What follows is a chapter from my upcoming book “It’s Complicated, Isn’t It?”

“You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”                            — Anne Lamott

I had a discussion with a Catholic family member. I made an observation: isn’t it odd that we have Catholics with such wildly disparate doctrinal views, all under the same roof? On issues like abortion, gun control, the need for a social safety net — same banner of Christianity, opposite ends of the spectrum.  His reply to me, in a nutshell, was “that’s expected.” I completely understand his point because after all, we’re dealing with human beings at the end of the day.

But I can’t help wanting to dig deeper, because the gap has widened significantly just within the decades of my own life. And in keeping with the theme of this book, I don’t think the issue is that simple. First, the what. I’m going to use Catholicism as the example in this case because that seems to be the easiest example to work from. But the issue isn’t unique to Catholicism, which I will address in the paragraphs that follow.

Catholics today draw their sense of what it means to be a good Catholic from a variety of sources. There’s the parish priest, the messages from Rome — but there’s also a plethora of high-profile political and media figures who wear the Catholic label and shape the thinking of the faithful in their own image. Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Stephen Colbert are Catholics, for example, and by all accounts, faithful ones — regular at weekly Mass, and sincere about living out Jesus’ message to support the downtrodden. I wouldn’t call them social justice warriors, but they lean that direction. And they seem far less concerned with Church doctrine — its stance on abortion, on LGBTQ rights — than with simply trying to live by the golden rule.

Then there’s the far-right wing of Catholicism, which includes media figures like Laura Ingraham, Bill O’Reilly, and Newt Gingrich, and Vice President JD Vance. Under the same umbrella we have people with enormous influence who are more aligned with the hardline doctrinal positions coming out of Rome — the more hardline the better.  Then there’s Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, who also has ties to the Heritage Foundation. Donohue holds no official Church position, yet he’s become a vocal media presence for the hard right of Catholicism — staunchly pro-life, a critic of same-sex marriage and LGBTQ visibility in public and civic life, and reliably first in line to minimize clergy sex-abuse accusations.  

Where the first group reaches for mercy, this group reaches for order.  

All of these people claim the Catholic label, and all of them are presumably sincere, yet their worldviews are from different planets. So what does it mean if “Catholic” contains both the cable-news culture warrior and the humble servant, and they agree on almost nothing that the faith supposedly implies? On Sunday they all check the same box. Monday through Friday they broadcast opposing gospels.

In trying to figure out the why, I have come up with the following. First, the way we consume news has changed radically since when I grew up. In the 1960s and ’70s, most of us got our news from three networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — and they weren’t that different in their messaging; there was a good faith attempt at even-handedness. There was no internet or social media to contend with. Today, people get their news from a wide variety of sources, very few of which try to stay above the fray. Consequently, the voting populace gets a steady diet of one-sided news with little counterbalance. Watch MSNBC and you get Stephanie Ruhle’s left-wing view of world events; watch Fox News and you get Laura Ingraham’s. Both professed Catholics, complete with ashes on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday, delivering opposite messages. And these aren’t just policy differences over big government versus small government. We’re talking about foundational moral questions — school lunch programs, gun laws, immigration, the death penalty — where each camp is utterly certain the same Gospel is squarely on its side.

The second reason I have come up with has to do with the fact that the parish priest is now competing with 24/7 news outlets and a barrage of social media that facilitates a constant discussion about what social policy should and shouldn’t be. The priest gets one Mass a week, of which only about fifteen minutes is a sermon for messaging. There’s no way his message can compete with the other sources, which are ingrained into our daily lives like water and air.

My third and final root-cause explanation is outlined best by biblical scholar Dan McClellan, when he explains that Bible texts have no inherent meaning and no consistent message. Scripture is a mirror, not a map. Readers find in it whatever they carried to it. One group of Catholics can focus on the texts that speak of order, borders, tradition, and authority, and find their “be a good person, and don’t tread on me” message there. The other group can focus on welcome the stranger, feed the poor, blessed are the peacemakers, and find their message there. Both groups are drawing from the same well, and each is sure it got the pure water. Religion ends up being a tool to bless a conclusion you’ve already reached. It gets used as a blunt instrument for tribal and political ends.

And it cuts both ways, which is the part that keeps me honest. The conservative Catholic subscribes to Rome on abortion but wants little to do with its teaching on immigration, refugees, or the death penalty. The progressive Catholic does the reverse — devoted to the social gospel, but happy to part ways with Rome on sexual ethics. Nobody is actually obedient. Everyone keeps the doctrines that fit and quietly sets down the ones that don’t, and then calls the other side the bad Catholics.

Lest I spend my days critiquing Catholicism with a list of grievances, there’s more to the story. Catholics are just a small subset of a much wider ecosystem that weaponizes biblical teachings to advance an agenda — and in many ways they’re far less guilty of it, because Catholicism was never built on biblical literalism to begin with. Where many Protestant sects treat scripture as the sole, self-interpreting authority, Catholicism has always run on a different paradigm entirely: Church tradition, the authority of the Pope and bishops to say what a verse actually means, and centuries of treating the Bible more like a book of symbolic stories rather than an owner’s manual. The Bible is authoritative, but it isn’t read like a legal document — and that alone should complicate any claim that “the Bible says so.”

In 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a “Resolution on the Moral Character of Public Officials.” It affirmed that a leader’s private morality matters to God and should matter to voters, warned that “tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture,” and urged Americans to “elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character.” It passed overwhelmingly. Everyone understood the target: Bill Clinton, mid–Lewinsky scandal. Character counted, the Convention said, and it mattered to God.

In 2011, the Public Religion Research Institute asked whether a public official who commits an immoral act in private life can still behave ethically in office. Thirty percent of white evangelicals said yes. By 2016 — same question — seventy-two percent said yes. A 42-point swing, the largest of any religious group, arriving precisely when it was their own side’s candidate whose character was in question. Nobody repealed the 1998 resolution. Nobody announced a change of heart. The principle just quietly evaporated the moment it became inconvenient.

I can’t think of a better example to support McClellan’s claim that religion is used as a tool, not a compass, than this one.

If someone walks up to me today and says “I’m a Christian,” it doesn’t tell me much. I have to use my best restraint to hold back my snarkiest response: “Traditional or Republican Jesus?” All of which is to say — no, Christianity isn’t simply explained. It’s quite complicated.