I remember the moment clearly all these decades later. I was not yet ten years old when my parents confronted me on the stairway and informed me earnestly but in no uncertain terms that if I ever married a Roman Catholic, I would be disowned.
I canโt say that I was actively considering marriage at the time, but I was warned.
We were living in rural southern Minnesota in a parsonage surroundedโliterallyโby cornfields. My father was pastor of a fairly large evangelical congregation. I recall as well that if a member of the youth group became engaged to a Catholic, members of the congregation would buzz with the urgent question, โIs she going to turn?โ meaning: Will she become Catholic?
I offer these anecdotes not as a gratuitous jaunt down memory lane but to provide perspective on the war of words between Donald Trump and Leo XIV. After the pontiff questioned the morality of the war in Iran, Trump responded that Leo was โweak on crime,โ adding, โI donโt want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because Iโm doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History.โ
J.D. Vance, a recent convert to Catholicism, chimed in by admonishing the pope โto be careful when he talks about matters of theology.โ
Hmm. If the pope canโt talk theology, who can?
Half a century ago, Trump and his vice president could have leveled those critical remarks against the pope and not suffered politically with their white evangelical base. Now, Iโm not so sure.
What happened? When did white evangelicals, who almost universally opposed John F. Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, in 1960, temper their suspicions about Catholicism?
The answer is slowly, and over the course of several decades. The Second Vatican Council, held in Rome from 1962 to 1965, altered Catholic theology and practice in many ways, including a more generous attitude about Christians other than Catholics, regarding them as catechumensโthat is, as spiritual pilgrims on their way ultimately (whether they acknowledged it or not) to becoming Catholic.
In addition, liturgical reforms, including a renewed emphasis on preaching, made Catholic worship slightly less alien to evangelicals. I remember my father, having recently returned from a ministerial conference in the late 1960s, allowing that the reforms of Vatican II made it possible that some Catholics might in fact be โChristians,โ something he had never previously contemplated.
The second reason that white evangelicals are more sympathetic with the pope and Catholicism pertains to politics. Although evangelicals considered abortion a โCatholic issueโ throughout the 1970s, once they jumped aboard the antiabortion bandwagon just prior to the 1980 election, they did so with the zeal of converts.
Since the early 1980s, then, white evangelicals and Catholics, especially conservative Catholics, have been co-belligerents on a host of โculture warโ issues, including homosexuality, same-sex marriage and abortion. That alliance, encouraged by such political strategists as Paul Weyrich, architect of the Religious Right, and Charles Colson, the former Watergate felon who identified both as Catholic and evangelical, has reshaped American politics.
White evangelicals today, therefore, are far less suspicious of Roman Catholics, so when Trump jousts with the pontiff, and especially when he follows with an AI image of himself as Jesus Christ (although Trump later said he was being portrayed as a doctor), he risks alienating his evangelical base.
Lord knows (and I mean that literally), Trumpโs evangelical supporters have remained steadfast through many previous statements and scandalsโhis innumerable prevarications, his multiple marriages and extramarital affairs, his bankruptcies and felony convictions, his impeachments, his acknowledgement of sexually predatory behaviorโand who knows what lies in the Epstein files? Perhaps his โluckโ will endure, and he will remain in the good graces of white evangelicals.
But itโs also possible that by tangling with the pope and by portraying himself as Jesus, Trump may be playing with fire. Evangelical attitudes toward Roman Catholics are far different today from what they were half a century ago.
A postscript: I did marry a Catholic. My parents, now deceased, loved her dearly.
Randallย Balmer, author ofย Americaโs Best Idea: The Separation of Church and State, teaches at Dartmouth College.