Pope Leo XIV presides over a Prayer Vigil for Peace at St. Peter’s Basilica on April 11. (Simone Risoluti — Vatican Media via Vatican Pool/Getty)
“The worst corruption is a corrupt religion,” - Reinhold Niebuhr.
“The balance within the human family has been severely destabilized. Even the holy Name of God, the God of life, is being dragged into discourses of death,” - Pope Leo XIV.
I’m not a pacifist. And neither is the Pope.
In fact, Leo started his religious life as a member of the Order of Saint Augustine, following the theologian who famously limned the tragedy of a Christian man in a fallen world, and understood the awful necessity in rare cases for collective violence. (Serendipitously, Leo was even visiting Augustine’s original church this week.)
For Augustine, an individual Christian can and must refuse to resist violence against himself, as Jesus did — and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Dr Martin Luther King Jr showed. That is, in fact, the ultimate Christian act — martyrdom in the face of violence — as an individual. But among worldly collectives — the nation, the tribe, the city-state — sin is still real, ineradicable, omnipresent, and embedded. And so there are times when it has to be collectively resisted — even with force — with clear moral justification.
Augustine, of course, knew of Caesar but not of Stalin and Hitler and Mao. And so, in the 20th century, the great American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr felt the need to reformulate Augustine and Aquinas to account for what Isaiah Berlin called “the most terrible century in Western history.” For Niebuhr, Aquinas’ faith in human reason was no longer sustainable after Auschwitz and the Gulag. And so the deeply liberal Niebuhr made a defense of the prudent use of American military power to defend others from an evil empire.
This “Christian realism,” which I share, is presumably what Speaker Johnson and Vice President Vance are referring to when they glibly cite just-war theory as justification for the neocons’ and Israel’s long-sought-for war against Iran. Their argument — which, fatally for its cogency, could have been made at any point in the last quarter of a century — goes: Christianity is not pacifism; the Iranian regime is evil and has the building blocks of dangerous WMDs; ergo, the war against Iran is just.
It fails badly on both Augustinian and Niebuhrian lines — first because it misses something Tom Holland discussed in our recent podcast. The core symbol of Christianity is a man willingly being tortured and put to death with no resistance. That’s our faith. Non-violence is not just a part of Christianity; it is integral to it, as the martyrs attest; it is what made it revolutionary. When Sean Hannity cites the Old Testament to defend the wars he thinks God blesses, there is only one thing missing in his Christianity: Jesus.
War is unthinkable for Christians unless utterly necessary in self-defense against an imminent threat, after all other options are exhausted. Leo is no more “liberal” on this than Benedict XVI — “the concept of a ‘preventive war’ does not appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church” — or John Paul II — “the use of force represents the last recourse.” Pace Vance, Leo is merely reiterating the Gospels with great care and clarity. Unlike Vance, he knows what he is talking about.
The attempt to re-write this war in the past week or so as simply a defensive one is thus 1) empirically false, and 2) sophistry — because it brazenly ignores the glaring just-war violations I cited a month ago: the war was launched illegitimately (no Congress or UN or allied approval); it was an act of aggression, not defense, because the nuclear question had been resolved peacefully by the JCPOA before Trump tore it up, and any remaining serious nuclear threat had been “obliterated” last year; it never had a clear goal; its violence was and is massively disproportionate and punitive; targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime; and it could easily have led to worse outcomes than it started with (like, er, the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and a strengthening of the fundamentalist regime in Iran).
Does the new ceasefire this morning change this just-war equation? Not at all. In fact, it reinforces the truth that this war was unnecessary and unprovoked, because all this violence and death has merely led back to the status quo ante: a (maybe) open Strait of Hormuz, and a (maybe) semi-intact Lebanon. Any deal we may now reach will give the Iranians far more money than the deal Obama secured — a deal that could have been built on if Trump hadn’t trashed it. The huge economic costs, the deep damage to NATO, the entrenchment of Iranian extremists, the exposure of our military as all-powerful but kinda limited in a new era of drone warfare: all these remain.
