In a speech at Notre Dame Law School last October, Bill Barr, the U.S. Attorney General, made clear that his conservative Catholicism and definition of democracy were one and the same. Like Republican fundamentalists since the Reagan era, Barr decried “moral relativism” as the cause of every social ill, insisting that the Constitution’s framers believed that “free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people.”

Leaving aside the question of what Barr means by “free government,” his thinking leaves aside a lot of people in this country. In 2019, Gallup polling found that 21% of Americans had no religion. That’s one in five people whom Barr considers incompatible with free government. I’m sure many in Barr’s audience were hardline conservative Catholics, and I’m sure that the “religious people” he thinks the framers had in mind were not Jews, Muslims, and Hindus.

Barr’s message—and that of Christian nationalism generally—is one of exclusion, which is baffling for a religion like Christianity. Why do the Catholics whom Donald Trump has attracted to his MAGA-sphere lack any desire to connect outside their conclave? Isn’t that the most logical way to multiply their numbers? Do they think outreach is something done only by Mormons and the charismatics going after immigrants and low-income people of color? Since when did Catholicism become all about exclusion?

When St. Peter was trying to convert his fellow Jews to Christianity, he said in Acts 2:38: “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Peter was offering a FREE GIFT with every new conversion! For one of Christianity’s most famous converts, the only way in was through forgiveness, which derives from love. “I loved not yet,” St. Augustine said when struggling with belief, “yet I loved to love.” Even though he loved to love a lot of different women, he was talking about loving without any limitation to person or idea but broadly loving the act of loving.

Especially if you believe that salvation can only be attained through the Catholic Church, why would you hoard that option only for yourself and your kin? God, per Timothy 2:4, “wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.”

The short answer is that Catholics like Bill Barr are elitists; they don’t want to come to a barn-raiser with other Christians on behalf of Jesus. They are worlds apart from the megachurch pastors and scammers like Paula White. For all its ills, the megachurch culture is at least welcoming. You’d think the hardline Catholics would be more in alliance with the evangelicals, but there is the cold distance of social class. Catholics like Barr don’t just want Christian nationalism; they want a Christian hierarchy. They get their kicks from exclusion.

Exclusion derives from hate, which Martin Luther King Jr. understood better than anyone. “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate,” he said in a sermon collected in Strength to Love (1963), “adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” King’s words seem to me more about logic, pure and simple, than they do about theology.

Hating became an American meme and an obsession in 2010, when George W. Bush professed on national television: “I’m not a hater. I don’t hate Kanye West.” When I saw this clip, I thought how West had never said that George Bush hates Black people; what he said in the wake of Katrina was that George Bush “doesn’t care about Black people.” It was W who escalated the charge to hate. Around that time, I was surprised at something I learned about a close friend who, like me, is not religious but was raised in the Catholicism of the 1970s. His parents were fairly tepid adherents, but they forbade he and sisters from saying three things: the Lord’s name in vain, the N-word, and “I hate.” I realized in the years thereafter that my friend never said the word, whereas I said it all the time, and usually for the most mundane irritations.

The nation’s first hate-crime statute was passed in 1978, and it’s not surprising that it happened in California. We don’t think of that state as particularly religious like we do Bush’s Texas, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi the practicing Catholic also did not like to be assumed to be a hater. In December, she admonished a journalist from the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group who asked if she “hates” Donald Trump. “As a Catholic,” she replied, “I resent your using the word hate in a sentence that addresses me. I pray for the President all the time. So don’t mess with me when it comes to words like that.” Currently, 46 of the 50 states and Washington, D.C., have statutes criminalizing various types of hate crimes. Only Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina, and Wyoming do not. And yet hate might be the one thing Americans have in common when everything else divides us. We are unified in loving the act of hating even more than we love our cultivated hatreds.

In his address at the recent National Prayer Breakfast, Donald Trump denigrated the prayers of Mormons and Catholics alike by saying that people of faith sometimes “hate” people—meaning, I presume, himself as a recent person of faith and a world-class hater. You have to wonder how the word of Trump over the word of Jesus felt to all those pastors in the audience . . . whether it clicked with the dark, starless nights of their souls.

Like predators instinctively know to isolate the young and the weak form the herd, Trump understands that the way to destroy people’s most fundamental linkages—with their local communities and within their own families—is through hate. The Democratic party’s big tent was built entirely on inclusion, a philosophy reflected in the words of poet Mary Oliver: “I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one.” Trump’s agenda is to break what we thought unbreakable, to take a machete to every strand of the Judeo-Christian tradition that has been extended and woven into democratic liberalism.

So is hate America’s preferred emotion, its default emotion? It’s long been a cliché that the hot emotion of love is the polar opposite of the cognitive coolness of thinking and reasoning. But maybe the hot emotion of hating is the true opposite of thinking. What, you have to wonder, really drives hate—the absence of love or the absence of thought? In his review of Louis C.K.’s post-cancellation comeback tour, the New Yorker’s Hilton Als had an interesting thing to say about the mostly white men at a comedy club on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls: “The audience seemed less interested in narrative and nuance than in living out a kind of revenge fantasy against thinking.”

It often seems like the physical energy at Trump’s rallies—where fans come decked out head to toe in “Catholics for Trump!” signage like Let’s Make a Deal contestants—is a revenge fantasy against thinking. People go to great lengths and drive many miles in this shared ritual of expunging any native inclination to Cogito, ergo sum. Adjusting to a changing world requires reassessing your values. Like Bill Barr, Trump’s supporters don’t want to do that because it’s hard. It can be painful. Augustine was the rhetorical master of changing his ways. He wasn’t like St. Paul, whose own conversion he attributed to seeing the risen Jesus. Augustine changed his ways through deep thought and reflection. What he was really saying in that famous quote: I loved not yet . . . but I was thinking a lot about my prejudices and the lies I’ve told myself to rationalize selfish pursuits and this process of exploration is instilling in me a tremendous longing to love. I remember when Lee Atwater was diagnosed with fatal brain cancer and converted to Catholicism in the final year of his life. In a Life magazine profile, he apologized to Michael Dukakis for the “naked cruelty” of his work on George H. W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign. People made comparisons to Augustine.

Today, however, no one on the right is ever contrite: saying you’re sorry is political suicide. Trump Republicans are Double Down Nation. Barr and his brethren have placed their thorn-less crown on the yellow head of the man who puts children in cages, hailing their chief as the antidote to “moral relativism.” The religious people whose hating has got them in trouble just double down on the hate. Having expunged their capacity for analytical thinking, they have expunged their souls, allowing their hollowed selves to be subsumed within the MAGA void of what Catholics call “individual conscience.” Odio, ergo sum. §