Mark Levin, host of the Fox News show, Life, Liberty & Levin, jumped on the bandwagon of Fox News commenters and Christian nationalists attacking the Pope. We are used to hearing commentators become instant experts in virology to counter Covid science, atmospheric physics to counter climate change, or election law to propel myths of widespread voter fraud. But this specific way of undermining theology is more dangerous, because what is at stake is reason itself — the way we come upon and agree on all truths.

Subscribe now

On April 19th Levin starts his program with “As you know, there’s been a lot of discussion about theology and this war.” Levin, who frequently evokes his Judaism for political commentary, says he “doesn’t pretend to be a theologian or a scholar.” But this won’t stop him from becoming an authority on Catholicism.

He sets up his argument by reading the Pope’s Easter address:

“Brothers and sisters, this is our God, Jesus king of peace who rejects war, who no one can use to justify war. He said he does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them saying, ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood.’”

Levin reacts: “Wow, that’s pretty pacifistic!... What is a just war?”

The tool he uses to dismantle the Pope’s interpretation of Jesus is the Catechism, a compendium of Catholic Church doctrine. Levin leans hard into passages of Just War theology: “In paragraph 2309, the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave and certain. All other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impracticable and ineffective. There must be serious prospects of success and the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.”

Eureka. Levin declares: “Well, this is a just war then by this definition.” The attacks on Iran are Jesus-approved. The Pope simply hadn’t done his homework.

What he doesn’t tell you is that the just war tradition he was citing was not derived from Jesus, and not written solely by Aquinas. Christian just war theology was invented, largely, by Augustine of Hippo in the early fifth century, specifically to solve a political problem that Jesus himself never had: how to run an empire.

Levin’s first draft is 1600 years old

After the Sack of Rome in 410 by the Visigoths, the Empire was in shock. Military leaders were questioning whether a religion based on non-violence — “turn the other cheek” — would give them the theological permission they needed to crush their enemies, an important requirement for empire building. They had moved from worshiping the all-powerful Mars, an actual God of War who did not mince words:

“If you command me to bury my blade in my brother’s breast, in my father’s throat, in my wife’s pregnant body, I will do all.”

- Mars (Lucan’s Pharsalia, 1st century CE)

Compare to Jesus: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” -

Jesus (John 13:34-35)

Roman military commanders like Boniface were having a hard time with the tradeoff. He wrote to Augustine asking whether a Christian soldier could kill without sin. In Augustine’s response we can see the early revisioning of Jesus the pacifist into Jesus the god of war. It’s the first draft of everything Levin read on air last week.

He told Boniface not to worry. War is not incompatible with Christian love, Augustine explained, as long as it is waged by legitimate authority, for a just cause, with the right intention. The soldier who kills on orders is not a murderer. The violence is the state’s, not his. His soul is clean. And fortunately for Boniface, Augustine, as a head of the Church, could sanctify his wars. Problem solved. He wrote:

“Do not think that it is impossible for any one to please God while engaged in active military service. Let necessity, therefore, and not your will, slay the enemy who fights against you.”

Augustine solidifies his just war framework a few years later in City of God:

“But, say they, the wise man will wage just wars. As if he would not all the rather lament the necessity of just wars, if he remembers that he is a man… For it is the wrongdoing of the opposing party which compels the wise man to wage just wars; and this wrong-doing, even though it gave rise to no war, would still be matter of grief to man because it is man’s wrong-doing… And if any one either endures or thinks of them without mental pain, this is a more miserable plight still, for he thinks himself happy because he has lost human feeling.”

The wise man is justified in waging war as long as he feels bad about it. To wage war without mental pain is a sin. You don’t need to read very much of the Sermon on the Mount to know Jesus never said anything close to this.

But here we are 1,600 years later believing Jesus was pro-war, when the idea has nothing to do with Jesus at all. It actually predates Augustine by 350 years. Cicero first laid out the just war framework in De Re Publica — a set of boundaries for engaging in war, a proto-UN Charter. Entirely secular, built on ethical reasoning accessible to any rational person regardless of faith. No God or scripture required. Just reason.

Augustine took Cicero’s framework, stripped out the reason, and replaced it with scripture. And when scripture didn’t deliver the conclusion the empire needed, he adjusted his interpretation until it did. That is what Mark Levin read.

Subscribe now

Why does the war have to be Holy?

Because Cicero’s framework has a fatal flaw — it’s democratic. Anyone can apply it. The enemy can invoke the same criteria and argue their case. The framework is neutral. It can go against you.

Augustine fixes that. Once you replace reason with scripture and make the Church the sole arbiter, you’re no longer fighting for Rome. You’re fighting for God. And fighting for God solves the one problem Cicero never could — it cleans the soldier’s soul. Under Cicero, a just war is a legal decision. Augustine turns it into a ceremony. The killing isn’t sinful as long as your heart is in the right place and you feel bad about it.

Which is the most useful thing an empire has ever been told.

Levin says of the Iranians: “They live to kill. Jihadis, kill as many people as you can, anybody who disagrees.” Under Cicero’s framework, an Iranian counter-attack is a logical step. A people defending themselves against a foreign military strike have just cause. The criteria are neutral and apply to both sides. Cicero doesn’t care which god you pray to.

But Levin needs Augustine precisely because Augustine lets him disqualify their god. Once you replace neutral reason with Christian scripture and make the Church the sole arbiter of legitimate authority, the enemy’s claim evaporates. They didn’t choose the right god, so their just cause ain’t just — not because the facts don’t support it, but because their authority isn’t legitimate. And legitimate means the right kind of Christian.

That is where Levin is simply wrong.

Beyond the technical misreading, none of the church fathers — not Augustine, not Aquinas — treated just war as a checklist for going to war the way Levin does. The entire tradition was built around restraint. The conditions weren’t a to-do list before battle. The question the tradition asked was never can we find justification for this war we’ve already decided to fight. It was, have we exhausted every reason not to fight?

Here is where he is dishonest.

Levin spends considerable time on Catechism 2308 and 2309 — the passages listing the conditions for justified war. But he skips what comes immediately before, paragraph 2307, which is the actual point:

“The fifth commandment forbids the intentional destruction of human life. Because of the evils and injustices that accompany all war, the Church insistently urges everyone to prayer and to action so that the divine Goodness may free us from the ancient bondage of war.”

This is the Catechism’s predicate and everything that follows are the exceptions. He read the fine print but not the actual text. The section is titled “Avoiding War.” He didn’t skip 2307 by accident. 2307 is the Pope’s entire argument.

So why now the hysteria over a Pope? Why the crash courses in Catholic theology? Why is Hannity quitting a church he’s belonged to his whole life rather than simply disagreeing with its leader? Why is the Vice President of the United States telling the Pope to be careful?

The lady doth protest too much.

Because if the Pope is right and by every measure he is, the war is conclusively unjust. Not just by Leo’s reading of scripture. By Aquinas’s criteria, which require that the sole intention be peace, not domination. By Cicero’s secular framework, which applies the same neutral standard to both sides and doesn’t care which god you pray to. And by the Catechism Levin himself read on air, whose very first sentence on the subject forbids the intentional destruction of human life and urges “freedom from the ancient bondage of war”.

Every framework they invoked to justify this war condemns it.

But this doesn’t answer my earlier question. Why does the war need to be sanctified? Why do they all care what the Pope thinks? Why can’t it just be justified on secular grounds, United States policy, national interest?

Because it probably can’t. Over 100 international law experts agree. A war that holds up to rational secular scrutiny doesn’t need Augustine. It doesn’t need Levin reading the Catechism on prime time television. It doesn’t need Hannity quitting the Catholic Church. It doesn’t need the Vice President warning the Pope to watch his mouth.

They need to sideline reason because the justification won’t survive it. And that is the Augustinian trap in its purest form — replace reason with religious authority, always redirect back to a holy text, declare that only the right kind of Christians can determine what is true, and you’ll never be wrong.

The irony is almost too perfect. The one person standing between Trump, Vance, Fox News and the truth they’re trying to bury is the head of the Augustinian order.

What separates Leo from Levin isn’t that Leo rejects Augustine. It’s that Leo reads him whole — cross-referencing Augustine against Christ, which is what Augustine himself demanded. The parts Vance and Levin reach for are precisely the parts where Augustine was most compromised — serving an empire that had killed his savior, bending theology to justify whatever the state required.

Augustine knew what he was doing. The grief he required from soldiers as a condition of Just War was his own penance for recommending it to Boniface.

The United States can still choose reason. That's what the Pope is saying. That's what all the attacks on him are trying to drown out.

Share

____________________________

Primary Sources

Augustine of Hippo, Letter 189 to Boniface (c. 417 AD). Full text: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1102189.htm

Augustine of Hippo, Contra Faustum Manichaeum, Book 22, sections 69–76 (c. 400–410 AD). Full text: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/140622.htm

Augustine of Hippo, City of God, Book XIX, Chapter 7. Full text: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120119.htm

Cicero, De Re Publica (54–51 BC). Just war framework.

Lucan, Pharsalia, Book 1 (1st century CE). Mars quote.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, Question 40. Just war criteria. Question 64, Article 7. Double effect doctrine.

Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 2263, 2264, 2265, 2266, 2307, 2308, 2309, 2310 (1992). Full text:

https://www.vatican.va

Mark Levin Transcript

Mark Levin, Life, Liberty & Levin, Fox News, April 19, 2026. Rev transcript: https://www.rev.com/app/transcript/NjllOWUwZmYxYWFiMDAwN2IzNzEwMzY2NkhDVWh4QlBWSHNX/o/VEMwNTY3NTAwNTc1

Pope Leo XIV

Pope Leo XIV, Palm Sunday address, March 29, 2026. Cited in multiple sources including: https://www.newsweek.com/how-war-of-words-donald-trump-making-pope-leo-xiv-11860046

Pope Leo XIV biographical background — Augustinian order, doctoral thesis, seminary teaching: https://www.northeastern.edu/2026/04/23/pope-leo-xiv-political/

Trump Administration Responses to Pope Leo

NPR, “Pope Leo vs. The Trump Administration,” April 16, 2026: https://www.npr.org/2026/04/16/nx-s1-5787533/pope-leo-vs-the-trump-administration

ABC News/Newsbusters transcript, Vance vs. Pope Leo, April 15–16, 2026: https://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/jorge-bonilla/2026/04/15/shameless-abc-continues-pretend-care-about-what-catholics-think

Newsweek, “How a War of Words With Donald Trump Has Been the Making of Pope Leo XIV,” April 22, 2026: https://www.newsweek.com/how-war-of-words-donald-trump-making-pope-leo-xiv-11860046

Northeastern University, “What is the Political Role of Pope Leo XIV Amid Trump Feud,” April 23, 2026: https://news.northeastern.edu/2026/04/23/pope-leo-xiv-political/

Fox News Theological Counter-Offensive

National Catholic Register, “Does Pope Leo Reject Just-War Teaching? Theologians Push Back,” April 20, 2026: https://www.ncregister.com/news/pope-leo-and-just-war-teaching

Father Gerald Murray, Raymond Arroyo, Robert Royal — Fox News “The Prayerful Posse” segment, April 2026. Cited in ncregister.com piece above.

Sean Hannity departure from Catholic Church — cited in Newsweek piece above.

John Hagee sermon, March 1, 2026 — cited in earlier search results.

Historical/Scholarly Context

Philip Schaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 4 — Augustine’s writings against the Manicheans. https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf104

Catechism of Trent / Roman Catechism (1566) — predecessor to 1992 Catechism.

Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes (1965) — source of Catechism 2308 language on self-defense.

The missing story

In the first book of Esdras there is a story called the Contest of the Three Guardsmen. It has spent sixteen hundred years in and out of the Bible depending on who was in charge.

While King Darius sleeps, three of his bodyguards devise a contest. Each writes his answer to the question: what is the strongest thing in the world? They place their answers under the king’s pillow.

When he wakes, he reads them and convenes the assembly. Power subject to judgment before it knows it’s being judged.

Wine, says the first, makes every man equal —king and slave alike forget themselves, forget their debts, forget their grief.

The king, says the second guard, commands all things and everyone obeys him.

The third guard, later identified as Zerubbabel, wrote: *women gave us life, but above all things, Truth is victor*.

When Zerubbabel argues his case he acknowledges that wine is powerful and that kings rule. But Truth, he says, outlasts them all. Bold words spoken to a king. Literally speaking truth to power.

He goes on:

“With her there is no accepting of persons or rewards; she does what is righteous rather than what is unjust or evil.”

The assembly declares Truth the winner. King Darius accepts the verdict. He tells Zerubbabel to name his reward. Zerubbabel does not ask for money or power. He asks for permission to rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple.

This concept of truth having no partiality runs through Torah and Talmud as a cornerstone of justice. Leviticus. Deuteronomy. Justice is not the king’s to control, it’s above him. (Leviticus 19:15, Deuteronomy 16:19, Mishnah Avot 1:18)

*Magna est veritas et praevalet.* Great is Truth, and it prevails.

The Augustinian Trap

1 Esdras was in the Bible Christians actually used for the first four centuries.

In 397 CE the Council of Carthage, attended by Augustine of Hippo, ratified a canon listing “two books of Esdras.” The story of Zerubbabel and the king was scripture.

Augustine re-frames the story to fit his own purpose. He says Zerubbabel is either talking about Christ or he’s wrong.

He argues: “unless, perhaps, Esdras is to be understood as prophesying of Christ in that passage where, on a question having arisen among certain young men as to what is the strongest thing... that same third youth demonstrated that the truth is victorious over all. For by consulting the Gospel we learn that Christ is the Truth.”

Zerubbabel said Truth needs no mediator and can defeat kings, a direct threat to Augustine's premise in the City of God that the Church is Truth's mediator. This is the Augustinian Trap — the logical fallacy explored in my last piece.

The story wouldn’t last for long. Eight years after the Council of Carthage, Jerome finished his Latin translation of the Bible. Jerome and Augustine were collaborators — exchanging letters, sharing enemies, building the same church.

Jerome put 1 Esdras in an appendix. He marked it “apocryphal” from the Greek Apokryptein — to hide away, to conceal. No council authorized this. He unilaterally made the call, and the story of Truth defeating kings disappeared from the Bible of the Western church.

The Council of Trent convened to answer the Protestant Reformation and upheld Jerome’s arrangement in 1545-1563.

In 1534 Martin Luther demoted the Apocrypha to a separate section of his German Bible. Present but not equal to scripture. *(Luther Bible, 1534, Apocrypha preface)

The British and Foreign Bible Society, the largest distributor in the world, whose editions reached every corner of the world, stopped including the Apocrypha in 1826. The most read Bible in the world no longer contained the Contest of the Three Guardsmen. *(Canton, A History of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1904)*

Scholars have solid reasons for its exclusion like unreliable sourcing, repetition of material found elsewhere. But the Book of Judith is acknowledged as historical fiction by Catholic scholars themselves: wrong geography, impossible chronology, a city that never existed. It stayed. The story where Truth defeats the king did not.

The story where Truth defeats the king did not.

Augustine’s arguments originated at a moment of crisis, when he decided to attack reason to save the Church. It’s worth noting that the theologians ancient and contemporary who follow him agreed

The Three Guardsmen story remains fully canonical scripture in Eastern Orthodox and Ethiopian Orthodox churches. It has never been removed from their Bibles.

So, for sixty bucks, Trump could at least include this story and the rest of the constitutional amendments buried in an appendix. Well, now for free you can sign up for his Truth Social and get the real facts. Augustine 101.

---

Sources:

1 Edras https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=642568301

Augustine, City of God, Book XVIII, chapter 36. Lawrence M. Wills, Introduction to the Apocrypha, Yale University Press, 2021. Council of Carthage (397 CE), Codex Canonum Ecclesiae Africanae. Leviticus 19:15. Deuteronomy 16:19. Mishnah Avot 1:18. Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, 1501-1508. Canton, A History of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1904.*

Book of Judith: Michael D. Coogan, ed. (2010). The New Oxford Annotated Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version (4th ed.). Oxford Univ. Press. pp. 31–36

Why does your neighbor think immigrants are why he can’t afford rent, when wages have been suppressed by corporate policy for forty years and housing consolidated by private equity? Why does your uncle believe cutting taxes on billionaires will make him richer, when it’s been tried repeatedly and consistently hasn’t worked? Why do millions believe Donald Trump is going to lower the deficit when his actions show otherwise? Why do people see mass voter fraud as the threat to democracy and not voter suppression? Why does anyone still think dismantling the ACA would make healthcare better, when virtually every country with universal coverage spends less and lives longer?

Half the country isn’t stupid. These are people who navigate complex lives, raise children, hold jobs, and sometimes accomplish brilliant things. Ben Carson performed brain surgery on children. Elon Musk lands rockets on drone ships in the ocean. Amy Coney Barrett is a constitutional law professor and Supreme Court Justice. These are not people incapable of reason.

So what is happening?

To answer that you have to go back. Way back. To a specific moment in our timeline — an epistemological earthquake that shifted Western civilization from using reason as the gold standard for knowledge to questioning reason itself in favor of something else.

In 410 AD, the Visigoths sacked Rome. The reality was mundane and political: they were soldiers employed by the Roman state who hadn’t been paid and badly mistreated. After the government didn’t pay up, they rioted. The city hadn’t been attacked in centuries and the psychological shock was enormous. Some Romans began drifting away from Christianity, blaming it for the disaster — they had chosen the wrong god.

A bishop far away in North Africa named Augustine of Hippo took the call. He ran what we would today recognize as a crisis communications campaign — a PR offensive to save the faith. Over a decade he wrote letters to elites and military commanders. He gathered their accounts. He built his case. That campaign was eventually compiled into arguably the most important book in Western history after the Bible: The City of God Against the Pagans — he took a simple political failure and used it to build an impenetrable new framework for Christianity to defend itself from its critics and, in doing so, redefine how the Western world understood truth itself. In a thousand pages he never mentions the real reason why the Goths sacked Rome. Instead he fills those pages with cosmic battles between good and evil, the corruption of paganism. That omission is the lie. The most powerful disinformation is never what you say. It’s what you leave out.

These letters were the Cambridge Analytica dark arts algorithm, the viral Instagram reel, the Fox News of its time.

He took all previous knowledge — Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, the entire foundation of Western philosophy — and absorbed it into his Christian framework. Like a corporation acquiring competitors to crush them. He writes that just as the Israelites took gold and silver from the Egyptians when they fled, Christians should take whatever is valuable from pagan knowledge and repurpose it to support Christianity. If you can make it support the framework, keep it. If you can’t, it isn’t really knowledge at all.

Reason and Logic take a backseat

To make this work he had to poison the idea of reason itself. This is really the absolute evil genius part of this plan whose ramifications we still feel today. Since Eve ate from the tree of knowledge and disobeyed God, mankind is fallen. That’s the Bible. Augustine takes it further — he extends the fall to reason itself. It’s not just that humans are morally compromised. Our capacity to think clearly is corrupted. We cannot be trusted to find truth on our own.

Augustine introduces Credo ut intelligam — Latin for “I believe so that I may understand” — to take reason’s place.

A maze with no exit

“A person who is a good and true Christian should realize that truth belongs to his Lord, wherever it is found.” So you can go out into the world and detect fact from fiction — but only if you are a good and true Christian. But who decides what makes a good and true Christian? Augustine was clear: the Church. He wanted a single institution to define orthodoxy and determine whose reasoning could be trusted. Which means anyone who arrives at different conclusions isn’t reasoning incorrectly — they’re simply not a good and true Christian. And you don’t debate the morally compromised. You pray for them. Or you deport them.

It’s a bulletproof method.

Step 1. Only good Christians can access truth.

Step 2. Make the Church the judge of who is a good Christian.

Step 3. When challenged on logic or fairness, remind everyone that human reason is corrupted by sin and cannot be trusted.

Did Augustine envision this being used to deceive people? No, he genuinely believed it. But it’s the consequences that matter. He created Just War theory but didn’t envision it being invoked to invade Iraq in 2003. None of this is part of Jesus’ teaching either.

Beyond Christianity

Here is what makes this so dangerous: you don’t have to be Christian to be caught in this trap. Augustine didn’t just convert believers. He rewired the entire epistemological environment of Western civilization. Once the framework became institutional —embedded in law, education, and culture —you didn’t have to believe in God to be shaped by it. You just had to grow up under it. Today you can be a lifelong atheist and still be reasoning inside a system Augustine built. You just call it common sense instead of faith.

That’s the trick being run on you right now.

That ability to make facts trustworthy or untrustworthy — rather than true or false — is the trick. When Trump says gas is two dollars a gallon and people believe him, that’s not stupidity. That’s Augustine.

So when someone tells you immigrants are the reason healthcare costs so much, they aren’t making an economic argument you can counter with data. They’re operating inside a framework where the data doesn’t count. Where capital concentration and wage stagnation have no place in the story. The story needs an enemy within.

Augustine created that enemy. He called them heretics, pagans, barbarians, those not sufficiently Christian. The framework has updated its vocabulary many times since, from pagan to secular to woke, and the technology spread the message from parchment to Fox News. But the structure is identical.

This is why you cannot win these arguments with facts. You’re not fighting a bad argument. You’re fighting a 1,600-year-old epistemological architecture specifically designed to make your facts irrelevant.

Augustine’s framework traveled through Calvin, through the Puritans, who brought it to America as covenant theology — the idea that this nation was divinely chosen -through the Moral Majority to the Heritage Foundation. Through every political movement that has told struggling Americans that their enemy is the person beside them rather than the system above them.

And now it runs on algorithms.

