsi, the Northwestern scholar. “I mean that that could really break something between Catholics and Jews.” And an affront to Israeli Jews could also strain relations between Catholics and the many evangelical Christian Zionists who support them.
“It was always a fragile and improbable alliance, born of [the] political, and not the religious.”
Israeli leaders said that safety concerns prompted their actions, but some Catholics saw the snubbing of Pizzaballa as retaliation for his strong condemnation of the war in Iran. Last month, Pizzaballa cited US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comparison of the war in Iran to the Christian Crusades as an example of abusing God’s name to justify war, which is, Pizzaballa said, “the gravest sin we can commit in this time.” Last summer, he called Israel’s actions in Gaza “morally unjustifiable.”
“Cardinal Pizzaballa was turned back because the Jews are at war with the Catholic Church,” tweeted E. Michael Jones, editor of the conservative Catholic magazine Culture Wars, to his 132,000 followers. “This violation of his rights as cardinal archbishop has nothing to do with ‘security concerns.’ If the Israelis were really concerned about their security, they would stop attacking Iran.”
Shortly after, radical right pundit Steve Bannon and “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, both conservative Catholics, discussed the incident on Bannon’s show. Palm Sunday, Posobiec said, “clearly holds biblical significance for so many of the believers. That’s why the outrage was so swift and so strong, by so many Christians all around the world.” Bannon called for a Christian uprising against the Israeli government. “We need the Christians to take control of the Christian sites, full stop—we don’t need to be supplicants to the Israel government to do this,” he said. He then took the argument a step further, lambasting US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and Sen. Ted Cruz, both evangelical Christians who strongly support Israel. “And any Christian [like] Huckabee and Cruz and this crowd that doesn’t agree, that shows you what heretics they are.” (Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, later expressed regret over the incident, and Huckabee called it an “unfortunate overreach already having major repercussions around the world.”)
Against the backdrop of these tensions, far-right Catholic influencers have become emboldened in their criticism of one of the most politically prominent evangelicals in the Trump universe. In a clip that went viral last week, during a White House Easter luncheon, the president’s spiritual adviser, evangelical minister Paula White-Cain likened Trump to Jesus. White-Cain, a charismatic evangelical who has called Israel her “spiritual home,” noted that Trump has been “betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that Our Lord and Savior showed us.”
The blowback was immediate and unsparing. Hard-right Catholic commentator Taylor Marshall, who has 235,000 followers on X, posted White-Cain’s remarks with the comment, “Paula White speaks blasphemy.” Boller posted to her 160,000 followers on X, “We were promised the golden age…now they are glorifying a genocide and justifying it as if it’s God’s will. Heretical teachers like Paula White are advising Trump for more war and destruction to fulfill their false end times fantasy.”
Milo Yiannopoulos, the far-right Catholic former editor of Breitbart News, had choice words about White-Cain after the incident, which he shared with his 828,000 followers. He described her as a “heretic con artist who preys on the poorest, dumbest**,** and most desperate people in America.” He added, “God isn’t the only one using Donald Trump, is he, you vapid old hag.”
“What does matter is that this Pope has said that this war is bad, this war is sinful, this war is immoral. This papacy was not the dream papacy of the Catholic right.”
Candace Owens reacted to the fact that Bishop Robert Barron, a Catholic leader in the Minnesota Diocese of Winona-Rochester and a prominent theological conservative, was also present at the luncheon but offered no objection to White-Cain’s remarks. “I am a new Catholic, but I am deeply concerned about Bishop Barron,” she wrote. “Paula White is an unabashed heretic.”
The Catholic commentators I talked to for this article cautioned me against using fringe voices on the Catholic right—such as Steven Bannon and Candace Owens—as representatives of broad Catholic sentiment. As Michael Sean Winters, a journalist who covers politics for the progressive Catholic news outlet National Catholic Reporter, put it, “I just don’t think it’s your average Catholic in the pew.”
He’s right. The 1.4 billion members of the global Catholic Church are astonishingly ideologically diverse; along with all the doctrinaire traditionalists, there are also thriving strains of progressivism and social justice teaching. “Catholics are not a monolithic social or political group any longer,” Fr. James Martin, editor-at-large of the Jesuit magazine America, noted to me via email.
