This article contains spoilers for the movie Heretic.

When I was a Mormon missionary in Texas in the early 2000s, my companions and I used to get strange phone calls from a man with a British accent named Andrew. We didn’t know who he was, or how he’d gotten the numbers for a bunch of Church-owned cellphones, but the calls always went the same. He would begin in a friendly mode, feigning interest in our lives and work. Then, gradually, the questions would turn confrontational as he revealed his true agenda: to convince us that everything we believed was wrong. Sometimes he’d drop cryptic allusions to controversial Mormon history that he assumed we didn’t know; other times he’d try to fluster us with theological gotchas. Most of us found him amusing, and he became a figure of lore in our mission, someone to swap stories about—Andrew called again! But I remember finding the weird, gleeful quality of his performances mystifying. As a missionary in the Bible Belt, I could understand the proselytizing instinct of the Baptists we met who tried to save us from hell. Andrew, though, wasn’t trying to convert us to anything in particular—he just wanted us to admit he was right. Later, I would meet missionaries from other places who’d gotten similar calls from an unidentified zealous Brit. Was this a hobby for him? An obsession? How much time was he dedicating to this project?

I never solved the mystery of Andrew. But when I returned home and joined the rest of my generation on the internet, I realized that his type—a man whose personal passion was to argue with random strangers for no evident payoff beyond personal catharsis—was not uncommon.

I found myself thinking about Andrew recently after seeing Heretic, a horror-thriller released this month by A24. The movie follows Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton, two young female missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who show up on the doorstep of a man named Mr. Reed, played by Hugh Grant. He invites them in under the pretense that he’s interested in learning about their faith, only to trap them in his labyrinthine home so he can torture them—first with a lengthy disquisition on the falsity of organized religion, then (in what may have come as almost a relief to the missionaries) with psychological torment and violence.  

It is possible to read Heretic as a dark satire of a distinctly 21st-century type: the militant New Atheist who won’t shut up. Smug and self-righteous, he is consumed with an absolute conviction in his worldview that would rival that of a Pentecostal snake-handler. He can’t accept that he lives in a world where people—especially women—hold beliefs that he finds irrational. And in Heretic, the villain gets to act out what might seem like a fantasy for many such men: locking young religious women in his house and monologuing at them until they surrender to his intellect.

[From the January/February 2021 issue: The most American religion]

But if Heretic’s strength is the spot-on characterization of its villain, its weakness is showing too much interest in his Reddit-level ideas about religion.

Right off the bat, you might be wondering just how watchable any of this is. In trying to describe the film to an Atlantic colleague recently, I explained that much of Heretic’s first hour is devoted to the villain’s philosophical arguments against religion. “Is it … terribly dull?” the colleague asked. Like many of us, he had spent time in conversation with monologuing atheists, and did not come away thinking, That would make great cinema!

Mr. Reed’s essential argument—which he delivers to the missionaries in a lengthy, Galt-like lecture from a faux chapel he’s constructed in his house—is that today’s major world religions are simply rearrangements of more ancient mythologies. The biblical character of Jesus Christ, he argues, is a rejiggered version of the Persians’ Mithras, or the Egyptians’ Horus, or the Hindus’ Krisha—all gods who were purportedly born on December 25, who performed miracles and were resurrected after death. “My claim is that all 10,000 verifiable religions that exist worldwide right now are as artificial as the symbolic church you are standing in,” Mr. Reed declares. “It is farce. There’s nothing holy here.”

Grant does his best to make this material compelling, performing it with a creepy, cool-professor smarm, and making entertaining use of various props (board games, pop records) to illustrate Mr. Reed’s ideas. But the ideas themselves are the movie’s biggest defect. Anyone who has given serious thought to religion is likely to find them too superficial and stale to be interesting.

“I found myself checking out a bit,” one critic wrote in the Mormon journal Wayfare. “How many times have I heard this neo-Campbellian spiel that distorts Asian religions from the comfort of an armchair, reducing ancient systems of belief to the level of twentieth-century entertainment franchises?” Matthew Bowman, a historian of religion at Claremont Graduate University, wrote, similarly, that he “slumped a bit” in his seat as Mr. Reed sermonized. Bowman recognized his rant as a “fringe academic hypothesis” known as Jesus mythicism that’s “rejected by nearly all scholars of Christian history and the ancient world” but that has nonetheless found “a vast array of adherents on the internet.”

Just how seriously viewers are meant to take these ideas is open to interpretation. The character articulating them is, after all, a murderous psychopath. But the movie devotes considerable time to its villain’s ideology and seems to consider his diatribes provocative and sophisticated, even profound. Bryan Woods, who wrote and directed Heretic along with Scott Beck, has said that Mr. Reed is meant to have a “genius-level IQ.” It seems that we are supposed to think of Mr. Reed as brilliant but extreme—a man who, in the tradition of Marvel bad guys and Bond villains, takes a good point much too far. (Think of Black Panther’s Killmonger.)

Eventually, Mr. Reed tells the terrified young missionaries that they’re free to go but that they must choose between two identical doors, one of which he has labeled belief and the other disbelief. A test of faith has commenced. The movie, to its credit, allows the women at this point to challenge him intellectually. Sister Barnes, in particular, gets off a few lines about Mr. Reed’s “thin rhetoric” and reductive framing. “There is an entire spectrum that your game is neglecting,” she says, correctly. But unfortunately for her, and for viewers, she winds up dead a few minutes later.

Much of the Mormon discourse around Heretic has focused on questions of representation. Thirteen years into The Book of Mormon’s run on Broadway, many in the Church are inured to seeing missionaries treated as punch lines; we’re somewhat less used to seeing their throats slit on screen. When the trailer dropped this past summer, many Latter-day Saints assumed that the movie would be an anti-Mormon gorefest.

Graphic violence aside, the film is less antagonistic to Mormonism than other recent pop-cultural treatments. Unlike Hulu’s Secret Lives of Mormon Wives—which draws on a microscopic subculture of swinger-adjacent Utah TikTokers to draw sweeping conclusions about their Church—Heretic’s story is grounded in something millions of Latter-day Saints have actually experienced (missionary service, that is, not being trapped in Hugh Grant’s basement). And unlike the 2022 FX series Under the Banner of Heaven, which dramatized a double-murder  committed by fundamentalists in the 1980s to advance its dubious thesis that Mormonism “breeds dangerous men,” this movie doesn’t seem to have any particular axe to grind with Latter-day Saints.

In fact, the two missionaries at the center of the story are sympathetic and complex. The actors, Chloe East and Sophie Thatcher, both grew up Mormon, and some of the most authentic moments in the movie were reportedly ad-libbed. (Ex-missionaries will chuckle when Sister Paxton assures Sister Barnes in one early scene that for every flight of stairs they have to drag their bicycles up, their future husbands will get “10 percent hotter.”) Not everything in the movie rings true—most notably the groaner of an opening scene in which the two missionaries discuss condom size—but for the most part, I was pleasantly surprised by how well drawn the protagonists were. Maybe the bar is just exceptionally low. What does it say about Mormon media representation that the most sympathetic portrayal in recent memory involves missionaries getting violently tortured by a lunatic?

[Read: The 15 films you should add to your watchlist this season]

In their press tour, the filmmakers have repeatedly said that they wanted to take their Mormon characters seriously, to treat them with empathy instead of condescension. This admirable notion has been somewhat undermined by the film’s marketing campaign, which has included, among other things, displaying fake MISSING posters for the fictional missionaries at the Salt Lake City airport, where hundreds of real-life missionaries fly in and out each day. (The Church’s official response to Heretic, incidentally, focused on concerns for the security of its 80,000 missionaries serving around the world. “Any narrative that promotes violence against women because of their faith or undermines the contributions of volunteers runs counter to the safety and wellbeing of our communities,” the Church spokesman Doug Andersen said in a statement.)

In the end, the film doesn’t actually have all that much to say about Mormonism specifically. The filmmakers have been honest in interviews about the constraints they faced. When they first started writing the script, they realized they didn’t know enough about religion to finish it. They had to spend a decade brushing up on religious texts and Richard Dawkins books before they felt they could return to the story. (Woods’s wife, Julia Glausi, is a graduate of Brigham Young University.) The film they ultimately made is suspenseful, creepy, and expertly staged and acted. But I found myself wondering what the movie would look like if it had been made by filmmakers whose exploration of faith was less academic and more deeply rooted in personal experience—filmmakers who’d wrestled with religious questions deeper and more difficult than the ones their villain poses.  

As it turns out, we almost got to see such a movie. In 2022, a group of student filmmakers at Brigham Young University made a short film called The Handbook that shares a premise with Heretic: Two Mormon missionaries enter the home of a seemingly sweet stranger who turns sinister and traps them inside. I got in touch with Brandon Carraway, who wrote and directed the short film with his wife, Hannah Grace, and he told me that the idea had grown out of his experience as a missionary. Most of the cast and crew, he said, had served Latter-day Saint missions as well. After The Handbook screened at a few festivals, an agent asked them to write a feature-length version. They started taking meetings with studios, but the project died after A24 announced it was developing Heretic. (A source close to A24, who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak on behalf of the movie, told me that the similarities between the films are “pure coincidence” and that Beck and Woods had not seen the short.) Carraway had nothing bad to say about Heretic but told me simply, “I think ours would have been a different movie.”

In Heretic’s climatic scene, Sister Paxton enters a dark, leaky subbasement and discovers a room filled with women being held in dog cages. She and her companion, it turns out, were not Mr. Reed’s first victims. On cue, the villain materializes to deliver the argument to which he’s been building throughout the movie. The “one true religion,” he tells the young missionary, is “control.”

The upsetting scene has drawn a variety of complaints. Some think the glib ambiguity about the women’s fate is irresponsible. Others take issue with the substance of Mr. Reed’s claim (though I’d argue their real issue is with Karl Marx, who beat him to this particular insight about 150 years ago). But the scene I left the theater thinking about takes place a few minutes later. Sister Paxton and Mr. Reed lie bleeding out on the floor of the basement, apparently on the verge of death. For the first time in the movie, we see the devout young missionary pray, but not before delivering an eloquent monologue of her own—about the scientific inefficacy of prayer. In between pained gasps, she recites the findings of a 1998 Templeton Foundation study on intercessory prayer, which found no connection between medical outcomes and divine appeals. “I think it’s beautiful that people pray for each other, even though we all probably know deep down it doesn’t make a difference,” the missionary says. “It’s just nice to think about someone other than yourself.”

It’s a sweet sentiment, but it feels more like a secular screenwriter’s cop-out than a sincere articulation of how most devout people feel when communing with God. The people I know who pray are not consumed with questions like Does this work? Where’s the proof? Am I right? The real beauty in prayer, like religion in general, is in its transcendence of the empirical and its embrace of the mysterious and divine. Faith, much to the frustration of the world’s Mr. Reeds, is not something one can be talked out of.

Of all the promises, from quixotic to horrifying, that Donald Trump has made about the next four years, the one that seems least likely to be fulfilled is his vow to “defeat anti-Semitism.” He has nominated a slew of cranks who have dabbled in the oldest conspiracy theory of them all, a belief that Jews control the world.

Over the past decade or so, pernicious lies about Jewish villainy have drifted into the mainstream of American life. That’s a fact Trump acknowledges when he talks about his plans to “defend Jewish citizens in America.” But he tends to focus on the problem at college campuses, which constitutes an incomplete diagnosis. It allows Trump to ignore his own complicity in unleashing the worst wave of anti-Jewish sentiment in generations.

In his first administration, Trump provided rhetorical cover for supporters who blared hateful sentiments—those “very fine people,” Kanye West, and others. This time, he’s placing them in the line of presidential succession. If confirmed, this crew would comprise the highest-ranking collection of White House anti-Semites in generations.

Take Matt Gaetz, Trump’s nominee for attorney general. He is a fierce opponent of the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would curtail federal funding for institutions of higher education that fail to address the hatred of Jews when it flourishes on their campuses. There are principled reasons for rejecting the bill. But in the course of arguing against it, Gaetz revealed himself. He asserted that the legislation’s definition of anti-Semitism would penalize the belief that the Jews killed Jesus. This wasn’t a point Gaetz made in the spirit of protecting free speech. He fervently believes it himself. “The Bible is clear. There is no myth or controversy on this,” he posted on X. This is the canard from which the whole Western tradition of anti-Semitism flows, a belief officially repudiated by the Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council nearly 60 years ago.

And it wasn’t a stray expression. In 2018, Gaetz invited Charles Johnson, a notorious figure on the alt-right, to attend the State of the Union address as his guest. Johnson is a textbook example of a Holocaust denier. He insists that only 250,000 Jews died—and only of typhus—during World War II. In a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session, he wrote that he agreed with a commenter “about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real.” When confronted with Johnson’s record, Gaetz admitted that he hadn’t properly vetted Johnson before extending him an invitation. Even so, he told Fox Business that Johnson is “not a holocaust denier.” That defense, given all the evidence about Johnson presented to him, is tantamount to an endorsement.

The essence of conspiracism is the description of the hidden hand, the ubiquity of all-powerful evildoers. That is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s overriding intellectual habit. He believes that the CIA killed his uncle, and he attributes autism to vaccines. In 2023, he was caught on video suggesting that COVID-19 might be a bioweapon. Espousing such a theory should be disqualifying for the job of running America’s public-health system. But he went further. He said that the disease was designed to attack Caucasians and Black people. “The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” (In case it needs saying, this is false.) As a well-practiced conspiracist, he knew to append his theory with a disclaimer, adding, “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not,” as if he were merely asking an innocent question. And when confronted with his own words, he denied any ill intent: “I haven’t said an anti-Semitic word in my life.”

[Read: The sanewashing of RFK Jr.]

But his insinuation echoed the medieval Christian libel that Jews had poisoned the wells of Europe, unleashing the Black Death. Kennedy’s winking accusation also mimics a strain of white-supremacist pseudoscience, which asserts that Ashkenazi Jews are a distinct race from Caucasians. According to this bizarre, and bizarrely prevalent, theory, that’s what makes Jews so pernicious: They can pass for white people while conspiring to undermine them.

Not so long ago, these sorts of comments would have rendered a nominee unconfirmable—or at least would have necessitated an excruciating apology tour. But anti-Semitism is no longer taboo. And it’s telling that Trump has adopted Elon Musk as a primary adviser, because Musk is a chief culprit in the lifting of that taboo.

When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he reversed a ban imposed by the company’s previous regime that kept anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers off the platform. Under his ownership, anti-Jewish voices became unavoidable fixtures on the site, broadcasting their bigoted theories without any fear of consequences.

One reason they have little to fear is that Musk has displayed sympathy for their worldview. Like them, he harps on the wickedness of George Soros, whom he once likened to the comic supervillain Magneto, a mutant who plots to wipe out humanity. (Like Soros, Magneto is a Holocaust survivor.) This comparison almost explicitly admits its exaggeration of Jewish nefariousness. And if the thrust of his sentiments wasn’t clear enough, he emphatically endorsed a tweet claiming that “Jewish communities have been pushing … dialectal hatred against whites.”

For a time, Musk refuted his critics by smearing them. He accused the Anti-Defamation League, the nation’s leading Jewish civil-rights group, of orchestrating a campaign to destroy him. Eventually, to fend off an advertiser boycott, he apologized, visited Auschwitz, and called himself “aspirationally Jewish.”

The presence of these conspiracists doesn’t suggest that Trump will pursue policies that provoke Jewish suffering. His support for Israel might even win him the approval of a growing segment of organized Jewry. Instead, the danger posed by his appointees is that their mere presence in high office will make American anti-Semitism even more permissible; they will make conspiracies about Jews socially acceptable. Indeed, that might already have happened. Trump just proposed the most anti-Semitic Cabinet in recent history, and that fact has barely elicited a peep.

My immigrant parents—my father especially—are ardent Christians. As such, my childhood seemed to differ dramatically from the glimpses of American life I witnessed at school or on television. My parents often spoke of their regimented, cloistered upbringings in Nigeria, and their belief that Americans are too lax. They devised a series of schemes to keep us on the straight and narrow: At home, we listened to an unending stream of gospel music and watched Christian programming on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. The centerpiece of their strategy, however, was daily visits to our small Nigerian church, in North Texas.

I quickly discerned a gap between the fist-pumping, patriotic Christianity that I saw on TV and the earnest, yearning faith that I experienced in church. On TV, it seemed that Christianity was not only a means of achieving spiritual salvation but also a tool for convincing the world of America’s preeminence. Africa was mentioned frequently on TBN, but almost exclusively as a destination for white American missionaries. On-screen, they would appear dour and sweaty as they distributed food, clothes, and Bibles to hordes of seemingly bewildered yet appreciative Black people. The ministers spoke of how God’s love—and, of course, the support of the audience—made such donations possible, but the subtext was much louder: God had blessed America, and now America was blessing everyone else.

In church, however, I encountered an entirely different type of Christianity. The biblical characters were the same, yet they were evoked for different purposes. God was on our side because we, as immigrants and their children, were the underdogs; our ancestors had suffered a series of losses at the hands of Americans and Europeans, just as the Israelites in the Bible had suffered in their own time. And like those chosen people, we would emerge victorious.

Over time, I learned that Christianity is a malleable faith; both the powerful and the powerless can use it to justify their beliefs and actions. This is, in part, the message of Scholastique Mukasonga’s Sister Deborah, which was published in France in 2022 and was recently released in the United States, in a translation by Mark Polizzotti. Set in Rwanda in the 1930s, the novel spotlights a group of recently arrived African American missionaries who preach a traditional Christian message about a forthcoming apocalypse, but with a twist: They prophesize that “when everything was again nice and dry, Jesus would appear on his cloud in the sky and everyone would discover that Jesus is black.” These missionaries are a destabilizing influence in a territory dominated by another version of Christianity, established and spread by the colonizing Belgians, that emphasizes the supremacy of a white Jesus.

[Read: A family story about colonialism and its aftereffects]

The most vital force in the novel is Sister Deborah herself. She is the prophetic, ungovernable luminary of the African American contingent, and possesses healing powers. Over the course of her time in Rwanda, she develops a theology that centers Black women; as a result, she is eventually castigated by her former mentor, Reverend Marcus, a gifted itinerant preacher who serves as the leader of the missionaries. Sister Deborah is a novel about the capaciousness of Christianity but also the limits of its inclusivity—particularly for the women in its ranks.

Those limits are evident throughout the novel. The first section is narrated by a woman, Ikirezi, who recalls her childhood in Rwanda. She’d been a “sickly girl” who required constant attention, yet her mother had avoided the local clinic: She had “no confidence in the pills that the orderlies dispensed, seemingly at whim.” Ikirezi’s mother eventually determines that her child’s chronic illness comes “from either people or spirits.” So, in a fit of desperation, she decides to take her to Sister Deborah. She doesn’t know much about this American missionary except that she is a “prophetess” who possesses the gift of “healing by laying on hands.” Upon learning of his wife’s plans, Ikirezi’s father explodes:

You are not going to that devil’s mission. I forbid it! Didn’t you hear what our real padri said about it? They’re sorcerers from a country called America, a country that might not even exist because it’s the land of the dead, the land of the damned. They have not been baptized with good holy water. And they are black—all the real padri are white. I forbid you to drag my daughter there and offer her to the demon hiding in the head and belly of that witch you call Deborah. You can go to the devil if you like, but spare my daughter!

Through Ikirezi’s father’s outburst, Mukasonga deftly sketches the two opposing Christian camps in the novel—one that depends on the Bible to protect its status, and the other that uses the Bible to attain status. The white padri (priests) seek to maintain their spiritual control of the local population by labeling the African American missionaries as evil interlopers. The missionaries, for their part, have positioned themselves as an alternative religious authority, and they begin to attract many followers, especially women, who are drawn to their energetic services and Sister Deborah’s supernatural abilities.

Ikirezi’s mother defies her husband and takes Ikirezi to see Sister Deborah. They arrive at the American dispensary, where Sister Deborah holds court “under the large tree with its dazzling red flowers, sitting atop the high termite mound that had been covered by a rug decorated with stars and red stripes.” She asks the children who are gathered before her, Ikirezi among them, “to touch her cane while she lay her hands on their heads.” Afterward, Ikirezi recalls “that under the palms of her hands, a great sense of ease and well-being spread through me.” Ikirezi’s depiction of Sister Deborah remains more or less at this pitch through the rest of this section: deferential and mystified, studied but also somewhat distant. As time passes, Ikirezi’s reverence for Sister Deborah only grows, forming a scrim that obscures the healer in a hazy glow.

The novel then pivots to Sister Deborah’s point of view; she expands on and revises Ikirezi’s portrait of her life. As a child in Mississippi, Sister Deborah discovered that she had healing powers. Her mother pulled her out of school, dreading “people’s vindictiveness as much as their gratitude” for her daughter’s gift. Shortly afterward, Sister Deborah is raped by a truck driver, which shifts the trajectory of her life dramatically. She has a profound religious experience when she visits a local church, and soon after falls in with Reverend Marcus.

Reverend Marcus initially sees Sister Deborah as a tool to advance his own ambitions. He is concerned about the suffering of Black people around the world: “the contempt, insults, and lynchings they endured in America; the enslavement, massacres, and colonial tyranny forced upon them in Africa.” His theology is focused not only on their salvation but on their ascendancy as well.

Sister Deborah begins to perform healings during Reverend Marcus’s revival services, and eventually, he brings her along on a missionary trip to Rwanda. There, the reverend and Sister Deborah initially work in harmony, attracting devoted new converts. But their partnership begins to fray when a divine spirit informs Sister Deborah that a Black woman, not a Black Jesus, will save them. Reverend Marcus’s response is both a warning and a prophecy: “If we follow you in your visions and dreams, we step outside of Christianity and venture into the unknown.”

Although the reverend initially accepts Sister Deborah’s “vision” of female power, he eventually uses it to undermine her, condemning her as a witch. Even within his progressive and radical theology, Reverend Marcus believes that women must serve men; in Mukasonga’s telling, he is a man whose shortsightedness and thirst for power eventually overwhelm his generally good intentions. His behavior reflects a reality that many Christian women have experienced, Black women in particular. In Rwanda, Sister Deborah is contending with a caste system that installed white men at the top and placed Black women at the bottom. Sister Deborah’s claim that the savior is a Black woman undermines that status quo. And the reverend’s response reveals a contradiction that many Black Christian women have faced: They are encouraged to seek spiritual freedom but are still expected to remain subservient.

[Read: Why did this progressive evangelical church fall apart?]

What Reverend Marcus doesn’t realize, however, is that his warning about “ventur[ing] into the unknown” has also given Sister Deborah a route for her own liberation. Like the women in Mukasonga’s prior work—a collection of accomplished memoirs, novels, and short fiction—Sister Deborah explores and then occupies unfamiliar realms. Unfamiliar, that is, to men, who create hierarchies in which they can flourish and then mark any territory beyond their reach as benighted. Yet it is in those benighted spaces, Sister Deborah comes to believe, that Black women can thrive. A group of women begins to follow her, and she changes her name to Mama Nganga. Little girls collect “healing plants” for her. She treats local sex workers, and invites homeless women to stay with her. She constructs an ecosystem of care and protection for women and proudly claims the label that Ikirezi’s father placed on her at the beginning of the novel: “I’m what they call a witch doctor, a healer, though some might say a sorceress,” she declares. “I treat women and children.” For Sister Deborah, Reverend Marcus’s Christianity is inadequate because it prioritizes dominance over service. She abandons that approach in favor of pursuing the true mission of Jesus: to uplift and care for the most vulnerable.