Cambridge Analytica didn’t invent Christian nationalist messaging. It just found it already embedded in the culture and targeted it with better tools. Strip away the technology and what you have is Augustine’s letter-writing campaign — reaching anxious elites, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and other unlikely supporters of Christian nationalism, telling them the problem isn’t the system. It’s the impurity within it.

The misinformation crisis isn’t only a crisis of technology or media literacy. It’s also the consequence of building a civilization on a framework that was specifically designed to make certain truths less important than others.

The people who believe immigrants caused their poverty, that tax cuts will save them, that Trump will keep them out of war, that gutting healthcare will make them healthier — they are not failing to reason. They are reasoning perfectly inside a system that was built to prevent them from seeing the actual causes of their fear.

Augustine didn’t just corrupt Christianity. He may have corrupted Western epistemology itself.

And until we identify the Augustinian trap and trace it back to its origin — we will keep having the same argument and hitting the same wall, wondering why the facts never land.

“The SAVE Act would require Americans to show proof of citizenship, like a passport or birth certificate, when registering to vote.”
https://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20260209/RCP_S1383_xml.pdf
https://www.factcheck.org/2026/03/qa-on-the-save-america-act/

“The days of registering at the DMV or online may be gone for good.”
https://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20260209/RCP_S1383_xml.pdf
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/why-the-save-america-act-is-so-contentious-29e2f66d

“Supporters say it’s a commonsense proposal to protect election integrity, to stop voter fraud.”
https://www.whitehouse.gov/saveamerica/
https://www.factcheck.org/2026/03/qa-on-the-save-america-act/

“The rationale being that non-citizens are voting illegally en masse to sway elections.”
https://apnews.com/article/dfb43bcdd0255d3665da588a60286b4e
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/13/explainer-save-america-act

“Supporters say this is about stopping non-citizens from voting. But when states actually check, they almost never find any evidence that this is happening.”
https://apnews.com/article/dfb43bcdd0255d3665da588a60286b4e
https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2026/01/23/are-non-citizens-voting-utahs/

“In Utah, officials audited roughly two million registered voters at great expense and found one non-citizen registered, and that person never voted.”
https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2026/01/23/are-non-citizens-voting-utahs/
https://kutv.com/news/local/utah-review-finds-more-than-999-of-registered-voters-are-us-citizens

“Georgia also conducted an audit and found 20 non-citizens registered out of about 8.2 million voters, and only 9 had voted in prior elections.”
https://apnews.com/article/14532ef49b66f9cbf34ff483d2534280
https://georgiarecorder.com/briefs/georgia-gop-secretary-of-state-reports-audit-found-20-noncitizens-registered-to-vote-out-of-8-2m/

“That’s about 0.00024%.”
https://apnews.com/article/14532ef49b66f9cbf34ff483d2534280

“Across the country, the numbers look similar.”
https://apnews.com/article/dfb43bcdd0255d3665da588a60286b4e
https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2025/03/26/noncitizen-voting-is-very-rare-in-ohio-and-america-not-having-proof-of-citizenship-isnt/

“The SAVE Act would require documents to prove citizenship such as a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization papers to register.”
https://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20260209/RCP_S1383_xml.pdf
https://www.factcheck.org/2026/03/qa-on-the-save-america-act/

“About 21 million Americans don’t have those documents readily available.”
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/millions-americans-dont-have-documents-proving-their-citizenship-readily
https://apnews.com/article/dfb43bcdd0255d3665da588a60286b4e

“For many people, that means taking time off work, traveling to government offices, and paying for replacement documents just to register.”
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/brennan-center-letter-senate-opposing-save-america-act
https://apnews.com/article/dfb43bcdd0255d3665da588a60286b4e

“Statistically, the burden falls disproportionately on lower-income citizens.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/18/save-america-act-trump-voting-republicans/
https://apnews.com/article/dfb43bcdd0255d3665da588a60286b4e

“Supporters often say that many European countries, as well as Canada and Australia, require voter ID.”
https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?dir=ids&document=index&lang=e&section=vot
https://www.aec.gov.au/enrol/

“In the United States, a driver’s license isn’t proof of citizenship, so people would have to obtain additional documents just to participate in elections.”
https://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20260209/RCP_S1383_xml.pdf
https://www.factcheck.org/2026/03/qa-on-the-save-america-act/

“Oh and if you think a REAL ID will work? It won’t as it’s available to green card holders and lawful residents who can’t legally vote.”
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-licenses-identification-cards/real-id/what-is-real-id/real-id-info-non-u-s-citizens/
https://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/real-id-act-text.pdf
https://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20260209/RCP_S1383_xml.pdf

“Look at Kansas, where they passed a similar law.”
https://www.aclu.org/cases/fish-v-schwab-formerly-fish-v-kobach
https://www.aclukansas.org/app/uploads/2021/05/fish_v._schwab_-_10th_circuit_court_of_appeals_decision_18-3133.pdf

“Out of 1.7 million voters, the state blocked 31,089 eligible Americans from registering, which was about 12% of people attempting to register at the time.”
https://www.aclukansas.org/app/uploads/2021/05/fish_v._schwab_-_10th_circuit_court_of_appeals_decision_18-3133.pdf
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-109/159368/20201102130911762_20-109%20Schwab%20v%20Fish%20Brief%20in%20Opposition.pdf

“Which stopped 31 thousand eligible Americans from voting.”
https://www.aclukansas.org/app/uploads/2021/05/fish_v._schwab_-_10th_circuit_court_of_appeals_decision_18-3133.pdf

“Guess how many non-citizens were found voting that year? Three. Not percent, THREE PEOPLE!”

https://www.kshb.com/news/local-news/kansas-once-required-voters-to-prove-citizenship-that-didnt-work-out-so-well#:~:text=That’s%20an%20issue%20Congress%20could,it%20will%20get%20even%20easier.%E2%80%9D

Take a deeper dive and read the article

How did we get from thoughtful religious leaders challenging America’s conscience to watching the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, follow a prayer for unity with the statement: “The military slogan ‘our diversity is our strength’ is the dumbest phrase on planet Earth”?

The Theology Behind a Blockbuster

This drive for purity and homogeneity – the idea that the nation’s integrity demands the expulsion of a supposed “enemy within” – is the ancient ghost of Augustine (the same ghost we explored in Part I). It’s the manifestation of the logic that demands that only when the moral compass is universally corrected can the city stand. Augustine was not writing about a modern nation-state, but his rejection of secular law as legitimate laid the groundwork for what would later become Christian nationalism.

America’s first Hollywood blockbuster transformed the country. D.W. Griffith’s 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation, based on the novel The Clansman, is an imaginary revenge tale in which the Ku Klux Klan ends post-Civil War multiculturalism by intimidating and killing Black voters. The film concludes with a symbolic “reunion” of a Southern man marrying a northern bride. It is a new, whites-only union, complete with an apparition of Jesus Christ blessing the celebration.

One of the film’s darkest legacies is the introduction of the burning cross as a racial symbol. In its climactic scene, Klansmen lynch a Black man amid a flaming cross. (The burning cross, until Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, was devoid of racial connotations and existed only as a Scottish highland signal to call clans together.) But this thrilling image ignited a new era of racial terror and sent a message that America is the White Man’s land of their God and country. This ritual of murder served not only to terrorize a population, but to homogenize the entire nation into their whites-only brand of Christianity.

The Split at Princeton

The Birth of a Nation radicalized audiences through spectacle. But it was Princeton Theological Seminary that paved the way for the intellectual discourse of Christian nationalism we’re facing today. This was no fringe institution. The school was a leading authority on Protestant theology in America when Protestants were 65% of the country’s population. Princeton produced some of the most influential clergy of its time. And so it remains.

The seminary had been home to theologians like Charles Hodge, who, during the era of slavery, provided moral and theological permission for white Southerners to continue their slaveholding economies by declaring that “slavery is not sinful in itself.” Among the faculty was Joseph Wilson, whose son Woodrow later became President and screened The Birth of a Nation at the White House. The worldview that made that film possible had already been preached on the grounds of Princeton Seminary.

Another supposed threat to Christian civilization was science. In 1912, the conflict between science and religion was heating up as Darwin’s evolutionary theories began expanding throughout America’s public schools. One seminary theologian tried to de-escalate the tensions.

“I do not think that there is any general statement in the Bible or any part of the account of creation… that need be opposed to evolution.”

But not everyone could tolerate coexistence, and the idea that evolution and faith could be taught together caused a revolt.

One response was a bombardment of pamphlets. The Fundamentals was financed by brothers Lyman and Milton Stewart, two Presbyterian oil millionaires, who feared that the nation’s seminaries were drifting in the wrong direction. Between 1910 and 1915, they published twelve volumes containing ninety essays, including many by Princeton theologians, that redefined the “fundamentals” of Christianity and took direct aim at evolution.

The Stewart brothers distributed 250,000 complete copies of The Fundamentals free of charge to pastors, missionaries, and churches around the world — a vast propaganda campaign. Out of this media blitz, fundamentalism was born.

Science and a Referendum on Race

The war of ideas found its battlefield in the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. John Scopes, a young high-school teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, was charged with violating a state law that banned the teaching of evolution. Scopes, an activist, had agreed to work with the ACLU to test the law, knowing it would lead to his arrest and trial.

The trial became a national spectacle. Updates were broadcast live on the radio, something unheard of at the time. Both sides brought in their champions. For evolution, Clarence Darrow, the famed attorney who had previously defended labor leaders and radicals. For Creationism, William Jennings Bryan, the former Secretary of State and Christian orator, who was supported intellectually by Princeton Seminary’s J. Gresham Machen.

The creationist cause was humiliated during the public debate. And though Scopes was technically found guilty (Scopes had to pay the minimum fine of $100), the trial marked a cultural turning point. Of the trial, H.L. Mencken for the Baltimore Sun wrote:

“It is not often that a man’s belief in a God can be made to look so cheap and ridiculous before the eyes of all the world.”

Beneath the surface, another battle was being fought — one over race and citizenship. Writer and historian W.E.B. Du Bois, said of the case that: The Scopes trial was not a fight between ignorance and learning, but between two sets of ignorances… Both sides ignored the real question, which is not whether man descended from animals, but that “the Scopes trial has made beasts of men.”

Conservative Christians aligned themselves with creationism not only because of the widely distributed anti-evolution tracts. They also saw it as a theological argument for racial hierarchy.

While Machen didn’t speak publicly about race, privately, he seethed. In a letter to his mother, he wrote:

“...makes me intensely angry to hear people talking glibly about equal civil rights of Negroes, when in many parts of the South these equal rights would mean that every legislator and every judge would be a savage of a low type… the white man would be more unsafe in parts of this country than in the most uncivilized parts of the world.”

For Black Americans, there was much more at stake than a debate over evolution. The trial became a referendum on education, equality, and who gets to define truth itself. The NAACP and early civil rights organizers understood this well enough and helped shape the public narrative around it.

The creationists’ lawyer, William Jennings Bryan, died just days after the trial ended. The New York Times, on July 31, 1925, reported the Ku Klux Klan had a cross-burning ceremony for him:

“In memory of William Jennings Bryan, the greatest Klansman of our time, this cross is burned; he stood at Armageddon and battled for the Lord.”

Although Bryan was not a Klan member, as far as we know, the Klan’s tribute cemented the idea that the fight for the Lord and for a White America was the same battle.

The fallout from the Scopes trial accelerated the rift between reason and faith at Princeton Seminary, and fundamentalists read the seminary’s progressive outlook as a sign that their whole framework of truth through scripture was coming apart. So they walked out.

With their leader, J. Gresham Machen, they founded Westminster Theological Seminary, a school built to wage intellectual war in the 20th century. From those halls came a new mission: to reclaim America from “godless education” by fighting public schools that taught science without scripture and framing equality as a rebellion against divine order.

Machen channels Augustine’s ‘enemy within’ logic, explored in Part I, when he wrote: “The greatest menace to the Christian Church today comes not from without, but from within”.

What was this enemy? They attacked Roosevelt’s New Deal as socialism, integration as heresy, and democracy as dangerous if it dared to put Man’s will above God’s law. Westminster became the blueprint for the Christian Right’s long march through American institutions, influencing pastors, politicians, and pundits to preach that scripture must be the controlling authority above laws and the government. Machen’s co-founder wrote, “The state itself is subject to the law of God, and its authority is valid only as it conforms to His will.” He then quoted Augustine, “There is no true justice except in that republic whose founder and ruler is Christ.”

In The City of God, Augustine describes his political hierarchy as ordo amoris — “Virtue is the order of love.” By this, he means that the health of a society depends on ranking our loyalties correctly, which itself boils down to government is legitimate only if it reflects the divine order. The correct interpretation of scripture comes first.

JD Vance was praised by Christian nationalists for his reworking of this ordo amoris idea during a Fox News appearance, turning the concept into an obstacle course of obligation to justify an America-first, anti-immigration policy: “We should love our family first, then our neighbors, then love our community, then our country, and only then consider the interests of the rest of the world.”

Vance wasn’t casually invoking Augustine. Upon his conversion to Catholicism in 2019, he chose him as his patron saint and admits that this 5th-century theologian informs his decision making. “There’s a chapter from The City of God that’s incredibly relevant now that I’m thinking about policy,” he said. Vance doesn’t name the chapter but the one most studied and quoted by political theorists is Book XIX which is about how peace is only achieved through order, not equality and prosperity, and, of course, law without Christianity is doomed. Augustine writes: “There is no justice except in that commonwealth whose founder and ruler is Christ.”

Another Christian nationalist who keeps finding himself in the news because of his growing influence in conservative politics is the cigar-puffing, flamethrowing evangelical pastor Douglas Wilson. One of the most visible —and self-avowed —Christian nationalists in America, Wilson preaches his Augustinian values to a high-profile flock, that includes Trump’s Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth. Hegseth eats this up and then regurgitates it on podcasts and into American institutions, as he did to military chiefs when he declared that, “the military slogan ‘our diversity is our strength’ is the dumbest phrase on planet Earth”?

Wilson evokes his own version of Augustine’s ordo amoris. “A virtuous Christian man can love Christ, his wife, his children, his nation, his region, his house, his dog, and his favorite coffee cup. What he cannot do (while remaining virtuous) is to get anything in this list out of place or out of order.” Employing ordo amoris provides Christian nationalists with a theological reference to justify placing church above government.

JD Vance sits on the board of advisers of American Moment, a culture-war organization that is part of the advisory coalition for the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 -the policy project that wants to “maintain a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.” Vance’s American Moment has promoted Doug Wilson by hosting lectures and producing social media content featuring him. Vance does not attend Wilson’s church, but he has appeared at fundraisers connected to the platform and has used his high-profile status to advance their shared ideological goals.

As Westminster was laying the foundation for a new Christian America, a few towns away another Christian school, Crozer Theological Seminary, was taking a different path. Founded by Baptists and abolitionists, the Crozer school embraced the Social Gospel that helped to forge the mind of a young Martin Luther King Jr. Crozer taught a different kind of Christianity that believed faith could coexist with reason and that justice was meant for everyone. He wrote: “Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary.”

According to a Gallup poll in 2024 “37% of Americans say God created humans in present form.” In most of Europe, that number is closer to 20%. And on science-vs-religion conflicts like man-made climate change and abortion, the United States remains far more skeptical than Europe, even though Europe is still overwhelmingly Christian in heritage. So, Christianity is not the problem.

Christian nationalists aren’t committed to reason. Theirs is a patchwork of arguments from Augustine, Calvin, and Westminster, and whomever else helps them make their argument for a whites-only America. It’s no accident. This is a debate style invented at Westminster called Presuppositional Apologetics. Its main rule? All scripture is true.

How do you reason with those who reject reason? Let’s look back at Clarence Darrow and early Civil Rights organizers. During the Scopes Monkey Trial, they forced the nation to confront the difference between faith and evidence and found success because they dragged the debate into the open. In the cold light of a courtroom, their arguments focused on evidence-based truth, not scripture or the culture surrounding it. Christian nationalists have since learned to compensate for their lack of evidence with intimidation, utilizing burning crosses and even flamethrowers.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was able to strike a balance by preaching the idea that reason and scripture can both be true and that nothing in the Bible forbids this relationship. By doing so, he also rejected the racist creationism exposed at Scopes, making clear that faith could never be used to place one group above another under God. His Christian evangelism became the spiritual force and moral compass that pushed America to live up to its promise — energizing the marches and giving courage to those who fought so all Americans could participate in democracy, education, and the pursuit of a better, unified nation.

