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I’m not a particularly religious person, even though everyone tells me how cool believing in God is now. Every so often, we get a new trend piece about how rad and chill Christianity has become. All the skateboarders and chads are churchmaxxing. Only atheists wear skinny jeans any more. Christopher Hitchens would totally get mogged by Pat Robertson. Personally, I don’t buy it. Influencers like Logan Paul and IShowSpeed aren’t going on Twitch to tell their viewers to tithe 10% of their earnings to the Lord. They’re encouraging them to buy cases and cases of Prime Hydration Drink and watch WrestleMania.
In my research on the topic, I found this article from the Independent this year that claims that gen Z is, like, totally down with Christ and can’t wait to chug Mountain Dew with their local pastor in a musty basement. No sooner had I clicked the link than I found an editor’s note that the poll that supported the claim was found to be fraudulent.
Now, I live in Godless Los Angeles, where most of us only go into a church if it’s temporarily acting as a polling place or a filming location. I won’t pretend to know the trajectory of organized religion in the United States, but I can say for certain that it remains a powerful tool for influence in our politics.
The current grudge match between Pope Leo XIV and Donald Trump is one more provocative tweet away from being booked on to the fight card at this weekend’s WrestleMania event in Las Vegas. I’m sure WWE’s promoters would love to get their hands on this particular row. Trump is already a veteran of the event, having participated in 2007. The pope has a resplendent costume, a majestic entrance, and presumably knows how to throw a punch thanks to growing up on the south side of Chicago.
This all started because, in remarks at the Vatican, Pope Leo decried war and the “delusion of omnipotence that surrounds us”.
The pope wasn’t naming names. But that didn’t do much to prevent the US president from responding as though he had been subtweeted by an ex. Like Drake responding to a Kendrick diss track, Trump and JD Vance launched responses, with Trump calling the pope “WEAK on crime” and Vance suggesting that the Pope stick to “matters of morality”. A few days later, the pope said the world was “being ravaged by a handful of tyrants”.
If it were me getting subtly taken to task by the pope, I’d probably let it slide. Pass the buck to someone else. Like, somebody who doesn’t have much else going for them anyway. He’s probably talking about some other warmongering tyrant. There’s so many different people he could be talking about. Have you considered Viktor Orbán?
But the Trump administration simply couldn’t pass up the opportunity to go 12 rounds with the Holy Father, so they did like the Michael Jordan meme and “took that personally”. Their retorts foreground exactly why they took such offense to words that didn’t target anyone in particular. It does seem to me that when Republicans use the word “morality”, they usually mean restricting access to abortion and banning gender-affirming care.
Violence – killings by the state, unprovoked bombing campaigns, soldiers on the streets of American cities – doesn’t strike these people as a moral issue. It’s just one of those exciting things you get to do when you’re in charge, I guess. They treat their policies and military actions as somehow inevitable. As though they are blessed by God and therefore just A-OK, no matter how many people die or suffer as a consequence.
Violence is, to JD Vance, political. And “political” here means you only have to answer to polls and donors, not God or your conscience. When it comes to polls, Catholicism is pretty popular. The aforementioned Logan Paul only has 27 million followers on Instagram, which is way fewer than the roughly 53 million Catholics in the United States. Donald Trump won about 77m votes in the last presidential election, so maybe he figures he’s got enough support to embarrass Pope Leo so thoroughly on Truth Social that he’ll have no choice but to bless an F22-Raptor live on CBS. But the president’s support keeps eroding, as polls indicate voters souring on the war.
And when Donald Trump feels materially threatened, there’s usually a punishment coming. The archbishop of Miami said the federal government canceled a contract with Catholic Charities in Miami to administer $11m in aid for migrant children. The government said that’s because, after 60 years of working together, the relationship is unnecessary thanks to Trump’s “successful” policies on immigration. If you believe that, I have a rare Pokémon card to sell you.
Assistance, aid, charity, kindness. I don’t even know if these words register for many of our elected officials. Retribution, revenge and dominance seem more in favor. If religion actually was so popular in 2026, one might think the reverse would be true, that we’d see a revival of acts of selflessness and a sense of community. The only place where religion actually seems to be on the rise is in our government, but strictly as a shield or an excuse. Unfortunately, they can’t even do that right either. They hope their words give the patina of godliness to behavior that is the opposite. In a world where virtue is in short supply, we might need some form of spiritual dogma more than ever. I just don’t know if I could guarantee people would actually listen.
Allow me, then, to also misquote another popular piece of fiction from the 1990s.
“Here’s to religion, the cause of, and solution to, all our problems.”
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Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist
