But the authors’ understanding of American religion seems to start and end with Google searches and anti-evangelical tracts, and their intended attack on Trumpery expands and expands, conflating very different political and religious tendencies, indulging in paranoia about obscure theocratic Protestants and fringe Catholic websites, and ultimately critiquing every kind of American religious conservatism — including the largely anti-political Benedict Option and the pro-life activism fulsomely supported by Francis’ papal predecessors — as dangerously illiberal, “theopolitical,” Islamic State-esque, “Manichaean,” a return to the old integralism that the church no longer supports.

None of this makes any sense. The post-1970s evangelical-Catholic alliance has been flawed in various ways, but it is neither theocratic nor illiberal; if Charles Colson and Richard John Neuhaus were integralists, I am a lemur. The religious right stands in a complex continuity with previous religious reform movements in American history, from abolition to the Social Gospel to Prohibition to civil rights and peace movements in the 1960s. And in its specifically Catholic form, religious conservatism has aspired to exactly the kind of Catholic engagement in liberal-democratic politics anticipated by Leo XIII’s “ralliement” and endorsed by the Second Vatican Council.

What Spadaro and Figueroa do not grasp is that the tendencies that they see at work in American Catholicism, the religious votes for the cheerfully pagan Trump and the growing interest in traditionalism, radicalism and separatism, are not the culmination of the Catholic-evangelical alliance but rather a reaction to its political and cultural failures — and the failures of liberal religious politics as well.

In increasing numbers, American Catholics (and Protestants) feel that their leaders and thinkers have spent decades rallying to the republic, trying to bring about its moral and political renewal … only to see republican virtues decaying, liberalism turning hostile to religious faith, and democratic capitalism delivering disappointment and dislocation. So some of them are reaching backward and sideways or ahead, trying to claim Trumpism or socialism or grasp some as-yet-unknown idea, because they sense that the present order might someday soon be itself an ancien regime from which their religion must slip free.

They may be wrong about this, but their sense of things is shared in certain ways by Pope Francis himself, who has a Trumpish, populist streak in his own right, and whose critiques of the West’s technocratic order are notable and pungent. Which is the other bizarre thing about Spadaro and Figueroa’s broad brush: As the American Catholic writer Patrick Smith points out, by warning against a Catholicism that takes political sides or indulges in moralistic rhetoric or otherwise declaims on “who is right and who is wrong” in contemporary debates, the pope’s men are effectively condemning not only American conservative Catholics but also the pope’s own writings on poverty and environmentalism, his support for grass-roots “popular movements” in the developing world and his stress on the organic link between family, society, religion and the state.

This they surely do not mean to do. But it is precisely this tension, between the Spadaro-Figueroa critique of American religious conservatives and Pope Francis’ sometimes harsh assessment of the liberal West, that makes the essay important as well as incoherent — because it reveals something significant about the dilemmas of the Vatican in a populist moment, in which the future of Western politics seems unusually uncertain.

Between Leo XIII and the Second Vatican Council, Rome gradually made its peace with secular and liberal government, and embraced a style of Catholic politics that worked comfortably within the liberal order, rather than against its grain. And the church has good prudential reasons not to lean in too far to any kind of populism or post-liberalism, lest it lead toward authoritarianism or simple disaster.