A President, A Pope, And Politics At The Water’s Edge |
Most of us know the feeling, even if we have never named it. You are standing at the edge of something that feels impossible to cross. Behind you is a force in pursuit that you did not choose and cannot outrun. In front of you is a reservoir of resistance that no one has figured out how to part. Around you, people are arguing about what to do, perhaps frozen in fear, or waiting for someone else to move first.
This is, at this very moment, the emotional weather of American public life. It is also, as it happens, one of the oldest stories we have.
It is the story of the crossing of the Red Sea, and you do not need to be religious to find it useful. In the version most people learned in childhood, Moses raises his staff and the waters part on cue. But the rabbinic commentary tradition that centuries of intellectual interpretation Jews call midrash, tells a more interesting version. In that telling, the sea does not split when Moses prays. It splits only after a man named Nachshon walks in. The water reaches his ankles, then his waist, then his chest. The rabbis, refusing to romanticize him, says he is terrified the entire time. The sea parts only when the water reaches his nostrils. To some, this teaching is that faith summons miracles. I see it differently.
I see the teaching as a reminder that the sea waits. For us.
I have been thinking about the story of Nachshon and the waiting sea while watching the extraordinary collision unfolding between the President of the United States and the first American pope. Pope Leo XIV — born in Chicago, an Augustinian priest by formation, a scholar of just war theory — has emerged as the most prominent moral voice in the world contesting both the administration’s posture on the war with Iran and on its treatment of immigrants. He has called the President’s threat to destroy Iranian civilization “truly unacceptable.” He has written that God “is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” He will spend the Fourth of July, the 250th birthday of the country of his birth, not in America but in the Italian island of Lampedusa, one of Europe’s pain entry points for migrants. The symbolism is as striking as it is substantive: where you stand, and when you stand there, is a testament of what you believe.
President Trump has responded by calling the Pope “weak on Crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy,” urging him to stop catering to “the Radical Left.” The Vice President, a Catholic convert, has lectured the Pope to “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” In response, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued a rare formal clarification reminding the country that when the Pope speaks on faith and morals, he is not offering opinions; he is exercising his ministry.
Let’s be clear: this is not a normal political dispute. Rather, it is a stress test of whether moral language still has standing in American public life — and whether anyone is willing to be the one to wade in the waters of hyper-political posturing and weather the waves of division and anger that our 24/7 media culture constantly froths.
In fact, taken in the moment, this feels like the nadir of our contemporary political times: expressions of faithful moral objection being repudiated by the most powerful men of a global superpower that is ostensibly “one nation under God.”
That said, here is what makes this moment more hopeful than it appears in the media. The American people are not, in fact, where the partisans are. Forty-five percent of Americans now identify as political independents — a record high in nearly a century of polling, and a majority among Gen Z and millennials. Sixty-two percent say the two parties are doing such a poor job that a third party is needed. Sixty-nine percent of Republicans and sixty percent of Democrats say their own side has gone too far in inflammatory rhetoric. When researchers actually walk respondents through policy detail rather than partisan framing, they find common ground on more than 150 contested questions.
We have been told, for over a decade, that America is made up of two warring tribes. The data, on the other hand, says we are one tired country pretending to be two.
What the President represents in this moment— and what makes his attacks on the Pope so revealing — is the unrestrained force of partisan combat that has driven the country to a water’s edge of its own. It is the politics that names enemies faster than it names problems, that mistakes volume for conviction, that has pursued the American public to a place where neither retreat nor advance feels survivable. Americans are the people at the shore: exhausted, divided into tribes that will not move, surrounded by a force we did not consciously choose, but that is advanced by algorithms and ad revenue.
And now, in the midst of an ocean of unprecedented uncertainty, a man wades in. He is not a politician. He has no military. He carries only the authority of a moral tradition older than the American republic itself, and the credibility of a person willing to be unpopular for naming what he sees. The water reaches his ankles. It reaches his waist. The sea has not split.
But notice what is happening. The American bishops, hesitant for years, have found their voice. The Senate Majority Leader, asked about the Vice President’s lecture to the Pope, replied dryly: Isn’t that his job? Catholic voters who broke for the President in 2024 are reading their bishops’ letters and feeling the cross-pressure of conscience. The water is moving.
The old story of Nachshon insists that the one man’s act did not produce the miracle on its own. The waters fully parted only when the rest of the people followed him in.
That is the work in front of us. Not to wait for a leader to fix what only the public can fix. Not to mistake outrage for action. To notice, instead, that someone is already in the water — and that the sea splits not for the one who walks in alone, but for the people willing to walk in after him.
The water is at his chest now. We have a choice to make. Will we follow him?
And what will happen if we do?