We who were inside the Evangelical apparatus for thirty years have watched the machinery turn Scripture into a blueprint for power, and the machinery has not stopped. The Christian Nationalist apparatus is building its tech-empire on the same biblical legalisms that condemned the Pharisees. Pope Leo XIV just announced it from the Vatican in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, released on Monday, May 25, 2026, but we knew this move — we have lived it. “It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow,” the Pope tells us, facing a truth the Holy See has had to acknowledge: the Catholic Church was not an innocent bystander in the history of white supremacy. For centuries, the Vatican maintained a silence that served as institutional complicity, and in the case of 15th-century bulls such as Dum Diversas, it provided the very legal foundation for the subjugation of those labeled “infidels.” This is a wound in Christian memory that we in the American Evangelical machine never even opened.
The encyclical draws the line straight from the fifteenth-century slave trade to the twenty-first century. Leo warned that digital systems and artificial intelligence are fueling “new forms of colonialism and human subjugation,” and he called for robust regulation to prioritize the common good over profit. The text reads like an indictment of the Christian Nationalist embrace of unrestrained technological and corporate dominion — an embrace sustained right here by our own movement’s use of Scripture to bless unchecked power. As Shannen Dee Williams has rightly named, this historic apology is a monumental requirement of truth-telling, a witness that recognizes the inherent dignity of those reduced to property by an institution that claimed to speak for God. This marks a departure from previous, generic expressions of regret by naming the institutional authorship of the trade. The significance of this moment is further underscored by the pope’s personal history; genealogical research by Henry Louis Gates Jr. confirms the pope’s complex lineage, including Black ancestors and both enslaved people and slaveholders among his forebears. As the Rev. Christopher J. Kellerman noted, this admission strengthens the church’s moral credibility, even as scholars continue to seek further detail on the full extent of the institution’s historical slaveholding.
Yet this apology must be more than a tidy closure. As Anthea Butler reminds us, if the Holy See is to credibly address modern technological threats — which risk fueling new forms of digital subjugation — it must maintain total honesty about its historical failures. The machine is now in our hands, and the question is no longer who the church was in the 15th century, but what it is choosing to build in this one.
We know what this sounds like. We spent two decades fighting in the churches and seminaries against an apparatus that did the exact same thing — reading the text to mean the opposite of what the text plainly says, just to justify the status quo and the concentration of power. The Pope is naming the chasm between the faith and the captured-brand legalism. Since the cultural wars of the 1980s and the rise of the Religious Right, the Evangelical apparatus has spent forty years drafting modern-day legalisms to replace the gospel with a theology of American destiny.
Let us look at what the gospel texts actually say about this. Jesus opened his public ministry in the Nazareth synagogue by reading from Isaiah 61 and declaring the year of the Lord’s favor, and the plain language of Luke 4:18–19 is unmistakable: “He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free.” This was not a spiritual metaphor for sinners in the pew. The original audience understood the political reach and tried to throw him off a cliff (Luke 4:28–29) because they knew the gospel was a threat to empire.
The Christian Nationalist apparatus reads the same New Testament but applies a captured reading that the captured pastors preach every Sunday. They take the mandate to “be fruitful and multiply” and the command to “subdue the earth” in the dominion-focused Genesis 1:28, pull them entirely out of their creation context, and use them as a license for digital colonialism and market dominion. They quote Romans 13:4, stopping at the end of the verse, to justify state surveillance and algorithmic control over “the sword” the state bears. They read the Sermon on the Mount as a private spirituality for believers, keeping Matthew 25:31–46 out of the policy debate entirely, even though Matthew 25 places the final judgment entirely on treatment of the hungry, the stranger, and the imprisoned — none of which are doctrinal tests.
We sat in women’s ministry tea rooms where we parsed Pauline epistles to justify submitting to the authorities and trusting the divine providence of the market, without noticing that the prophets had already named the specific sin. Amos 5:21–24 does not separate worship from economic practice. The Lord says, “I hate, I despise your religious festivals… But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.” The captured operation’s pastors have been teaching their members to bless the machinery of subjugation while the gospel commands them to unsettle it.
The Catholic Church is grappling with the legacy of Dum Diversas, the bulls that authorized the enslavement of “infidels.” They are wrestling with the fact that their own legal machinery was used to legitimize chattel slavery for centuries. The Gospel reads back against this: the church has spent eighteen centuries acknowledging humanity’s full incompatibility with slavery because the gospel explicitly dismantles the hierarchies of empire. Paul tells the Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” The ancient world was built on the slave-master dynamic. The gospel reads the slave and the master as equal before God, and it requires the immediate dismantling of the institutional architecture that keeps one person enslaved to another.
When the Christian Nationalist movement treats artificial intelligence and unrestrained market dominance as providential signs of American destiny, they are applying the same captured reading that Dum Diversas applied to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. They are reading the text to mean the opposite of what it says, in order to vote the way the apparatus requires, in order to justify the concentration of wealth and the erosion of the common good. The captured-operation reading ignores that Jesus told us we cannot serve both God and money (Matthew 6:24), and it ignores the explicit warning in James 5:1–6: “Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty.”
You will forgive us for being plain about this: the Christian Nationalist apparatus is building its tech-empire on the same biblical legalisms that condemned the Pharisees. The gospel does not bless the machinery of empire. Jesus cleansed the temple because they had made a house of prayer a den of robbers (Matthew 21:12–13). He read the text and found the legalists using Scripture to legitimize theft, exploitation, and the exclusion of the poor. The Christian Nationalist machine is doing the exact same thing today, deploying the same captured readings to legitimize digital colonialism and the subjugation of the vulnerable.
The Pope’s apology for the Church’s historical delay in condemning slavery is a necessary step toward truth. But truth requires more than a statement of sorrow; it requires a dismantling of the interpretive machinery that caused the delay in the first place. We who were inside the apparatus have to name what we served. We served a machine that taught us to read the Bible as a contract for power rather than a manifesto for justice. When we read the Bible’s plain language — the prophets read directly, the red letters in cross-translation — the machine collapses. The gospel does not need legalisms to survive. It is an unsettling power that requires us to unsettle the empires of our time.
We love this church too much to let this pass. We who read the Bible must stop using it to bless the subjugation of the strangers and the hungry in front of us. The Christian Nationalist apparatus is building its digital empire on biblical legalisms the gospel itself repudiates, and the gospel text is waiting in the open for us to read it plainly. Matthew 25:40 asks the question that dismantles every captured reading: “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” The least of these are still in the pews, and they are still waiting for the church to read the scripture plainly instead of weaponizing it for the empire.