Bill McKibben: Pope Leo has stirred awake a progressive Christianity. It can rise again

[muriel_volestrangler]

(As people may know, I'm an atheist, but I think this is interesting for liberals in both mainstream Protestant and Catholic traditions)

With his stand against Trump, the pope has shown the far right doesn’t have a monopoly on Christianity. If people of good faith push hard, the future could be redefined

In the same way that America’s shambolic war on Iran has turned Donald Trump into the most effective EV salesman the world has ever seen, so his attempts to defend said war have produced another unlikely outcome: the rise of a genuine and global theological debate. Led by Pope Leo but extending across Christian denominations, it’s producing the sudden recognition that a kind of progressive Christianity long given over for dead seems to be stirring. Christ is risen, as it were – and if people of good faith push hard, the future could be redefined in powerful ways.
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Even before the war, there were signs that these churches – while not exactly coming back, certainly not to the dominant role they once played – were reasserting themselves in remarkable ways. The first person to really stand up to Donald Trump in the days after his inauguration, as he launched his blitzkrieg of rightwing change, was Episcopal bishop Mariann Budde, who at the official prayer service marking his ascension, told him: “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now,” specifically naming immigrant and gay communities. (Trump, of course, called her a “so-called bishop” and said the service at her cathedral had been “very boring”.) There were a great many different forces behind the magnificent display of non-violent resistance in Minneapolis this winter, but one of them was the Lutheran church, dominant in the region and with a long tradition of immigration advocacy. (Full disclosure, I’m on the advisory board of Global Refuge, known until last year as Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Service). Renee Good, shot in January as she drove away from a protest, was a serious Presbyterian, who’ had taken mission trips as a child; at a vigil marking her death, the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire called on his clergy to “get their affairs in order to make sure they have their wills written” so that they could, if necessary, stand between “the powers of this world and the most vulnerable”. After Good’s death, hundreds of clergy from across the country descended on Minneapolis as an act of witness; about 100 were arrested in a protest at the airport, appealing for an end to the flights disappearing immigrants from their families and communities.
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Indeed, there is a millennium-old just war tradition, and it descends from Augustine of Hippo, St Augustine. Leo, as it happens, is an Augustinian, and spent 16 years in various forms of seminary education, studying among other things this precise canon – and he actually had been in Hippo, in modern-day Algeria, as this exchange was building. The pontiff had in fact been careful – precise – in his choice of words. God does not, he said, hear the prayers of those who “wage” war – Augustine’s theory, as it has developed over the years, makes it clear that the only sanctified warfare is practiced by those who were attacked first. As Daniel Flores, the American bishop in charge of explaining these matters to the faithful, patiently told reporters, citing catechism: “A constant tenet of that thousand-year tradition is a nation can only legitimately take up the sword ‘in self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed’. That is, to be a just war it must be a defense against another who actively wages war, which is what the Holy Father actually said: ‘He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.’” (To return to Vance’s example, the Axis were the aggressors in the second world war.)
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Something’s happening: I was speaking in the home cathedral of Boston’s Episcopal diocese over the weekend, and when I talked about Leo’s witness, people I knew to be good Protestants were in tears. As the war began, the United Methodist bishops asked people to “pray for peace”, a fairly anodyne stand; by its sixth week, the president of its council of bishops was getting stronger. “We reject any language or action that endangers civilians or threatens to destroy entire civilizations, and we raise a prophetic call to our leaders, urging them to persistently choose the path of peace,” said Tracy Malone from that midwest red redoubt of Indiana. Parishioners arriving for a Good Friday service at a Colorado Methodist church found 168 tiny pairs of shoes arranged in a heart on the front stairs, one for each of the girls killed in the hideous attack on a school in Minab in the early hours of the conflict.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/26/pope-leo-trump-hegseth-christianity