Indeed, the fringe controversies obscure the more important fissure. “What does matter is that this Pope has said that this war is bad, this war is sinful, this war is immoral,” Orsi told me. “This papacy was not the dream papacy of the Catholic right.”
Out of the shambles of the evangelical-Catholic coalition, a new alliance is beginning to take shape. Today, some conservative Catholic intellectuals find they have more in common with a hard right group of Christian nationalist reformed protestants than with mainstream megachurch evangelicals. Christopher Hale, the progressive Catholic commentator, noted in his Substack post that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is a disciple of Idaho pastor Doug Wilson, a hard-line Calvinist protestant. Wilson is the de facto patriarch of the TheoBros, an extremely online group of mostly millennial, mostly Calvinist men who proudly call themselves Christian nationalists.
Last week, I spoke to R.R. Reno, editor of the conservative Catholic publication First Things. Unlike the Pope, Reno is cautiously supportive of the war in Iran because he believes that it can be defended under the just-war doctrine. “Diminishing or neutralizing the war-making capacity of one’s enemy is the baseline cause pursued by nations that make war,” he wrote in a recent First Things opinion piece. Doug Wilson shares this cautious support, even though his Calvinist denomination does not believe that Israel plays a special role in the End Times. But beyond their agreement on Iran, Reno says that he and Wilson, who has written for First Things, get along because of their shared erudition. “You go down to your local Pentecostal church, and they typically want to engage on things just at the level of the Bible,” he told me. He noted that mass advertising was invented in America more than 100 years ago, and part of its genius “is to be able to bring things into focus in a kind of pithy way. And American evangelicalism is just so American.” In contrast, much like Catholicism, the kind of protestant faith that Wilson practices “has a very rich intellectual tradition,” says Reno. He refers to it as “single-malt Calvinism.”
The newfound bond between Catholics and TheoBros is not without tension—the main pressure point being that Wilson takes a dim view of Catholicism as a whole, calling the faith “priestcraft” and the authorities in Rome “not qualified to teach the saints of God.” Still, Reno told me, “I have a lot in common with the Doug Wilson crowd.” While the simplicity of evangelical messages may appeal to the masses, Reno says, his brand of Catholicism and Wilson’s single-malt Calvinism are “more likely to exercise influence at an elite level, and,” he added, “you’re not going to get Paula White exercising influence at an elite level.”
There is perhaps no better example of the elite influence of the TheoBros and Catholics than Vice President JD Vance, whose views have been shaped by both movements. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, has written about how Catholic thinkers such as St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the philosopher René Girard have influenced his worldview. Yet he also has intellectual and social connections to the TheoBros, especially those associated with their unofficial publication, American Reformer. His assertion that children should be allotted votes managed by their parents, for example, echoes arguments against women voting made by Wilson’s church.
For Vance, a presumed 2028 presidential hopeful, harmony with Doug Wilson, who just planted a new church in Washington, DC, and recently spoke at the Pentagon at Hegseth’s behest, is an asset. One that may be more important than his harmony with the Pope, who, on the Iran War and several other key issues, happens to be opposed to the actions of Vance’s boss and the MAGA base. (Before he became pope, he also famously criticized Vance on social media for his remarks about the Christian concept of rightly-ordered love, saying he was simply “wrong.”)
On the war in Iran, Vance seems to have come around from initial misgivings to a position that reflects Trump’s rather than that of Catholic leaders. I asked Winters, the National Catholic Reporter journalist, if he thought Vance struggled internally to integrate the teachings of the Pope with the directives of President Trump. “I would be surprised if he sees it as a predicament,” Winters told me. “I just think the ambition is so raw there, that’s an easy call. Trump is going to win that every day and twice on Sunday.”
When a journalist asked him last month about his change of heart on Iran, Vance replied, “We have a smart president, whereas in the past, we’ve had dumb presidents, and I trust President Trump to get the job done, to do a good job for the American people, and to make sure that the mistakes of the past aren’t repeated.”