The ascendancy of Cardinal Robert Prevost — now Pope Leo XIV – to become the global head of the Catholic Church is an inherent threat to the worldview of the American religious right, according to one Christian pastor.
In a recent essay for Religion News Service (RNS), the Rev. Jennifer Butler — who is the senior pastor at First Congregational United Church of Christ in Corvallis, Oregon — argued that the far right is railing against Leo XIV specifically because of the dilemma he presents to their belief system. Butler wrote that the MAGA faithful is not opposed to the new pontiff because he's a liberal like his predecessor Pope Francis, but because he's a traditional conservative Catholic who nonetheless holds radically different views than Christian nationalists.
"Leo has become a MAGA flashpoint not due to any dramatic break from Catholic doctrine, but because his worldview directly threatens the Christian nationalist engine behind the rising authoritarianism of our time," Butler wrote. "He threatens to become a transnational counterweight to a rapidly expanding authoritarian religious network."
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Not long after Prevost was elected to the papacy, Vice President JD Vance traveled to the Holy See to meet the first American pope in history. But Butler pointed out that Leo XIV and Vance are in direct contradiction with one another when it comes to Christian nationalism. While Vance has argued that Americans should put their country first before the rest of the world, Leo XIV — who was a longtime priest in Peru — has said that "Jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others."
"This was no minor theological dustup over the proper 'order of love' Christians should obey," Butler observed. "It was a direct rebuttal to the ideological foundation of Christian nationalism: that faith should serve state nativist power and preserve national sovereignty at the expense of human rights."
The United Church of Christ pastor called the Christian right a "transnational" movement that has also found footing in authoritarian regimes like Vladimir Putin's Russia and Viktor Orbán's Hungary. And she characterized its goal as one in which its proponents impose a "rigid moral order" on the rest of the world that serves to "polarize the public and erode democratic institutions." However, she said Pope Leo XIV's tenure could be one in which the Christian right's use of religion "to justify authoritarian consolidation and frame dissent as sacrilege" is upended.
"The election of Leo XIV signals that not all global religious institutions are capitulating," she wrote. "... MAGA influencers understand that when Leo speaks, people listen — not just Catholics, but others looking for spiritual leadership grounded in clarity. His critics know how powerful that can be."
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Click here to read Butler's full essay in RNS.