Financial Times and Wall Street Journal pieces
FT and WSJ
Apr 23, 2025
Questions about Catholicism and MAGA come to the fore as we prepare for the conclave
I've been quoted, briefly, in recent articles examining the connection between Catholicism and the MAGA movement. Let me be clear: I'm no fan of MAGA. I have no doubt that there are troubling and even nefarious entanglements between MAGA and certain expressions of Catholicism. But I must admit, the sharp criticism of J.D. Vance by prominent mouthpieces for capitalism strikes me as, at least in part, a mark in his favor. Let me explain.
Populism has a long and complicated history. Some populist movements represent some of the darkest chapters in human civilization. But others have served as serious challenges to entrenched wealth and power. Consider Julius Caesar. The Roman Senate was dominated by aristocrats, landowners whose wealth depended on vast agricultural estates worked by slaves. Caesar sought to pass laws requiring that a significant proportion of those laborers be Roman citizens or freedmen rather than slaves. The result would have been a dramatic shift: reduced profits for the aristocracy, and expanded opportunities for wage labor among the lower classes. His populist agenda, redistributing economic power away from the elite and toward ordinary people, was one of the reasons he was assassinated. It threatened the foundations of capital.
In a small but real way, Catholic postliberals like J.D. Vance represent a similar kind of threat to capital. Not Trump, but Vance and his postliberal peers, are willing to countenance financial losses for investors if it means channeling greater support to workers. That stance alone makes them dangerous in the eyes of certain economic interests.
There are many good reasons to critique Vance and the postliberals. And the journalists who write these pieces are good guys and I'm glad they quote me. But I suspect that mixed in with those legitimate concerns are other, less noble motivations. So when institutions like the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal sound the alarm on postliberal Catholicism, I can’t help but wonder: alongside the good reasons, are some bad ones at play too?
Anyway, here are the pieces:
For those fighting a paywall:
This is the Financial Times piece
This is the Wall Street Journal piece https://www.wsj.com/us-news/conservative-catholic-maga-pope-vance-b2a4497b?st=TeVd7S&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink