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Christian nationalists are panicking because religious progressives are thriving
(RNS) — Christian nationalists are sounding a bit panicked these days. I can’t say I am surprised.
On Saturday (March 28), 8 million Americans of diverse faiths and beliefs joined together in streets and squares around the world for No Kings protests. The next day, the Christian holy day of Palm Sunday, thousands more came out again. All of these people were rejecting the rising autocracy of our current moment, and many of them were Christians.
No wonder, then, that the late James Dobson’s Focus on the Family recently published an article blaring an alarm: “The Left Wants to Hijack Jesus! Don’t Let Them.” The essay, written by longtime religious right activist and failed Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer, warned that the “secular left” is out to take away “the Jesus we know.”
These arguments break down quickly, however, as Bauer focuses on the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, James Talarico, and Kentucky Governor and possible presidential candidate Andy Beshear, whom Bauer attacks for supporting full dignity of transgender people and for their faithful conviction that abortion should be a right.
Bauer is joined by the wider political and Christian right, which has pounced on these positions with horror and outrage. Pete Hegseth’s pastor, Brooks Potteiger, was so incensed by Talarico’s faith and politics that he went so far as to wish for his death. Others have tried to paint Talarico and Beshear’s faith convictions as deviant, completely out of step with Christian thought.
In reality, they aren’t. According the Pew Research Center and the Public Religion Research Institute, the majority of Christians actually support LGBTQ+ equality and abortion rights. Meanwhile PRRI’s most recent survey shows that only a third of Americans sympathize with Christian nationalism, and two-thirds of Americans are skeptical or outright reject the ideas and goals of Christian Nationalists. The majority of Christian nationalists are white evangelical Protestants, a group that, Robert P. Jones, president of PRRI, says is shrinking. “Today (they) only make up 13% of the public — that’s it. And that’s down from a quarter of the public 20 years ago. So they’ve shrunk by half. And I actually think that shrinking is one reason … As they’ve shrunk, they’ve gotten older and more extreme and more desperate.”
Christian nationalists’ preferred framing of American politics as “secular left vs. Christian” is false. For one thing, while humanists and atheists rightfully take their place in the public square, Christians have been joined by Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Indigenous and many other faith traditions in our body politic. None of them fit neatly into partisan lines, and none of them are secular.
To try to paint the left as entirely secular, and the right as entirely Christian, is to choose to be willfully ignorant of 250 years of history of Christian thought in America. Much of this thought can broadly be described as progressive, insofar as it has inspired the country toward broader liberty and justice for all. Virtually every era in American history has seen diverse Christians on opposing sides of political and social issues such as slavery, the rights of workers, the rights of women, the environment, civil rights and LGBTQ+ equality.
It’s clear why Christian nationalists are trying to drown out this segment of religious America. The Christians who are currently most visible and resonant with the American people are those who are resisting the Trump administration’s cruelty and chaos. Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde of Washington, Pope Leo XIV and the Catholic bishops, Christian leaders on the ground in Minneapolis and the millions of Christians protecting their neighbors against ICE — these are the people demonstrating the kind of Christian witness that America not only needs but wants right now.
I recently spoke to the historian and writer Rebecca Solnit for an upcoming show on the “State of Belief” podcast. Solnit is not a Christian, but she commented on how clearly she is hearing the Christian voice rising up for democracy: “In Minneapolis, with our fabulous new pope from Chicago, Pope Leo, I’m seeing a kind of progressive Christianity really showing up and standing up — standing up in the streets, trying to go into the ICE gulags to give Mass and minister to the people inside. So I’m really seeing a deeply humane, anti-authoritarian, progressive Christianity, and I feel like something incredibly exciting might be happening in this moment.”
This developing trend extends to many Democratic politicians. There are Christian clergy serving as elected officials, including the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the senator from Georgia; the Rev. Emmanuel Cleaver, who represents the Kansas City, Missouri, area; as well as Talarico, who earned a theology degree from Austin Seminary in 2025.
President Donald Trump said at the National Prayer Breakfast in February that he doesn’t know how people of faith can vote for Democratic candidates. He is ignoring millions of Americans and the legacy of Christians who have held the presidency before, most notably President Jimmy Carter, who was arguably the most religiously observant president of the post-World War II era.
As the president of Interfaith Alliance, I strongly support the constitutional guarantee that there should be no religious test for public office. People of every faith and belief should be equally welcome to participate in government. As for Christianity: no person nor political party owns Jesus. At the same time, as a Baptist minister from a tradition of progressive Christianity, I am glad when politicians and religious leaders alike are inspired by their faith to insist on the rights of my trans neighbors and the right to abortion — because I believe that, too.
