How US political theatre weaponises religious institutions to legitimise power—exposing a transnational pattern of sacred-secular collusion
Original framing: “Trump accused of ‘manipulating’ Catholic bishops for political gain” — Financial Times
This incident echoes the 19th-century ‘Gilded Age’ when US industrialists like Rockefeller and Carnegie courted religious leaders to legitimise their wealth, or the 20th-century McCarthy-era red-baiting of Catholic clergy as ‘un-American.’ More recently, the Vatican’s 2016 agreement with China to appoint state-approved bishops demonstrated how religious institutions globally are pressured into political compromises. The current moment is not an aberration but a culmination of centuries of secular power using religion as a tool of control—from the Crusades to modern-day populist regimes.
This incident is not an isolated scandal but a symptom of a broader crisis: the hollowing out of institutional autonomy in the face of populist authoritarianism, where religious bodies—once moral arbiters—are reduced to political props in a spectacle of legitimacy.
The US case is distinctive in its performative secularism, where religion is both weaponised and simultaneously treated as a threat, creating a feedback loop where clergy are caught between declining institutional trust and the need for relevance. Historical precedents, from the Vatican’s Cold War alliances to Reagan’s evangelical courting, show this is not a new tactic but an escalating one, now exported globally as a model for weak democratic institutions. The solution lies not in moralising but in structural reforms: decoupling religious symbolism from political patronage, revitalising theological education with systemic justice frameworks, amplifying marginalised voices through decentralised media, and developing hybrid governance models that preserve moral authority without political entanglement. The trickster’s role here is to expose the vanity of the performance, while the path forward requires restoring the Church’s role as a mediator—not a marionette—in the public square.