Again, these objections essentially cover the entire gamut of Catholic just-war criteria, and this war fails every single one. The Free Press titles its piece, “The Catholic Case for War In Iran.” But there is no such thing. The idea that there is even any real debate among actual Christians about this is pure cope. It isn’t even close.
But the Niebuhrian critique runs deeper, and points to something darker in what passes for the soul of this administration. Niebuhr saw what all actual Christians know: that, in the words of Solzhenitsyn, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.”
In even morally necessary conflicts, therefore, a Christian insists on his own brokenness, checks his own hubris, and believes that no side, least of all his own, is ever purely good and no side is ever purely evil. In our desire to do good, we Christians are supposed to understand we may and can also do evil. And sometimes the greatest evils are committed to achieve what are seen as the greatest goods. (I have long wrestled with my conscience over the Iraq War: it is my moral certainty in my own righteousness that I need forgiveness for.)
This tragic Christianity, laced with humility, was perhaps never more beautifully expressed than by Abraham Lincoln who, even during a war against the absolute evil of slavery, refused to adorn himself with the mantle of God’s will:
Both sides read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully.
This is as eloquent as it is quintessentially American. And nothing, nothing could be more alien to those now running this war. The secretary of defense — who calls himself secretary of war as if to broadcast his pagan heresy — is declaring that God is unequivocally on his side in a campaign of naked, unfettered aggression, while offering this pre-Christian obscenity:
This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.
Yesterday, Hegseth invoked the following verse from Ezekiel, combining it with a Samuel L Jackson riff from Pulp Fiction, to bless the US military:
And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.
He has hailed “death and destruction from the sky all day long” and “maximum lethality” in this war, plus “no quarter, no mercy” for captured soldiers. On the first day of the war, his AI-guided bombs killed over a hundred children, and he hasn’t expressed regret. This week he lambasted the press corps thus: “Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what side some of you are actually on. … [You] are just like [the] Pharisees” — an analogy that again appropriates Jesus for Trump.
For his part, of course, the president, who has no discernible Christian values of any kind, has actually threatened to wipe out “an entire civilization” from a position of total military dominance. That threat is still up there, one of the most grotesquely immoral statements by any American president in history. He’s proud of it. You think it’s somehow “liberal” or “political” to be affronted by this? Let me quote Princeton’s Robert P George, a very conservative Catholic, who takes orthodoxy very seriously:
I don’t see any way to interpret President Trump’s “prediction” that “a whole civilization will die tonight” as other than a threat to order the military to commit crimes against civilians. If he issues such an order, it will be the duty of military leaders to refuse to comply.
When you recall Lincoln or Niebuhr, Trump’s and Hegseth’s declared motives and justifications make this war more than unjust. They make it objectively evil.
Other Christianists have gone further and even anointed Trump as a savior and equated him with Jesus, as Trump did himself in that infamous AI image. No Christian — no American — should let that rank, rancid blasphemy stand. The Christianists miss the core Niebuhrian point: we are all broken. Seeing ourselves as special, chosen instruments of God’s will is a violation of Lincoln’s crucial balance; it is a feature of pride, hubris, and sin.
No Pope should let that sin go uncontested either. And it’s hard to express how relieved I am to hear the clarity of Leo’s witness in these dark days. Popes in previous eras have often played it safe as monsters have stalked the earth. This one isn’t. And no, this has not been a “spat” between the two most powerful Americans on earth. The Pope has never uttered the mad king’s name. He has merely told the truth. That truth comes with the serenity and confidence of two millennia of moral perspective; and it met a man with a two-second attention span and no discernible morals at all.
After almost a decade of mind-numbing depravity and madness in America, we have struggled to solve the problem of responding to Trump. No one can beat him in the slug-it-out discourse of social media or partisan politics. In the American domestic context, he brings everyone down to his level. But when he tried to do this with the Holy Father — “WEAK on Crime” “who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon” — he fell flat. For once, a critic countering his vileness has solid ground under his feet: clear, unimpeachable moral authority, outside any national context, calling this country and its despicable tyrant to account.
That this is also an authentically American voice really does, for a Catholic, make one think of the Holy Spirit at work in this dark period. That calm, Catholic, American voice exposes just how alien this president is to the historic Christian values of this country, how destructive he has been to the American experiment as a whole, and, unlike the Founders, how utterly disrespectful he has been to the opinions of mankind. Has America ever been this loathed in every country, among friends and foes alike? For good reason?
There is, we must begin to recognize, a new MAGA America in the world, deeply hostile to Christian values and Western civilization, theocratic, bullying, racist, violent, greedy, and imperialist. The Pope reminds us that it remains our urgent and vital moral duty to expose, resist, and end this alien philosophy and fake religion.
America is not over; but we cannot begin again until this monster is gone, his movement defanged, and his malign wars of aggression ended. Prayer is not enough. We have to act. And speak up. And vote.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a historical chat with Jeffrey Toobin over the pardon power; dissents and other commentary over Christianity, Islam, the war, and UFOs; 13 notable quotes from the week in news, including an Yglesias Award over the antichrist; 15 pieces on Substack we recommend on a range of topics; a musical mashup for a Mental Health Break; a window from St. Augustine, FL; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
Here’s a longtime Dishhead on why he just paid for a subscription: “I read your blog back in the Atlantic days and miss the way the internet used to be.” Another reason from a newcomer: “You were right about Trump all along.”
Back On The Dishcast: Jeffrey Toobin
Jeff is a lawyer and a contributing opinion writer for the NYT, after a long run at The New Yorker and CNN. He has written many bestselling books, including True Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Oath, The Nine, and Too Close to Call. He appeared on the Dishcast in 2024 to talk lawfare, and in this episode we discuss his latest book, The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy.
We recorded this episode a while back, and we’re posting it this week after Trump promised mass pardons for White House staffers before he leaves office. His longtime use of the absolute pardon power to gut the rule of law is one of the deepest wounds he has inflicted on our democratic way of life. I wanted to bring attention to it, and who better than Jeff?
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on Biden’s corrupt pardons, and Trump’s obscene pardons. That link also takes you to commentary on the pod with Tom Holland on Christ’s influence on the modern West, along with readers debating the war, Islam, and the Bible.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Greg Lukianoff on free-speech fights, Jerusalem Demsas on the state of the left, Tiffany Jenkins on privacy in a liberal democracy, Adrian Wooldridge on “the lost genius of liberalism,” HW Brands on the life of George Washington, Ben Rhodes on foreign policy, and Tom Junod on his dad and masculinity. As always, please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Last night I went on Anderson Cooper’s show to talk about the Christianist barbs against Pope Leo from Trump and Vance. You can watch the segment here.
In The ‘Stacks
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the huge election in Hungary, what it means for America, and talk of the 25th Amendment. Examples:
Gary Lucia vents over companies that market trans products to gay men.
Why do so many Africans go bankrupt over funerals?
Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday at 11.59 pm (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription. Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. Here’s part of the winning entry from our contest in Denver:
A couple of things to note about the Limelight Hotel’s building is that it’s also home to Tavernetta — perhaps the best dining experience in Denver (so make your reservation well in advance). The Ajax restaurant is also in the building, and its original Aspen location is named after Ajax Mountain that overlooks the ski town, which is in turn named after the mighty Greek warrior from the Iliad.
Ajax is also the name of my adorable and mighty mini Australian Shepard:
I’ve been a Dish subscriber for many years, and this is only the third time I’ve been able to identify the window. I hope I am selected this time; this would complete my dream of winning both your contest and Mike Pesca’s The Gist podcast “Lobstar of the Antentwig”:
