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This essay contains spoilers.

The new movie Conclave is a faithful adaptation of Robert Harris’s 2016 novel—and an absurd portrait of the Catholic Church. A thriller about the politicking that occurs when cardinals gather to elect a new pope, it depicts a clash between racist conservatives and supposedly insightful liberals who talk like a cross between an HR manual and a greeting card. Although the film’s hero describes “certainty” as the enemy, the movie has no doubt about who the bad guys are. Not even a subtle, intelligent performance from Ralph Fiennes can salvage the film’s simplistic morality.

No one expects a movie to be a doctrinal treatise, but Conclave’s blithe approach to Catholic teaching spoils the drama. The best art about the Catholic Church doesn’t necessarily endorse its tenets, but it at least takes them seriously. Novels such as Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair and Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour found tragic and comic potential in the Church’s most difficult and otherworldly teachings. They asked questions like, What if marriage really is indissoluble, and a character resolves to act accordingly? The answers were never easy, but they were always interesting. Conclave is incapable of tapping the dramatic potential of Catholic dogma, for the simple reason that the dogma it believes in is not Catholic but progressive.

Early on, we are introduced to Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), a wily Italian traditionalist who tries to persuade another cardinal to vote for him in order to prevent an African from getting elected. Tedesco, who longs for the days of the Latin Mass, naturally believes that only a European should be pope. In Conclave, racism and ritualism go together like bread and wine. In the real world, however, traditionalist Catholics have no greater friend in the highest reaches of the Church than Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah.

[Read: Martin Scorsese’s radical act of turning theology into art]

Standing opposite Tedesco are the liberals, led by Cardinal Lawrence (Fiennes). Lawrence opens the conclave with a homily that declares, “Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance.” This claim, treated as a searing insight, does nothing to diminish the certainty of his fellow progressives. While claiming to favor “tolerating other views within our own Church,” they resolve to do everything in their power to stop Tedesco.

In one scene, Lawrence uses the sacrament of confession to extract information from a nun about a rival cardinal who had sex with her years before. Employing the sacrament for one’s own purposes, as Lawrence does, is a grave act of spiritual abuse. So is what he does next: Lawrence confronts the offending cardinal with what he has learned—thus breaking the confessional seal.

All of this could make for good drama, in a film that regarded the Catholic sacraments as capable of commanding belief. If Lawrence were genuinely Catholic, he would be racked by his conscience as he weighed his sacramental transgression against the noble aim of preventing an unworthy man from becoming pope. Instead, he intones something about his respect for the sacrament he has just violated, and moves on.

A similar flippancy emerges at the end of the film, when the newly elected Pope Innocent is revealed to be intersex. Catholic sacramental theology holds—for reasons grounded in scripture and elaborated over the course of centuries—that only a man can be ordained a priest, let alone made pope. A more interesting film might have dramatized the ironies arising from a doctrine that holds that an evil man can ascend to an office from which even the holiest woman is barred. But Conclave treats Catholic theology as mere policy, like the membership rules at Augusta National.

One effect of doctrinal limits is to constrain the powerful. If a rule is understood to have been laid down by Christ, not even a cardinal or a pope can undo it. If Catholic doctrine can change, however, the high and mighty have more freedom to remake the faith as they please—a fact that Conclave celebrates.

The film holds up Lawrence as an exemplary “manager,” as the late pope described him. Lawrence employs his procedural acumen both to enforce the rules of the conclave and to set them aside—whichever ensures the outcome he deems best. He blatantly manipulates the voting process. He digs up damaging information on leading candidates, breaking into the sealed chambers of the dead pope and violating the conclave’s ban on outside information by publicizing a dossier that swings the election. For these acts of interference, liberals praise him. “That firm hand of yours has its admirers,” a like-minded cardinal says.

If Lawrence is the image of a responsible managerial elite, his ideological opposite, Tedesco, is the ecclesial version of a conservative populist. He maintains that the Church’s leadership has fallen into lassitude and corruption since Vatican II, and his crude manners and colorful speech hint at a working-class background that he is happy to play up. (Harris’s book reports that he comes from a peasant family.)

The film explicitly proposes a parallel between sacred and secular politics, in case anyone missed the point. At one late-night meeting, a cardinal complains, “I feel as if I’m at some American political convention.” The machinations become so elaborate that another cardinal jokes that he is poised to become “the Richard Nixon of popes.” For Conclave, there is no real distinction between Church politics and electoral politics, between a Cardinal Tedesco and a Donald Trump. It’s all a power game in which anything is justified for the right cause.

[Read: The Exorcist and the lost art of Catholic storytelling]

If the movie has a saving grace, it is the way the camera admiringly lingers on the visible expressions of Catholic belief—the cassocks and tassels, the red silk and white smoke. Perhaps the most striking scene is the one in which Lawrence is carefully vested in his holy livery. These images will communicate the Church’s charisma to some viewers, despite the film’s failure to reckon with the claims that underlie the visuals.

Nonetheless, in its crude view of the Church and its lack of genuine drama, Conclave is even worse than the last great ecclesial potboiler, The Da Vinci Code. That earlier movie was pulpier, including a brief flash of a ritual sex scene. And Tom Hanks’s performance, which is probably less remembered than his hairdo, does not compare to that of Fiennes. But The Da Vinci Code was in a certain way the more intelligent film. Despite its hysterical suggestion that the Catholic Church is a grand conspiracy of albino monks and Hispanic prelates devoted to covering up the fact that Jesus fathered a child, it at least recognized that sacramental ideas, including the all-male priesthood, are central to Catholic belief. Conclave fails because it takes itself—and not its subject—seriously.

“On the record? We’re as calm as calm can be,” a European official assured me last week when I called him to ask what he thought about the reelection of Donald Trump.

His answer surprised me. I’d first met the official earlier this year when I was reporting on European allies’ view of the U.S. presidential election. Back then, almost every leader and diplomat I interviewed expressed dread at the prospect of Trump’s return to power; this same official had described the stakes as “existential” for his country. The reasons for the anxiety were obvious: Russia was waging war on NATO’s doorstep, and America, the alliance’s most powerful member by far, appeared to be on the verge of reelecting a president who had, among other things, said he’d encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries he considers freeloaders. Yet now, the official on the other end of the line was talking optimistically about the “transatlantic cooperation” his government looked forward to fostering with its partners in Washington, and “working toward strong relationships with the new administration.”

[Read: What Europe fears]

“We approach the next Trump presidency with calm and focus, not wobbling and panic,” he confidently declared.

Then he asked if he could speak anonymously. I agreed. “Obviously,” he said, “a million things could go wrong.”

Political leaders and diplomats across Europe are clear-eyed about the threat that the next president will pose—and yet they can do very little about it. “The overall level of anxiousness is fairly high,” the official told me. “People are expecting turbulence.” America’s allies now know that they can’t simply ride out a Trump term and wait for a snap back to normalcy. So far this century, Americans have elected George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Trump again. “Predictability is gone,” he said. “The pendulum swings from one extreme to the other.”

In the short term, sources told me, the plan is to cozy up to Trump and those close to him and hope for the best. In the long term, a growing consensus has emerged that Europe will need to prepare for a world in which it no longer counts on America for protection.

Wolfgang Ischinger, a veteran German diplomat who has served as ambassador to the United States, is among those urging calm. He has publicly cautioned European leaders against “finger wagging” in their interactions with the president-elect, and said they should take a wait-and-see approach when it comes to Trump’s foreign policy. Like other Europeans I spoke with, he was relieved by the choice of Marco Rubio—who has signaled support for NATO and has traditional views of America’s role in the world—for secretary of state. Ischinger also welcomed the realism that has shaped Europe’s response so far to Trump’s reelection. “We’re just going to have to deal with him—we’re prepared to deal with him.”

European officials, who have spent years planning for this contingency, are working to deepen personal relationships with Trump’s Republican allies, Ischinger told me, and talking about gestures they could make to flatter him. But these efforts will almost certainly face resistance from the European public, which, he said, broadly finds Trump repellent and even sinister. “I see a lot of disdain and panic,” he told me.

These reactions were reflected in the postelection headlines in the European press, which greeted Trump’s return with a mix of bafflement, scorn, and Apprentice puns. “What Have They Done … Again?” asked the cover of Britain’s Daily Mirror. The Guardian plastered its cover with the words “American dread.” And an op-ed on the homepage of the German newspaper Die Zeit resorted to English to capture the moment with a four-letter headline: “Fuck.”

Behind the scenes, Ischinger told me, European leaders have discussed inviting Trump to a capital for a grand state visit where allies could roll out the red carpet and hopefully cultivate some good will. But Ischinger worries that such an attempt could backfire. “I cannot imagine any such scenario in any German-French-Spanish-Italian city where you would not have huge anti-Trump demonstrations, probably really ugly ones,” he told me. “Organizing a decent visit for Mr. Trump would really be quite a nightmare for the police.”

Ischinger told me that the return of Trump and his hard-edged “America First” policy is emboldening Europeans who have been arguing that the continent needs more independence from its most powerful ally. Ischinger himself seems to be listening. When we spoke earlier this year, he was somewhat dismissive of the idea that Europe could chart a post-America course, at least in the near term. “Dreaming about strategic autonomy for Europe is a wonderful vision for maybe the next 50 years,” he told me in March. “But right now, we need America more than ever.”

Last week, though, he spoke urgently of the need for Europe to start manufacturing more of its own weapons and get serious about being able to defend its borders. “Are we finally going to wake up to the fact that we cannot rely forever on being protected by the United States?” he asked. He said he doesn’t believe that Trump will move to withdraw from NATO, but the fact that it’s even a question puts Europe in a deeply precarious position. The U.S. has more troops stationed in Europe (about 85,000) than the entire militaries of Belgium, Sweden, and Portugal combined. It provides essential air-force, intelligence-gathering, and ballistic-missile defense capabilities; covers about 16 percent of NATO’s operating costs; and manufactures most of the weapons that are bought by European militaries. Ischinger said that the situation is untenable: It’s just too risky to rely indefinitely on American military might to deter Russian aggression in the region. “We have a war now. This is urgent—this is not just political theory,” he told me. “This is a decisive moment in European history.”

Meanwhile, some in Europe are looking beyond the immediate military implications of Trump’s election. At Faith Angle Europe, an annual conference hosted last week by the Aspen Institute in France, journalists and scholars from both sides of the Atlantic gathered in a resort on the French Riviera and, in between pastry buffets and dips in the pool, contemplated the potential end of liberal democracy in America. To many in Europe, Trump’s election looks less like a historical fluke or “black swan event” and more like the climactic achievement of a right-wing populism that has been upending politics on their continent for much of this century—the same forces that led to Brexit in the United Kingdom, brought Giorgia Meloni to power in Italy, and made Marine Le Pen a major player in France. Not all Europeans, of course, are put off by the brand of politics that Trump represents

Nathalie Tocci, an Italian political scientist who has worked as an adviser for the ministry of foreign affairs and the European Union, predicted that Trump’s victory would “galvanize” far-right movements around the world. “They feel they really are on a roll, and they probably are,” she told attendees at the conference. “There’s a sense of legitimization … If this is happening in the heart of liberal democracy, surely you can’t make the argument that this happening in Europe is undemocratic.”

In recent years, Tocci said, far-right leaders in Europe were on their best behavior, eager not to alienate America by, say, airing their real views about Putin and Ukraine. Now that Biden, a classic transatlanticist, is set to be replaced with Trump, she said, “there’s going to be quite a lot of lowering of the masks.”

Bruno Maçães, a writer and consultant on geopolitics who has served as Portugal’s Europe minister, told me his phone had been ringing constantly since Trump’s election. European business leaders want to know what Trump will do with his second term, and how they can prepare. Maçães was not optimistic. He scoffed at Trump’s decision to create new, lofty-sounding administration posts for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and was baffled by the Silicon Valley types who believe the billionaires will transform the federal government, usher in a new era of unprecedented economic growth, and colonize Mars. “Maybe,” Maçães said. “I don’t know. But if you saw this in another country, you would see it as an acute sign of political decay when billionaires and oligarchy are taking over political policy.”

Maçães, like others I talked with, was eager not to be seen as hysterical or fatalistic. He said he didn’t think Trump’s foreign-policy appointments so far have been disastrous. But when he looked at the people Trump was naming to key domestic positions, most notably Matt Gaetz as attorney general, he found it hard to see anything other than a profound deterioration of political culture and democratic norms. “Americans have more reason to worry than the rest of the world,” he said.