To be continued, Pelagius, Presuppositional Apologetics and the Voting Rights Act.

Trump said these raids “clean up the blood of our country” and protect it from “the enemy within.” But this very phrase he is invoking a man he has likely never heard of: Augustine of Hippo. And an idea that is built on a 1,600-year-old mistruth, perhaps a lie?

After the Visigoths destroyed the city of Rome in 410 CE, the Romans began to wonder if their new Christian faith had doomed them. Had Christianity angered the old gods? Augustine, the philosopher-turned-Christian-bishop, rushed to defend the empire’s new religion. Rome was sacked not because it was too Christian, he said. It was because it wasn’t Christian enough.

The Visigoths, recent refugees in Rome who were soldiers, were also Christians. But their Arian faith interpreted Jesus as the son of God, not God himself. Augustine called theirs a heretical, immoral faith, and argued that this was the true cause of the sack of Rome. He sent a warning: There are wolves within, and sheep without.

This mistruth gave birth to a myth that endures to this day: Rome fell because of a broken moral compass, betrayed by an “enemy within.”

You could tell the real story of why Rome was sacked in a few pages but Augustine takes a thousand pages and blames everyone across the entire cosmos. He drags in Osiris, to Hermes, Aristotle, Cicero, the rich, the poor, everyone. He turns a political dispute and bureaucratic failure into an eternal war between light and darkness and this is what has persisted.

The City of God became the playbook for theocracies. It showed rulers how to frame crises as insoluble unless its citizens were homogenized under the Church’s version of Christianity. Charlemagne’s “holy” wars of conversion against the Saxons; the Inquisition’s torture and murder of Jews and Muslims; the Trail of Tears ethnic cleansing of American Indians; and the Third Reich. Each flourished under the same tools and rules: purify a nation to save it. Multiculturalism became a liability.

In 1776, an influential book about Rome’s decline landed in America. Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is the first modern account built on primary sources rather than theology. Gibbon wrote that “The freedom of inquiry was abolished by the same edicts which proscribed heresy; and the authority of the Church was irrevocably established by the civil power.”

A dark cloud of superstition, he wrote, “was finally spread over the human mind, and the liberty of the Roman world was oppressed by a new and intolerant dominion.” It was a warning against the fusion of religion and empire that was read by the writers of the Constitution and would shape the First Amendment twenty years later.

Gibbon’s book remains popular and is still cited today. Mostly, it is manipulated for political metaphor.

The Harvard and Oxford-educated historian Niall Ferguson is one of the most high-profile manipulators of this metaphor. In his 2015 Boston Globe op-ed, “Paris and the Fall of Rome,” he quoted Gibbon’s description of the Goths sacking Rome as if it were a script for modern terrorism. “Whenever the Barbarians were provoked by opposition, they extended the promiscuous massacre to the feeble, the innocent, and the helpless.” He’s pushing the metaphor civilization is much more fragile than we think. We are all Romans now, and the barbarians are already inside the gates!

In an earlier Vanity Fair piece, Empire Falls, Ferguson had laid the foundations of his armageddon fetish. “With the decline of Christianity, Europe is also experiencing a rise in what politicians euphemistically call ‘antisocial behavior.’ This new primitivism is the extraordinary surge in the popularity of tattoos, once associated with the unruly Picts of the Far North. In this modern decline and fall, it seems, at least some of the barbarians come from within the empire.”

Barbarian antisocial tattoos? It might be funny if he were joking. The people of Brooklyn need to tread carefully.

Real Late Antiquity scholars noted that Ferguson’s Rome talk isn’t evidence-based history, and the consensus is that it’s emotional stagecraft designed to make modern immigration feel like an existential threat. The old “barbarians at the gate” He’s a fellow at Stanford’s right wing Hoover Institution, not a specialist in the period, and his storytelling only serves the purpose to stoke fears on immigration.

And now Ferguson isn’t just writing about decline, he’s built a new institution around it. The University of Austin, co-founded with Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, the controversial company that provided software and data-integration to ICE. This so-called brave new home for “free thought,” is run by culture-war personalities and Ferguson isn’t just sitting on the board, he’s front and center shaping it.

So what you get is a school designed to teach his worldview straight to the next generation -the same Rome-is-falling script, the same talk about outsiders threatening the empire.

In 2025, conservative think tanks with “America First” agendas devoted to promoting anti-immigrant, pro-white Christian policies have poured millions into Fall of Rome content. There are podcasts, documentaries, essays, and social media posts from the likes of Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, PragerU, the Heritage Foundation, and Tucker Carlson. Even Putin pops up. Of his war on Ukraine, he declared, “We are fighting not just for our land, but for our moral values…The spiritual space of Holy Rus’ is being torn apart.”

So, when Trump stood before military leaders at Quantico on September 30, 2025 and warned “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within… We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big [problem] — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”

Augustine’s ghost was standing proudly behind him.

If you think it’s accidental that Trump’s raids primarily target Latino families, who historically represent ‘traditional’ family values by virtue of being deeply Christian, it’s not. Immigration law may be written in neutral terms, but its enforcement has never been neutral. The effect is predictable. The goal of Christian Nationalism has never been morality. Consolidation in king. One church, one color. White Jesus against the brown one.

To be continued…

The real reason Rome was sacked? The Goths were unpaid Roman soldiers whose wages stopped coming one too many times. Also, when Goths arrived as refugees, they were treated like sh*t.