Dissent vs. Bad Theology

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I am, by nearly all measures, a “bad Catholic.”

I’m a gay, transgender, pro-choice, anarcho-communist. I don’t belong to a parish. I don’t attend Mass on a weekly basis, and I go to confession maybe twice a year. I basically go to Mass just enough to push me past the dreaded CEO status (Christmas-Easter Only for those who have never spent time around judgey Catholic mothers). I’m not confirmed because I was lucky enough to have parents that didn’t force me to go through the process when I wasn’t completely certain of my beliefs in eighth grade (frankly, I’m shocked by and somewhat question people who were confident enough to honestly go through the process at that age).

Don’t worry, I don’t give money to the Church. I loudly oppose the Church’s stances on gender, homosexuality, birth control, and abortion. I don’t think everyone needs to believe in God, or that atheists are going to hell, or whatever pro forced conversion nonsense people come up with. I would fight every single pope in a Denny’s parking lot. And while I generally don’t believe in absolutes, one of my few exceptions to that is the need for the complete separation of church and state, including revoking the Vatican’s permanent observer status at the UN.

I’m even willing to admit that even though I personally claim the identity, a significant number of Catholics, and a much larger number of non-Catholics would probably not consider me Catholic at all. I should note that there is also a ton of historical and cultural nuance behind my choice to claim the Catholic identity– perhaps a topic for a future essay someday.

In spite of all of that, I thankfully have never screwed up so badly and in such a public manner that Pope Francis felt the need to publish a letter calling out my harmful and terrible theology. Unlike Vice President J.D. Vance, whose public use of St. Augustine’s ordo amoris to justify the Trump administration’s horrifying immigration policies drew concern and ire from theologians and state-church advocates alike.

Let’s back up a little. In a recent Fox News interview, the Vice President responded to criticisms of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, saying:

“You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”

When people criticized him for this take, he posted on the app formerly known as Twitter, telling people to google the ordo amoris, an ancient concept presented by St. Augustine expanded on by St. Thomas Aquinas, outlining how everyone and everything should be loved. Apparently in Vance’s view, this means that you have a hierarchy of love, and that’s how you should align your life and world views. Quite literally an “order” in which you should love people.

There are some serious issues with this understanding. Now bear with me here, I am at best, an extremely amateur theologian, if that. My training is in legal and political theory. But much of Western political theory has roots in Christian theological debates, so I’ve spent a significant amount of time with these texts in both religious and academic contexts in my lifetime.

Yes, Augustine did write that there are certain things that should be loved more, less, or equally.

“Now he is a man of just and holy life who ... neither loves what he ought not to love, nor fails to love what he ought to love, nor loves that more which ought to be loved less, nor loves that equally which ought to be loved either less or more, nor loves that less or more which ought to be loved equally,”

And he did write that while we should love all humans equally, there are circumstances that we should consider when making priorities. Often this is based on proximity, because those are the people you interact with every day, but that was never meant as a hard fast rule, just as a statement that it is physically impossible for any one person to do good things for every single person, so you should focus your energy on those who you can do good for.

“Further, all men are to be loved equally. But since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you.”

St. Thomas Aquinas revisited this concept a few centuries later, expanding on the theme and providing more clarity, noting that there will always be circumstances in which you should prioritize the needs of a stranger over that of your family, encouraging the use of reason, context, and nuance when making determinations of who you should extend love and kindness to.

“And yet this may vary according to the various requirements of time, place, or matter in hand: because in certain cases one ought, for instance, to succor a stranger, in extreme necessity, rather than one’s own father, if he is not in such urgent need.”

This concept, which has helped to inform Church doctrine for centuries, is filled with grey areas and exceptions. They’re far from strict directions or even guidelines. They are, at best, an extremely general framework to explain our responsibilities to each other. Using it to justify broad sweeping political harm is indicative of a serious misunderstanding and misapplication of a complex theological concept. Not to mention we shouldn’t be basing our policy priorities on theology anyway.

Pope Francis apparently agreed with this evaluation, and felt that, given the Vice President’s immense power over the lives of millions of people, and visibility as a Catholic, it was important for him to address these comments. On February 10, the pontiff, who has become well known for his relatively liberal theological stances (though I will note the bar is absolutely subterranean in that regard), issued a letter addressed to the Bishops of the United States. Mostly focused on the need to continue to care and advocate for immigrants in the face of rapidly changing policy and attacks on funding for Catholic-run immigrant and refugee programs, the letter never actually names the Vice President, or even the ordo amoris outright. Still, many were quick to note paragraph six as a clear reference to Vance’s recent comments. Specifically the second sentence, which read: “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups[,]” which seems to be a clear rejection of Vance’s theological understanding and approach to immigration policy.

Many cradle Catholics, including those who no longer practice, have been making jokes since then about the fact that if we had been on the receiving end of that type of letter, we would simply cease to exist. It’s built into the core of our being, the same way that pretty much anyone raised Catholic, regardless of current belief, experiences a brief moment of panic that they have forgotten that it is a Friday during Lent every time they see a commercial for the McDonald’s Filet o’ Fish. As far as I’ve been able to find, it seems that Vance has declined to publicly respond to the letter (if I’m mistaken, please send it my way), so maybe he too is embarrassed. I somehow doubt that though.

Vance is a part of a stream of Catholics known as “radical traditionalists” or “rad-trads.” Most visible in online spaces, rad-trads advocate for the Church to return to its pre-Vatican II ways. Hallmarks of rad-trads are a hyper emphasis of the Tridentine Latin Mass (as opposed to Mass being said in the local language of the congregation), traditional gender roles and hyper-natalism (rad-trads massively overlap with the larger “trad wife” movement), the adoption of Roman Imperial and Crusades era aesthetics, an aggressive approach to proselytizing, and increasing Christian nationalist politics (though the movement precedes the coining of the term). They are also highly critical of Pope Francis for his more liberal views, some even going as far as to refuse to recognize his authority as pope outright, which is…confusing to say the least. Many people have noted that the loudest and most aggressive demographic within this movement are white men who converted as adults from some form of Protestantism, typically fundamentalist or Evangelical streams, though there is a fair number of people with Mainline roots as well.

The Catholic rad-trad movement appeals to this particular group for several reasons. Christian traditions that over emphasize traditional gender roles and masculine power are a dime a dozen, especially in the United States, and especially when looking at American political theology. A lot of converts come out of those theologies, in fact. What I think appeals to them in particular, though, is the sense of historical legitimacy that the Church provides.

Regardless of your theological beliefs, it is an objective historical truth that the Catholic Church is an ancient institution with millennia of history behind it. Comparatively, many American Protestant groups have only existed for a short period of time. These converts often find their previous traditions lacking academically, and find more meaning in the history and scholarship of the Church. In an ideal world that is all well and good. I always recommend a more scholastic approach to theology and working to understand doctrine, tradition, and scripture in the contexts that they came about. The modern world is unspeakably different to the ancient world, and literal, one-to-one applications are never going to work. The problem comes in when instead of understanding these things as a part of an ever evolving and ever changing understanding of faith, rad-trads typically decide that any scholarly evolutions past the 1950s are an invalid result of feminism and the sexual revolution, and that scripture and any historical documents should be read extremely literally (a much more Protestant concept than Catholic). There is a significant lack of deconstruction amongst rad-trad converts that unfortunately is only encouraged by large portions of the Catholic hierarchy, who rather than listen to the voices of young people who are leaving the Church, have decided to gear programming to the people they think they can convert. This isn’t to say that there aren’t cradle Catholics who have jumped onto the rad-trad bandwagon, or were even raised as a rad-trad Catholic from birth. But it is inarguable that the movement is predominantly made up of white men who are seeking both historical legitimacy, and gendered power, and bringing with those desires what I refer to as “Bad Theology.”

“Now hang on a minute Kat,” I hear you say, “you yourself disagree with a large number of the Catholic Church’s teachings, you just said so at the beginning of this piece. What makes your disagreement different from theirs?”

That’s a fair question, and the lines between these types of disagreement are very thin. But they are there, and they’re becoming increasingly important to recognize as we make our way through the hellscape of Trump II.

Especially as we continue to figure out how to build the interfaith coalitions and spaces that are going to be necessary to bring down the Christian nationalist movement and restore religious liberty, we are going to need to be more and more actively aware of the differences between dissent and Bad Theology. Because let me be clear, no single faith or non-faith group is going to be able to do this on their own. You cannot have religious liberty that is defined through the world view of a single group alone. We must come together for a common goal (and hopefully learn more about our shared humanity in the process). If you were curious about just two of the staple readings I recommend to people on theological dissent, I would go with “Why you can disagree— and remain a faithful Catholic” by Philip S. Kaufman (available for free on the Internet Archive), and “Catholic Does Not Equal The Vatican” by pioneering feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Reuther.

So what is this distinction?

Legitimate theological debate is the same as any other type of scholarly debate. It’s backed by multiple, strong sources, engaged in by people who are motivated primarily by finding truth and the expansion of human knowledge, and open to change as new information and understandings are made available. I base many of my dissenting views on the work of feminist, womanist, Black, queer, indigenous, disabled, and other contextual theologians, research on the political and historical contexts surrounding certain decisions made by the Church, and historical evidence that provides cultural context for why certain parts of scripture say what they do. My views have evolved wildly since I began to engage with theology as a mature, serious endeavor and not just taking what I was being told at face value (ask me about my beliefs on hell sometime), and I’m ok with that. Dissenting views are what help the Church evolve, and it’s not uncommon for dissenting views to become doctrine over time (see the Church’s stances on heliocentrism, women and girls serving as altar servers and lectors, and any of the massive overhauls of Vatican II.) Yes, the Catholic Church has a complicated, bloody history when it comes to stifling dissent, I’m not denying that by any means. And it still struggles to accept new and evolving ideas. But the same could be said for any number of institutions, and like those institutions, the Church is constantly grappling with what it means to change.

Bad Theology, on the other hand, is a whole other can of beans. I think of it as being a lot like reading a paper by that one person in your 100-level English class who found a single reddit post that agrees with their take that the curtains in a scene of a book are “just blue”, and refuses to engage with anything alternative reading that might say to the contrary. When that person later gets a poor grade on their paper because they clearly did not do the work or research, they claim that they are being “silenced” or “censored” because the statement that “the curtains are blue” is right there in the text. This often isn’t because the person genuinely lacks the skills to understand a symbolic or interpretive reading of the text, but because they get some kind of personal victory out of it, whether it’s “sticking it” to the professor or getting to play the victim. In other cases, it’s the like person who refuses to vaccinate their children because “people lived for thousands of years without vaccines” without acknowledging that also people died early deaths for thousands of years without vacciness. It is a framework that is fundamentally based on a refusal to engage in good faith with anything that might prove their prior beliefs wrong.

Bad Theologists (who have existed for as long as the concept of “theology” has) are often more than capable of engaging in legitimate debate, but choose not to, for a wide variety of reasons depending on the historical moment. Generally though, the reason can be traced to the acquisition and consolidation of power.

This is the part where I caution that just because someone or some group is in the Bad Theologist camp does not mean that they aren’t lended legitimacy by the group they come out of. Continuing to look at the Catholic Church as a case study, nothing exemplifies this quite like “Opus Dei,” a group of lay Catholics and priests that claim to be dedicated to “spread[ing] the Christian message that every person is called to holiness and that every honest work can be sanctified.” The organization, which operates with the permission of the Vatican, has increasingly come under scrutiny for its abusive practices, connections to human trafficking in the Global South, militant hyper-conservatism, and influence over right wing Catholic politicians in the U.S.

Founded in Spain in 1928, the organization has a fraught history with the Vatican, fighting with various Popes for recognition and respect until 1978, when Pope John Paul II granted it special status that made it answerable not to the normal Catholic hierarchy, but to the Pope and the Pope alone. It’s important to note that this was not achieved through any great work, but through a financial campaign prior to his election as pontiff that included cash donations, speaking engagements, and the publication of his books. In addition to more formal recognition and leeway to operate within the Church, Opus Dei also received the rushed and controversial canonization of its founder, Josemaría Escriva, under Pope John Paul II. Since Pope Francis took over, the relationship between Opus Dei and the Vatican has been less steady, but the organization has firmly entrenched itself into the life and politics of many Catholics globally, and continues to pull strong political influence in the U.S., hiding its extremism under a veneer of “protecting Catholic religious liberty” and its more recent history of widespread approval by the Church. While the organization does not release lists of its members, we do know that conservative juggernaut and Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo is also director of one of the main Opus Dei hubs in D.C., and there has been a clear focus by the group to establish it as the “one true voice” of Catholicism in American politics. Its members have no interest in theological debate or diversity, and they certainly don’t have any interest in building a society that embraces religious pluralism with perhaps the limited exception of their relationships with “Cooperators”– non-Catholics who never-the-less support their work. What they want, more than anything, is power and religious authoritarianism.

What we do with this distinction is where politics as a matter of law and politics as a matter of social action diverge. In the same way we don’t want religious groups to dictate the law, it’s also probably not a good idea for the government to be determining what theological takes are orthodox. Certainly the government might need to determine if a religious belief is “sincere” for an individual in limited situations like conscientious objector applications, but beyond that, whether or not a certain belief is valid within the context of its source religion would be clearly problematic from a constitutional perspective.

But politics is more than law and the official actions of the government. Laws and government actions are the end results of the social climate that they exist in, and as such we have both the social right and responsibility to identify Bad Theology and publicly reject the role that it’s playing amongst the powers that be. Christo-facism requires the public to believe in its legitimacy to survive. Resisting this legitimacy is going to require different types of work from different types of people. For those of us from source faiths with powerful Bad Theologists influencing the government, we have a responsibility to aggressively and publicly reject these groups or individuals as representative of us and our beliefs. And I don’t mean just saying that they aren’t “real Catholics/Christians/etc” but by being clear in our advocacy and actions that they are a fringe minority within the broader group. On the opposite side of the coin, I urge people from outside of these groups to resist the impulse to equate Bad Theologists with their source faith as a whole. When the standing social narrative is that these extremist groups are the only true representative of their source faith, they are able to defend themselves from critique by claiming “religious discrimination.”

None of this should be read as me discouraging real criticisms, critiques, or debates about religion as a whole, but rather to encourage an injection of nuance in discussions of religious influence on our society and government, especially as we continue to figure out how to work together as respectful collaborators.

In an ideal world we would not need to worry about this distinction. Bad Theologists would be laughed out of the halls of power as quickly as they jump to conclusions. We would not need to think about the Pope rebuking the theology of the Vice President of the United States because the Vice President would not be justifying policy with theology to begin with. But we do not live in that world. And if we are going to win, if we are going to survive, we have to make this distinction and utilize it in our favor. And we need to do it fast.

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Kat (they/them) is a queer lawyer, activist, and theorist focusing on the intersections of law, queerness, religion, and politics, with the occasional bit of theology, political theory, and legal theory thrown in for good measure. Originally from rural southern Indiana, Kat earned their B.A. in Political Science in 2019 before continuing on to earn their J.D. in 2022, both from Indiana University- Bloomington. A former Equal Justice Works Fellow for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Kat has spent their professional career fighting for the separation of church and state and LGBTQIA+ rights. Outside of work you can find them at a ballet or contemporary dance class, sipping on dirty shirleys at their local gay bar, or playing video games with their cat, Merlin.