The Middle Ages are back in style. Pope Leo XIV and the Trump administration are dueling over political theology. Jest as we might, the war of words in the media between the pontiff and the President of the United States exposes two things:
- There remains a significant debate, even in largely Christian societies, over whether temporal power is subordinated to spiritual power.
- Most Protestant Evangelicals, whether they’re pro-Trump or anti-Trump, are intellectually non-functional when it comes to understanding the aforementioned proposition.
This short piece is therefore a primer for the uninitiated. I propose to lay out, in layman’s terms, what Roman Catholics believe, what Protestants historically believe, what so-called Evangelicals believe, and how it is relevant to our current moment.
Roman Catholics believe that what we call politics is, in the final analysis, subordinated to spiritual power—i.e., the Church, and more specifically, the Roman Catholic Church. Unam Sanctum, the papal bull issued by Boniface VIII in 1302 AD, stated that “this Church and in its power are two swords; namely, the spiritual and the temporal.” Put simply, the Church is the referee of politics, and politicians answer—even in their capacity as politicians—to the Church. At its root is the proposition that the Roman Catholic Church is the final arbiter of all things spiritual and political. In the aftermath of Vatican II,the Roman Catholic church did declaim theocratic political power over heads of states, but it maintains that truly just military actions must be executed in conformity with ecclesiastically-delineated propositions such as so-called Just War theory.
The Protestant Reformers rejected—vehemently—the political theology of the High and Late Medieval Roman Church. Kings had their commissions directly from God, and they were not responsible to the Church for temporal political decisions. God’s law, spoken through nature, was their guide. The Church could admonish and teach the state, but it did not have authority over it. Luther’s two kingdoms were co-equal. Political rulers were just as important in the divine economy as the spiritual rulers of the Church. When John Calvin called magistracy the most sacred calling a man could take up, he meant it.
So-called Evangelicals don’t really know what they believe about any of this, largely because their movement is too new to have meaningfully engaged the particulars of political theology. Evangelicals tend to do politics based on personalities rather than intellectual pursuit, so it’s not surprising that Trumpist pastors like Tennessee’s Greg Locke and Dallas’s Robert Jeffress can claim that the Church should rule America, while the Charismatic Evangelical–turned–Roman Catholic Vice President of the United States simultaneously lectures the pope about staying out of politics.
For the actual Protestant, it is important to be clear. Pope Leo is certainly right on the merits about U.S. interventions, and he is undoubtedly intellectually consistent, but classical Protestants cannot concede the power of the Roman Church—or even any Protestant church—to set political terms for foreign policy. Kings and presidents exercise the same power as Constantine: the “direct transcription” of Christ’s power to rule the temporal world. That transcription is not mediated through the Church.
The Trump administration, while certainly right to claim the authority given to rulers to govern the temporal world, is not meaningfully informed by Protestant political theology, and it would be wrong to set up the Trump–Leo duel as a Protestant vs. Roman Catholic political theology contest. Trump’s administration, in fact, is much more the product of Roman Catholics and Pentecostal Evangelicals. There’s certainly a contest of politics and theology going on in this year of our Lord 2026, but it isn’t one between classical Protestants and Roman Catholics.