There is a natural desire for a unifying theory of all the disturbances in Western institutions, a way to make all the conflicts into one so that an unstable situation can be distilled and understood. Which is why, over the last week, there’s been an attempt to unite American politics and Vatican intrigue into a single melodrama, in which the same populist forces that elevated Donald Trump are supposedly trying to pull Pope Francis down.

The key to this interpretation is the connection, reported last week by my colleague Jason Horowitz, between Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief ideologist, and Cardinal Raymond Burke, the American traditionalist who has been the Jesuit pope’s most vocal critic within the College of Cardinals. The Bannon-Burke link consists of a friendly 2014 meeting, a few secondary connections and some broad commonalities between their respective worldviews — both in their way reactionary, nostalgic for the civilizational confidence of the Western or Catholic past.

Out of this thread a number of the pope’s admirers have spun a narrative in which the Catholic Church’s internal conflict and the secular struggle between liberalism and nationalism are basically the same battle. The Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne, for instance, portrayed Bannon and the pope as locked in a struggle “to define the meaning of both Americanism and Catholicism.” Rather more intemperately, another Post writer, Emma-Kate Symons, accused Cardinal Burke of “using his position within the walls of the Vatican to legitimize extremist forces that want to bring down Western liberal democracy.”

As a description of actual machinations, this is conspiratorial nonsense: Burke has no such illiberal ambitions, Bannon has other fish to fry, and the theological issues dividing the church are quite distinct from the political issues dividing Western countries.