Analysis of: Pope Leo has stirred awake a progressive Christianity. It can rise again
The Guardian | April 26, 2026
TL;DR
Pope Leo XIV's theological challenge to Trump's Iran war exposes religion as a site of class struggle, not just culture war. The real question: can progressive Christianity mobilize material resistance, or will it remain symbolic opposition?
Analytical Focus:Contradictions Historical Context Class Analysis
Bill McKibben's celebration of Pope Leo XIV's confrontation with the Trump administration over the Iran war reveals a deeper contradiction within the superstructure of American capitalism. While framed as a theological dispute between 'progressive' and 'regressive' Christianity, the conflict illuminates how religious institutions function as contested terrain for legitimizing or challenging the dominant order. The article traces the historical trajectory of American Protestantism from its role in abolitionism and civil rights to its decline in the neoliberal era. McKibben attributes mainline Protestantism's shrinkage to its demands becoming 'more than many were willing to give'—a formulation that obscures the material conditions driving church membership shifts. The rise of evangelical megachurches coincided with deindustrialization, the atomization of working-class communities, and the retreat of organized labor. These churches offered not merely 'entertainment' but a theodicy compatible with neoliberal individualism: prosperity gospel replaced social gospel, personal salvation replaced collective liberation. Pope Leo's intervention matters less for its theological content than for its disruption of the ideological apparatus legitimizing imperialist war. When Hegseth invokes divine blessing for 'hitting them while they're down,' he performs the classic function of religious ideology: naturalizing violence in service of capital accumulation. The Pope's counter-narrative—that God 'does not hear the prayers of those who wage war'—doesn't challenge capitalism itself, but it does withdraw religious sanction from its most naked expressions of imperial violence. The question McKibben cannot answer is whether this progressive religious awakening can connect to material struggles—labor organizing, anti-war movements, immigrant solidarity networks—or whether it will remain a moral critique contained within institutional channels that pose no threat to the underlying class structure.
Class Dynamics
Actors: Military-industrial capital (represented through Hegseth, Trump administration), Evangelical megachurch leadership (ideological apparatus), Mainline Protestant clergy, Catholic hierarchy (divided), Immigrant communities, Working-class parishioners, Iranian civilians
Beneficiaries: Defense contractors and military-industrial complex, Evangelical leaders maintaining political access, Trump administration seeking war legitimacy, Oil and resource interests in Iran conflict
Harmed Parties: Iranian civilians facing military assault, Immigrant communities targeted by ICE, Working-class Americans bearing war costs, Religious communities manipulated for political ends
The article depicts a conflict within the superstructure—religious institutions competing to legitimize or delegitimize state violence. However, the material base remains unchallenged: neither the Pope nor progressive Protestants question the capitalist mode of production driving imperial expansion. Power flows from capital through the state (military action) with religious institutions functioning as competing legitimation machines. The evangelical-state alliance represents a more direct fusion of ideology and capital interests, while progressive Christianity offers moral opposition without material leverage.
Material Conditions
Economic Factors: Military-industrial complex profits from Iran war, Resource competition (oil, strategic positioning), Immigration enforcement serving labor discipline functions, Fertilizer shortages affecting global food production mentioned tangentially
The article focuses on superstructural conflicts while largely ignoring production relations. The evangelical megachurch model operates as a capitalist enterprise—entertainment commodification of religion. The decline of mainline churches correlates with deindustrialization and the destruction of the labor movement, which provided the organizational base for social gospel Christianity. Pope Leo's background 'ministering to the poor' in Peru gestures toward liberation theology's material analysis but McKibben doesn't develop this connection.
Resources at Stake: Iranian oil and strategic resources, Immigrant labor subject to deportation threats, Political legitimacy for war-making, Cultural hegemony over 'Christianity' as ideological category
Historical Context
Precedents: Abolitionist movement's religious dimension, Civil rights movement's Black church foundation, Liberation theology in Latin America (1960s-80s), Vatican II reforms (1962-65), Religious right consolidation (1970s-present), Just war theory tradition from Augustine
The article documents a recurring pattern: religious institutions oscillate between legitimizing and challenging dominant class interests depending on material conditions and class struggle intensity. The post-WWII social democratic compact allowed mainline Protestantism to thrive alongside labor unions and civil rights organizing. Neoliberalism's assault on working-class organization also dismantled progressive religious infrastructure, while funding and amplifying evangelical movements compatible with deregulation, anti-unionism, and imperial expansion. Pope Francis and now Leo XIV represent an attempt to reorient Catholic social teaching away from the religious right alliance, but within the constraints of institutional preservation rather than revolutionary transformation.
Contradictions
Primary: The fundamental contradiction lies between Christianity's foundational texts (which emphasize solidarity with the poor, welcoming strangers, and rejecting wealth accumulation) and its institutional capture by forces serving capital accumulation and imperial violence. This theological contradiction reflects the deeper capitalist contradiction between socialized production and private appropriation.
Secondary: Progressive religious leaders calling for justice while remaining embedded in hierarchical, property-owning institutions, Moral opposition to war without challenging the economic system driving imperial expansion, The Vatican's enormous wealth while championing the poor, Mainline Protestantism's decline blamed on 'asking too much' rather than analyzed through class decomposition
These contradictions cannot be resolved at the theological level alone. Progressive Christianity's revival depends on connection to material struggles—labor organizing, anti-war movements, immigrant solidarity. Without such connection, it risks becoming controlled opposition: offering moral critiques that provide safety valves for popular discontent while leaving capitalist social relations intact. The Pope's symbolic power could catalyze broader resistance or could be absorbed into spectacle politics where the conflict itself becomes the story, displacing attention from the war's material victims and beneficiaries.
Global Interconnections
The Pope-Trump conflict must be understood within the context of U.S. imperial decline and the intensification of inter-imperialist competition. The Iran war represents an attempt to reassert American hegemony through military force as economic dominance erodes. Religious legitimation becomes more important precisely as material legitimation (rising living standards, American Dream mythology) fails. The global dimension emerges in the article's mention of fertilizer shortages affecting 'poor people across the planet'—a glimpse of how imperial wars ripple through global commodity chains to produce hunger in the periphery. Pope Leo's background in Peru connects to Latin American liberation theology's challenge to U.S. hegemony during the Cold War. The Vatican's 1980s suppression of liberation theology under John Paul II aligned with Reagan-era imperial restoration. Leo's papacy potentially reopens that suppressed tradition, but within an institution that collaborated in its closure. The evangelical-Catholic alliance that dominated American religious politics for decades represented a cross-denominational fusion in service of neoliberal capitalism and imperial expansion; its fracturing signals broader hegemonic crisis.
Conclusion
McKibben's hopeful account of progressive Christianity's revival raises the essential question for any movement: will it connect to material struggles with the capacity to challenge capitalist social relations, or will it remain a moral critique contained within existing institutional forms? The clergy arrested at Minneapolis airport, the shoes arranged for killed Iranian children, the bishops telling parishioners to prepare their wills—these gestures toward sacrifice and solidarity. But the article's framework—a battle between 'good' and 'bad' Christianity—obscures the class dynamics determining which religious expressions gain institutional power and media amplification. Workers and the oppressed need not wait for theological resolution; they need organizations capable of wielding material power against capital. Whether progressive religious institutions can contribute to such organizing, rather than substituting symbolic opposition for it, remains the open question.
Suggested Reading
- Prison Notebooks (Selections) by Antonio Gramsci (1935) Gramsci's analysis of how religious institutions function within capitalist hegemony—sometimes reinforcing, sometimes contesting ruling class ideology—directly illuminates the Pope-Trump conflict as a struggle over cultural leadership.
- Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by V.I. Lenin (1917) Lenin's analysis of imperialism as capitalism's necessary expansion helps explain why religious legitimation of war becomes crucial as the U.S. pursues military solutions to declining hegemony.
- The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon (1961) Fanon's examination of how colonized peoples must develop their own consciousness against imperial ideology resonates with the article's glimpse of Iranian victims and immigrant communities targeted by both military and religious violence.