These leaders reflect the will of millions of voters — citizens who are mobilizing to uphold democracy not in spite of their faith, but because of it. Christian nationalists are right to panic, because their narrow ideology and repressive morality is facing a tidal wave of faith-inspired solidarity and love for our neighbor — just like Jesus taught us.
(The Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush is the president and CEO of Interfaith Alliance. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
Mexican bishops: Holy Week reminds us that ‘evil does not have the last word’
In El Paso, two Catholic sisters follow detained immigrants wherever ICE takes them
EL PASO, Texas (RNS) — On their spreadsheets, down the list on their prayer table and off their tongues after a long day of ministry roll the names — of the man who is slowly but unsteadily regaining his grip on reality after being deported to Cuba, of the woman facing deportation to Brazil after more than a year in detention fighting for asylum, of the son whose mother fell to the floor screaming “take me instead” as he was detained at immigration court.
Carlos was the name that launched Scalabrinian Sisters Leticia Gutiérrez Valderrama and Elisete Signor’s pastoral response to President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts. Gutiérrez Valderrama met Carlos on a trip last year to witness the increased immigration agent presence at immigration court, and he looked “like he had won the lottery,” she recalled, when she offered to accompany him.
“He was the instrument for us to develop the ministry accompanying migrants at the courts,” Gutiérrez Valderrama told parishioners at a volunteer recruitment event at St. Francis of Assisi Parish on March 5.
There are still days at the immigration court when federal agents, waiting to potentially detain people after court, are staked out by the elevators or leaning on the atrium railing behind family members who nervously await their loved ones. But now, Gutiérrez Valderrama or her court volunteers are always there to sit with them.
With the help of about 30 volunteers, since June of last year, the ministry begun by the two sisters has accompanied more than 1,000 people in immigration court, and they’ve accompanied about 300 people in immigration detention each year.
When the immigrants finish, if the agents are there, the volunteers are afforded a short time to prepare them to face possible detention — they provide Sharpies to write families’ numbers on their bodies, prompt them to make a plan for their car and childcare and ask if they will share their information so another team can visit them in detention and support their families.
Though faith groups across the country are accompanying immigrants in court and detention centers, the integrated system built by the Scalabrinian sisters in the Diocese of El Paso is rare.
“As the sisters observe the trauma people experience while they’re detained — while trying to follow the legal process — they also proceed to support them in the detention centers and, with that, their families,” said Jesús de la Torre, assistant director for global migration at Hope Border Institute, advocating that more groups adopt the approach.
Raised in Guadalajara, Mexico, Gutiérrez Valderrama has run toward difficult ministries with people in pain since she first began considering religious life, first joining a group that ran a detox house and an outreach ministry for youth experiencing drug addiction.
Since joining the Scalabrinians, whose religious community focuses on serving migrants, she led the Mexican bishops’ conference migration ministry and worked in a Mexico City Scalabrinian comprehensive care ministry for migrants who have experienced torture, kidnapping and other serious crimes.
Signor and Gutiérrez Valderrama began working together in the diocese of El Paso in 2024, expecting to work in the area’s migrant shelters, as the city had thousands of migrants arriving weekly during the Biden era.
But with the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, that project “changed by 180 degrees,” Gutiérrez Valderrama told RNS in Spanish.
This ministry “doesn’t only transform the experience of the people we accompany, but we ourselves are transformed,” Gutiérrez Valderrama said at the volunteer information session.
For the sisters and those volunteers, accompaniment can mean many different things. It can mean bouncing a newborn while the mother organizes her paperwork at immigration court, driving a truck to the owner in Juarez, Mexico, after they’re deported, sending a WhatsApp voice message to a worried mother in Brazil explaining how to find her son through the online ICE locator or preparing a backpack of clean clothes to hand off to someone before their deportation.
“We are going to encounter sacred people. What they are going to tell us is sacred,” Gutiérrez Valderrama told potential volunteers. “Because who we’re going to encounter is the Lord Jesus there,” she explained, drawing on Christian theology of Christ’s presence with vulnerable people.
After their visits, the volunteers report back to families whether their detained loved one lost weight or has been crying. Signor, who coordinates the detention center ministry, manages a WhatsApp group of over 500 family members of detained immigrants, in addition to constant phone notifications from individuals’ messages.
She frequently exclaims aloud while receiving those updates. “Oh my God, the Lord,” Signor said in Spanish, picking up her phone to see the notifications after a Saturday night visit to the detention center.
In early March, after receiving a visit request from Catholic Charities in Minnesota, Signor entered the detention center to visit with a Sudanese man she had not met before. The Department of Homeland Security had publicized the man’s robbery conviction, but the Brazilian-born sister was more worried about her English skills than about his criminal status.
“I go because he is a human being. He is a migrant who is, at this moment, possibly lonely, depressed, scared,” she told RNS in Portuguese. In the waiting room, she tucked her cross inside her shirt because she believed she would be visiting a Muslim, as she tried to entertain a toddler in a fuzzy red jacket who kept breaking away from her father to shout “Mami,” and run toward the visitation door.
In her visit, where she spoke slow, deliberate English into a phone connecting the plexiglass partition, she found out the Sudanese man, a new father, was Christian and had developed diabetes in detention. “He likes crosswords, and I’m going to buy him one tomorrow,” Signor excitedly told RNS.
The sisters rely on small grants to buy books for detainees and put money in their communication accounts.
At the end of the day, the two come together to reflect. “I admire her prudence, her calm” and her listening, Signor said of Gutiérrez Valderrama.
Gutiérrez Valderrama said Signor has a “commitment to accompany people until the end.” The sister said Signor “is generous to the max,” explaining that she sometimes tells Signor, “Stop for your health.”
“She hears but does not listen when it has to do with accompanying, protecting, defending,” said Gutiérrez Valderrama, who rests from the mission by rising every morning at 4:00 to pray and finding time to clean their house and iron, “relaxing” pastimes for her.
Although Gutiérrez Valderrama is the ministry director, she told RNS, “I am not the most important in this mission. No, we are all important because we all place a little grain of sand in the construction of the kingdom.”
Among the team at the courthouse are the Rev. Mike Gallagher, a Jesuit immigration lawyer who arrives as though dressed for a fishing trip in a Jesuit Refugee Service vest to provide basic legal advice, and a group of religious from the diocese of Las Cruces, New Mexico, who come once a week because immigrants in their diocese attend court in El Paso. Brother Joseph Bach, a Franciscan friar and favorite of the security guards, leads the Las Cruces team, which also coordinates New Mexico detention center ministry and is preparing to accompany migrants in criminal court.
Bach bases the Las Cruces trainings on lessons learned from Gutiérrez Valderrama. “Every time I’m with her, I learn something new,” he told RNS.
At court, Bach cracks jokes when appropriate, along with Assumption Sister Chabela Galbe, who makes remarkably accurate duck quacks at children, and her provincial, Sister Mary Ann Azanza.
The Scalabrinian sisters and their team of volunteers also see it as a cornerstone of their ministry to build relationships, not just with the families and those detained, but also with the team at the courthouse. Which, the group maintains, has allowed them to keep their buffer zone to counsel migrants pre-detention, uncommon in courthouses where agents often immediately detain migrants or staff block access.
“It helps the (migrants) for us not to be adversarial,” Azanza said. “The whole ethos of our ministry is we try to build relationships and not add to the division and the sense of animosity.”
The building’s staff now ask the team to pray for their families.
The religiosity of the volunteer team varies. Sigrid Gonzalez, who says she’s a “non-practicing Catholic,” volunteers at court and in Mexico during the week. On the weekends, she goes to the detention center, describing it as her “Mass.”
Alejandro Figueroa, another detention center volunteer, is a dedicated Mass-going Catholic. A former volunteer firefighter, he described struggling with having no tools when emptying his pockets and entering the detention center. “The only thing you have is the love of God,” he said.
Despite their help, Signor struggles to decide how to prioritize visits when there are not enough volunteers to reach everyone on her list. The team lamented that there isn’t the same volunteer energy that the migrant shelters drew, and the Scalabrinians told RNS that it is difficult to recruit diocesan priests.
Some priests, the sisters said, worry about their own immigration status, even as green card holders, but Signor notes that Gutiérrez Valderrama leads the ministry with just a temporary R1 visa.
Still Signor understands why some struggle to stick it out. “It’s not a mission for everybody, because it’s a very big emotional burden,” she said.
Signor said that in her 40 years working with migrants in Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Tijuana, Mexico and Boston, “I never, never imagined myself working with detained people, because as migrants we are born to be free.” The transition for Signor, whose Italian family migrated to Brazil, has had challenging moments.
The sister said she struggled with nightmares until she began a new nightly prayer routine. “All the people I met — I entrust to God their realities. What I could do during the day I did — call their families, visit them, pray, deposit money. Now I can do no more, and may God take over.”
Israel apologizes after barring cardinal from Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday
VATICAN CITY (RNS) — Following outcry from political and religious leaders for barring Catholic leaders in the Holy Land from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday (March 29), Israeli authorities apologized and gave them permission to worship at the church, one of Christianity’s holiest sites.
