Donald Trump’s second administration has been a reckoning for America, and perhaps especially for America’s Christians. From the deployment of masked paramilitary thugs to enforce immigration policy to the full-throated assault on transgender Americans to an unrelenting campaign against the rights of women and girls, reactionary Christianity is riding high. This agenda pursued by the administration has been made possible through 50 years of campaigning by the religious right, a coalition of white evangelical Protestants, conservative Catholics, and conservative Eastern Orthodox Christians and Jews that formed the core of the late 20th- and early 21st-century Republican Party.

But in this season of their triumph, a genuine faith-based opposition is finally beginning to break through.

The evidence of religious resistance first emerged on Inauguration Day. During the National Prayer Service at the National Cathedral, Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, DC, stared down from the pulpit at the new president and told him in a sturdy voice:

Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. … In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.

These words, a public reminder that there is diversity within the Christian tradition with respect to political opinion, were only the beginning. The Episcopal Church has since ended its relationship with the US government’s refugee resettlement services over the administration’s controversial decision to admit Afrikaners as refugees.

There appeared to be some coalition-building when a dozen or so religious organizations sued the administration over new policies that gave immigration officials more latitude in making arrests in and around houses of worship. And, in July, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Sean Rowe, penned an op-ed at Religion News Service with the headline: “Once the church of presidents, the Episcopal Church must now be an engine of resistance.”

Yet all of this is happening within some of the most liberal denominations in the country. These are also denominations that have been in demographic decline for decades, and only 11 percent of the American public identifies with the mainline Protestant traditions. This is hardly encouraging for the possibility of a mainstream political movement or resistance.

Enter American Catholicism, a group that may redefine the role religion has played in politics and public life.

The bargain

The political power of the religious right depended in large part on religious conservatives agreeing to adopt the GOP’s positions on issues such as labor rights, immigration, environmental regulation, and even taxes. In exchange, the Republican Party embraced their reactionary consensus on certain social issues, largely related to gender and sexuality. First came opposition to abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment, later to marriage for same-sex couples, and today to transgender inclusion.

To understand why the compromise made sense for both sides, it is important to remember the seminal role that race, and particularly the civil rights movement, played in forming the religious right. The end of segregation in public schools galvanized white evangelical Southerners to reenter politics in the early 1970s. The first allies they found — allies that made them a national and not a regional force — were second-generation immigrants, whose parents had come to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century from southern and eastern Europe (and Ireland). These groups were, by a large margin, Catholic.

Upon their arrival, these immigrants had not been considered “white.” After growing up largely in ethnic neighborhoods in northern cities like New York and Chicago,........

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