This Easter was a landmark one for many Catholic parishes in the U.S. Dioceses across the country boasted record-breaking numbers of converts. These neophyte Catholics—many of whom are young adults—were barely a week past their conversion when their president decided to issue a one-two punch against their newly adopted spiritual father, Pope Leo XIV.
Speaking to CNN reporters Sunday evening, Trump denounced the pope as “weak on crime,” a sentiment he also expressed on Truth Social jeremiad.
As I wrote in my newsletter, Trump’s post was yet another peal of the death knell for Catholicism’s political utility to the right—despite Catholics having a moment both in the corridors of power as well as among top influencers. The pro-life consensus that held the religious right together for the last four decades has pretty much collapsed: Trump has told his party it needs to be “flexible” on public funding for abortion, and his administration angered pro-life groups when the FDA approved of a generic version of the abortion pill mifepristone last year. Catholicism began to fall out of MAGA’s good graces early in the second Trump administration. First came the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops’ high-profile criticism of Trump’s approach to immigration. But then Pope Leo’s condemnation of the Iran war was an additional black mark.
But those waiting anxiously for a newly emboldened religious left shouldn’t hold their breath, either. As both left and right scramble to lay claim to the newest generation of voters, they may ultimately be wasting their time. To the extent that it’s real, the Gen Z turn toward Catholicism and Christianity more generally indicates a broader phenomenon: its rejection of the American partisan binary.
The notion of a rising religious left has gained notoriety in such outlets as Religion News Service, which recently hosted an event to discuss it. The so-called rise emerged as a talking point after the visible presence of clergy at anti-ICE demonstrations and the candidacy of James Talarico, the Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful in Texas. Talarico made waves when he spoke about his own progressive brand of Christianity on the Ezra Klein Show: “The religious right convinced a lot of Christians in America that the two most important issues were abortion and homosexuality,” Talarico said. “Religion is being used to control people and accumulate power and wealth.” This is simply not how Americans are used to hearing Christian politicians talk about religion.
For all his groovy theology, Talarico, 36, is showing his age. In reality, only 37 percent of liberals identify as Christians (as compared to 82 percent of conservatives), and of those, the young ones have no memory of the religious right to which Talarico is offering himself as an alternative.
“For anyone born in the last forty years or so, the only conception that they have of religious activism is likely tied up with the Religious Right,” Ryan Burge wrote in a 2024 article entitled “There is Almost No Liberalizing Religion.” Christian teachers and activists have told me that younger Americans don’t have the same emotional baggage associated with either religion or politics as Gen Xers and millennials, so they are engaging in ways that their elders have been slow to understand.
People born in the 1970s and 1980s commonly associate the religious right with the televangelist scandals and cultural lightning rods like Jerry Falwell. “And so we kind of went into these spaces trying to prove we weren’t that kind of Christian, trying to prove how progressive we were,” said Justin Giboney, founder of the And Campaign, an initiative that supports non-partisan, consensus-building civic projects within a biblical framework. “We were still reacting to the harshness of the Moral Majority.”
But Giboney has noticed a trend in his work: Young people are more willing to have difficult conversations about theology and ideology than their generational predecessors. “We have people who are Democrats, we have people who are Republicans,” Giboney said about the And Campaign. He sees his mission as helping Christians arrive at positions rather than sides. Giboney says a “religious left” that puts politics ahead of theology risks becoming a mirror image of the recent behavior among some on the right (think: figures within MAGA and the GOP downplaying or rationalizing Trump’s AI Christ post). “[Your side] may have a bad policy, or they may have some bad behavior, and now you have to either defend it or ignore it,” he said.
“Once you choose a side,” he said, “You just stay with that side.”
And in both politics and religion, Americans are increasingly uncomfortable with labels—Trump’s slipping poll numbers with young voters and other first-time GOP voters, as well as Americans’ increasingly fluid relationship to denominations, bear that out. To the extent that it still exists, the “religious right” Talarico wants to oppose is something of an anachronism. Or maybe the religious left/right framing was a category error to begin with. Christianity predates American partisan politics, after all.
For many, especially young people, that appears to be a major part of its appeal.
Take, for example, Pope Leo’s calls for an end to wars in the Middle East. He is frequently misunderstood when he calls for disarmament or for the parties of a conflict to gather around the table and talk out their differences. He’s seen as anti-Israel, a cockeyed optimist, as Dan Hugger acknowledged earlier this week in Dispatch Faith, or still worse, a woke lib. But what he’s actually calling for is even crazier than it initially appears. As a Christian, Leo is talking as much to Hamas and the ayatollahs as he is to state actors like Israel and the United States. He’s appealing to a Christian tradition that values meek humility and love of neighbor above all else. It’s like when your mother would tell you to be safe and make good choices before you went out when you were a teenager: a pipe dream, surely, but she wouldn’t be doing her job if she didn’t say it. A world where no one is willing to make a case for universal peace as an ideal standard is arguably far worse than the one where at least one prominent Christian is willing to do it.