“In agreement with the Israel Police, access for representatives of the churches has been secured in order to conduct the liturgies and ceremonies and to preserve the ancient Easter traditions at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher,” read a Monday (March 30) joint statement by the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the Custodian of the Holy Land, who heads a body of Franciscan priests and brothers who tend to the region’s holy sites.
The statement emphasized that “especially in times of hardship and conflict, such as those presently endured, safeguarding freedom of worship remains a fundamental and shared duty,” adding that all religions be allowed to practice and worship. The leaders also called for an end to the “tragic war.”
The Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, and Archbishop Paul Ghallagher, who oversees the Holy See’s relations with other states, met with the Isreali ambassador to the Holy See, Yaron Sideman, to discuss the “unfortunate” incident on Monday.
“During the conversation, the parties expressed regret over the incident, offered clarifications and acknowledged an agreement between the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem and local authorities allowing participation in Holy Week liturgies at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem,” read a Vatican statment on the meeting.
Following the strikes by Israeli and United States forces against Iran on Feb. 28, several holy sites in the Old City of Jerusalem, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, were closed. The Israeli government enforced a rule prohibiting gatherings of more than 50 people in places without bomb shelters.
The Latin patriarch, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, and the Rev. Francesco Ielpo, the custodian, and two other priests were stopped by Israeli police on Sunday as they prepared to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to conduct a Mass that was to be streamed online, in lieu of the traditional service attended by hundreds.
“This incident is a grave precedent and disregards the sensibilities of billions of people around the world who, during this week, look to Jerusalem,” the patriarchate said in a statement Sunday.
Pizzaballa later said on TV2000, the Italian bishops’ conference television channel, that the Patriarchate had complied with Israel’s security restrictions by organizing a “small private ceremony” to commemorate the Christian feast. The custodian of the Holy Land had said in a previous statement that it was communicating with local authorities to receive guidelines on how to celebrate Holy Week.
“There were no clashes; everything was done in a very polite manner. I do not want to force the issue,” the cardinal said, adding that he hoped there would be clarifications by the government on how to ensure safety and religious freedom in Jerusalem.
The Israel police wrote in a post on X on Monday that, after a “productive meeting” with Pizzaballa, “a mutual framework has been established for upcoming Easter ceremonies.”
Following a productive meeting between the Israel Police and Latin Catholic Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, a mutual framework has been established for upcoming Easter ceremonies.
Due to the complex security reality of Operation “Roaring Lion,” ceremonies including the “Holy… pic.twitter.com/uWcE4fnQMO
— Israel Police (@israelpolice) March 30, 2026
Backlash to Israel’s action on Palm Sunday included comments from U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who called the events “unfortunate.”
The Canadian prime minister, representatives from the European Union, and French, Italian and Spanish leaders also posted a statement on social media condemning the event. “We must not allow war to exclude followers of any religion from our shared holy city, Jerusalem,” wrote Hungarian President Viktor Orbán in a post on X.
The president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, wrote on X on Sunday that he had called Pizzaballa “to express my great sorrow” over his being denied entry to the church. He said his country continues its “unwavering commitment to freedom of religion for all faiths and to upholding the status quo at the holy sites of Jerusalem.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated that the decision was made out of special concern for Pizzaballa’s safety, but said upon hearing about it that he “instructed the authorities to enable the Patriarch to hold services as he wishes.”
In an interview with the Italian daily La Repubblica, the Rev. Olivier Poquillon, a Dominican priest who is director of the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem, said denying the patriarch access to Holy Sepulchre represented “a complete rupture.”
Poquillon questioned whether security concerns were actually the reason behind the ban, since the Patriarchate’s headquarters is only a few blocks from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. “One might ask whether this restriction on the exercise of religious freedom was also intended as a way to pressure the Catholic Church, particularly at a time when certain Catholic groups in the United States are questioning the legitimacy of the conflict,” he said.
He also noted that the first critical reactions to the news came from Israeli citizens.
At the Vatican, Pope Leo XIV celebrated Palm Sunday before cheering crowds in St. Peter’s Square. During his homily, the pope referred to Jesus as the “King of Peace” seven times, offering biblical examples of when Christ offered messages of humility and nonviolence. “Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war,” Leo said, adding, “He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.”
The pope’s words came as world leaders, including the United States and Israel, employ religious language to frame the ongoing conflicts. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used the term Armageddon to present military action as sanction by God.
“The abuse and manipulation of God’s name to justify this and any other wars is the gravest sin we can commit at this time,” Pizzaballa said on a video call organized by the Oasis Foundation, a Catholic organization for Muslim-Christian dialogue on March 15.
Leo on Sunday asked for prayers for Christians living in the Middle East, “who are suffering the consequences of a brutal conflict and, in many cases, are unable to observe fully the liturgies of these holy days.”