WokeMarxistPope.com was born on May 8, 2025, as MAGA social media unraveled over the election of Pope Leo XIV. Far-right influencers on Elon Musk’s X, who know next to nothing about Catholicism, quickly tracked down Robert Prevost’s pre-papacy tweets, including one, from 2015, critical of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s “anti-immigrant rhetoric.” Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist now close enough to the president to direct his personnel choices, reacted to the decade-old tweet in a reply: “WOKE MARXIST POPE”.
To us, a group of friends and colleagues who write about and study religion, the MAGA meltdown over the new pope’s very, very Catholic quest to treat immigrants humanely was, like most things MAGA, simultaneously absurd, fascistic, and eminently memeable. That is why we quickly registered the domain name WokeMarxistPope.com. We think the Trumpist Christian nationalist movement is a threat to democracy and freedom around the world, and that Trump devotees’ determination to deploy the last century’s worst smears and slurs in the service of their false claim to embody “true” Catholicism and Christianity demands more attention and illumination.
Watch this space: very soon we will have words, art, and maybe even music and merch for you. Because the WOKE MARXIST POPE–the meme, and all its counter-memes–never rests.