Patrick Tomassi teaches a high school class on world issues at an ecumenical Christian private school in Portland, Oregon. “My role there is not to give [students] particular political views, but it is to help my students start looking at social questions with some of the tools that Christianity provides,” he told me. Like Giboney, Tomassi sees that young people are looking past partisan politics, ready to be challenged, and open to new ideas. Each year he screens the documentary Unguarded, about a Brazilian prison using a restorative justice model that centers the prisoners’ inherent worth and potential for reform. “If you’re on the right, you have ‘tough on crime,’ but it misses human dignity a bit,” Tomassi said. “On the other extreme, I think you have folks on the left that would probably say incarceration itself is bad.” He said his students, who are Catholic, Protestant, non-religious, and atheists, come away impressed with the middle way Unguarded presents, an emphasis on the human flourishing of inmates that still boasts a decreasing rate of recidivism compared to Brazil’s other traditional prisons. “They’re starting to kind of internalize this different way of looking at questions,” Tomassi said of his students.
Tomassi, a millennial who came of age politically during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, remembers religious conservatives of his parents’ generation who were “rah-rah for the Clinton impeachment because he was an immoral person who did immoral things in office,” he said, “and then those same people voted for Trump.” He says his perception growing up was that the issue of abortion united the religious right.
“The first time I voted was for Trump in 2016,” said Pennsylvania resident Sean Domenic, 27. A cradle Catholic, he also absorbed from his parents a view common at the time, that pro-lifers must suppress their scruples and support the GOP candidate to protect the unborn. “I felt terrible about it,” he said.
In subsequent presidential elections, while Domenic’s views on abortion remain unchanged, he now casts protest ballots for American Solidarity Party candidates. He still argues with progressive friends about abortion, but he also counts progressive Christians among his friends, collaborating with them in local activism surrounding homelessness. Domenic also argues with conservative family members about capitalism and American wars. He said this rejection of the traditional American political duopoly is common among the younger practicing Christians he knows. “Even if a young Zoomer Catholic is buying what either a Democrat or Republican is selling, they’re not buying into it whole hog,” Domenic said.
He said he finds younger friends receptive when he talks to them about distributism, a “third way” political/economic paradigm rooted in Catholic social teaching that is popular in postliberal circles. Often confused with socialism, it favors private property but advocates for widespread ownership of the means of production in the form of entities like worker co-operatives, and decentralized production management, preferably at the local level when possible. “I think younger people are more interested and open to more radical interpretations,” he said. “That would say we totally need to sweep away capitalism and transcend that.”
Yet Domenic is similarly dismissive of Talarico, whose rhetoric doesn’t deviate from standard partisan talking points. Talarico “will never be of interest to anyone who’s not already convinced on progressive issues,” Domenic said.
Giboney largely agrees. “I haven’t seen anywhere where [Talarico’s] Christianity conflicts with secular progressivism,” he said. The young people he encounters are more serious about how they engage with politics through a religious lens. “All the squishy theology, it doesn’t do it for them,” he said.
At least some on the religious left seem to be receiving that message, whether it’s viral anti-ICE pastor David Black mixing unapologetically progressive values with old-timey apocalypticism from the pulpit, or Episcopalian bishops urging their clergy to talk about God and the Bible more.
In his posts over the weekend, Trump inadvertently exposed the limits of cynical pandering to religious interests. The widespread condemnation among American Catholics (a key GOP voting bloc) of his Pope Leo comments and the willingness of evenprominent Christian Trump supporters to condemn his AI self-apotheosis on Truth Social show that Christianity in America still has some vigor. Despite a decades-long relationship, the GOP and Christianity are not a foregone conclusion, especially among the youngest voters who belong to the same generational cohort currently starring in the “religious revival” narrative. People in their teens and 20s today missed the New Atheism and don’t have their elders’ baggage around organized religion.
But having grown up in an era of fractious national politics, they do have a distaste for partisanship. “A Majority of Young Voters Now Reject Both Parties,” read a recent New York Magazineheadline. According to a John Hopkins University report on young Americans’ dissatisfaction with national politics, “Young people are not necessarily becoming more conservative or progressive,” but simply, “more cynical and frustrated” with the existing political systems. Weaker political parties that can no longer rely on generational tribalism may find themselves pivoting to actual issues out of necessity. A Christian renewal led by the young may offer a civic renewal at the same time.