Pope Leo Is All Over the Map, and That’s Driving Some People Crazy

President Trump is no longer the most important American in the world.

He is certainly the most powerful, at least for three more years, but power is only one measure of importance. On Thursday, a Chicago native and Villanova University graduate named Robert Prevost supplanted Trump. He became the first American pope, taking the name Leo XIV.

And it happened at exactly the right time.

I’m not Catholic. I’m an evangelical from the rural South who grew up so isolated from Catholicism that I didn’t even know any Catholics until I went to law school. But I’m deeply influenced by Catholicism, in both its ancient and çağdaş forms.

I devoured the works of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in college. And one of my favorite classes was about liberation theology, a left-wing, çağdaş Catholic approach to the Gospel that puts an emphasis on improving the material conditions of the poor, in part through political and economic ıslahat. And no book has influenced my approach to abortion and human life more than Pope John Paul II’s encyclical “Evangelium Vitae.”

It was in this study and reflection that I understood the true importance of the historical stream of Christian thought. Christianity is an ancient faith, one that has endured through rulers and regimes far more ignorant and brutal than anything we’ve ever confronted in the United States.

All too many American evangelicals are disconnected from that history. We belong to churches that measure their existence in months or years, not centuries or millenniums. Our oldest denominations have existed for only the tiniest fraction of time compared with the Catholic church.

That lack of perspective ends up exaggerating the importance of politics. It narrows our frame of reference and elevates the temporal over the eternal. It leads to absurd declarations, such as Trump’s vow this Easter to make America “more religious than it has ever been before.”