A STRONG tactical alliance between conservative Protestants and conservative Catholics has been a feature of America’s ideological landscape for at least a couple of decades. An important step in forging this “theocon” partnership was a joint declaration in 1994 by top figures in both camps who pledged to work together for traditionalist policies, particularly regarding the family and reproduction.

The rise of Donald Trump (approved by an overwhelming majority of white evangelicals but only a marginal majority, at best, of white Catholics) has strained that alliance but not broken it. It is still a robust enough phenomenon to provoke furious disputes among Catholics. This month, the editor of a prominent Jesuit journal who is close to Pope Francis made a powerful denunciation of what he called the “ecumenism of hate” which was linking religious conservatives across denominational lines. Conservative Catholics have been fighting back against his polemic.

The article co-authored by Antonio Spadaro (pictured) in La Civiltà Cattolica, a bi-monthly review whose contents are vetted by the Holy See, is a startling piece of writing. It denounces what the authors see as a fundamentalist front for a pathological concoction of hard-line religious and political ideas. In their view, these ideas include an obsession with capturing political power; a tendency to demonize others, from Muslims to migrants; an uncritical attitude to militarism, capitalism and the arms industry; indifference to the environment; and an obsession with the apocalypse and a final battle between good and evil. Some Catholics, the authors implied, were lining up with the nastiest strains of Protestantism, including a “prosperity Gospel” which had replaced the older Protestant ideals of thrift and deferred gratification.

Ironically, the authors maintain, pan-Christian fundamentalism was not all that different from the Islamic variety that it claimed to be fighting:

At heart, the narrative of terror shapes the world-views of jihadists and the new [Christian] crusaders and is imbibed from wells that are not too far apart. We must not forget that the theopolitics spread by ISIS is based on the same cult of an apocalypse that needs to be brought about as soon as possible.

Among the authors’ targets is a news and commentary service run by right-wing Catholics called the Church Militant. It was taken to task for having presented America’s presidential contest as a kind of religious war, comparable to those of the late Roman empire. (In this slightly eccentric comparison, Mr Trump is seen as the equivalent of Constantine, Rome’s first Christian emperor.)

Charles Chaput, the archbishop of Philadelphia, was among those who rejected the article’s line and defended pan-Christian co-operation in conservative causes, including traditional ideas about gender and sexuality.

The differences among these faith communities run deep. Only real and present danger could draw them together. The cooperation of Catholics and evangelicals was quite rare when I was a young priest. Their current mutual aid, the ecumenism that seems to worry La Civiltà Cattolica, is a function of shared concerns and principles, not ambition for political power.

As you’d expect, Church Militant defended itself pugnaciously. Its founder, Michael Voris, declared:

The hypocrisy of Father Spadaro is shocking. He accuses Church Militant of using theology to advance a political agenda—which isn’t true—while he spends every waking hour using the Vatican and the Church to publicly advance a left-wing agenda.

If this whole argument proves anything, it is that the worldly chasm between liberals and conservatives often runs much deeper than any theological differences between Christians. The article is correct, of course, to note that Catholics and Protestants of a traditional hue are making common cause over an ever-widening series of issues. But the article itself is a product of collaboration between a liberal Catholic and a liberal Protestant. Its co-author, Marcelo Figueroa, is an Argentine Presbyterian.

There is an intriguing counterpoint to the escalating standoff between Christian liberals and Christian conservatives, in which each camp accuses the other of pursuing worldly goals at the expense of spiritual ones. It is offered by Shadi Hamid, a fellow of the Brookings Institution and one of the prominent commentators on Islam in the world of Washingtonian think-tanks.

He argues that despite appearances, parallels between politicised Christianity and politicised Islam cannot be pushed very far. Islam, he has argued, has a deep-seated theocratic tendency (in other words, an aspiration to influence government in the name of God) which is unlikely to change soon. But in his view, what passes these days for Christian politics, whether of right or left, is really just a bundle of secular ideas with only the lightest of religious covering. As he puts it:

Considering the ideological vacuum and failure of elite centrist politics, you would think that in a relatively religious country [like the United States], Christian politics would have had a fighting chance of presenting an alternative. Instead, the most secular, irreligious president perhaps in our history has just been elected.

Another critique of Christianity’s liberal-conservative debate might be that diatribes from religious people which merely follow the contours of secular ideological contests are not very interesting. At its most subtle and provocative, religiously-inspired commentary on worldly matters transcends the conventional secular categories.

For example, the best of Catholic thinking on social and economic questions defends both private enterprise and the right of trade unions to organise, but sets ethical boundaries to both. It denounces both dogmatic Marxism and consumerist materialism as mindsets empty of spiritual content. And it agrees with the Russian writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn that the line between good and evil does not run between cultures, nations or political parties, but down the middle of every human being’s heart.