Mukasonga’s slim novel is laden with ideas, but perhaps the most potent and urgent is her assertion that sometimes, Black women cannot achieve true freedom within the confines of Christianity. By exposing how even progressive interpretations of the faith can uphold patriarchal norms, Mukasonga invites her reader to question the limitations imposed on marginalized believers. In Sister Deborah, real liberation lies in eschewing conformity to any dogma, even the Bible. But the novel is more than a critique of religious institutions: It is a call to redefine faith, perhaps even radically, on one’s own terms.

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.

This article was originally published by Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Donald Trump’s fans and critics alike have compared him to some of history’s most famous rulers: Cyrus the Great, Adolf Hitler, King David, and more.

But on the eve of the election, a celebrity pastor named Jonathan Cahn wants his evangelical followers to think of the Republican candidate as a present-day manifestation of a far more obscure leader: the biblical king Jehu, who vanquished the morally corrupt house of Ahab to become the tenth ruler of the Kingdom of Israel.

“President Trump, you were born into the world to be a trumpet of God, a vessel of the Lord in the hands of God. God called you to walk according to the template; he called you according to the template of Jehu, the warrior king,” Cahn told the hundreds of Christian leaders who gathered last week for the National Faith Summit outside Atlanta. He also shared a clip of his prophecy about Trump on his YouTube channel, which has more than a million followers.

What Cahn means—and why at least one scholar of the Christian right says he is worried—requires some background. Cahn, 65, is the son of a Holocaust refugee and grew up in a Jewish household in New Jersey. When he was 20, he says he had a personal revelation that led him to Jesus, and he eventually became the head of a Messianic congregation, blending Jewish rituals with Christian worship and a focus on doomsday prophecies.

Cahn helped popularize the interpretation of 9/11 as an apocalyptic biblical allegory. In his telling, the terrorist attacks were akin to God’s rebuke of the biblical nation of Israel, and they happened because God wanted the United States to revert to a time before legalized abortion and gay rights when religion held a more central place in society—or else. His book on the topic, The Harbinger, came out in 2011 and spent months on the New York Times best-seller list.

Cahn continued to release commercially successful books, and combined with his social-media activity, he established a growing and enthusiastic audience for his prophetic warnings.

Then Trump came along. During Trump’s first term, many evangelical-Christian supporters explained his lack of religiosity by comparing him to Cyrus, the pagan ruler of ancient Persia, who served as God’s agent by, according to the Bible, helping the Israelites return home from exile. In 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, amid an effort to build stronger ties with the evangelical movement, praised Trump as a modern-day Cyrus.

But Cahn had spun a different prophetic narrative about the new American president. He released a book called The Paradigm the year after the 2016 election, which cast Trump as Jehu, the biblical king who took control of and restored the Kingdom of Israel, whose territory largely overlapped with parts of present-day Israel and Lebanon. Just as Jehu killed the idol-worshippers who had taken over the kingdom, Trump would “drain the swamp” of Washington and “make America great again.” In this contemporary rendition, Hillary and Bill Clinton play the role of Ahab and Jezebel, the evil rulers who had led the kingdom astray. Jezebel is also seen as wicked in the Jewish tradition, but she is far more prominent as a symbol in evangelical discourse today, representing feminism, sexual promiscuity, and moral decay.

In the 2024 election, Joe Biden’s replacement with Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate challenging Trump allowed the template of Jehu versus Jezebel to get updated and become salient again.

Two weeks before Cahn spoke at the National Faith Summit, an ally of his named Ché Ahn evoked the comparison at another mass religious event. Ahn heads Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena, California, as well as a network of thousands of ministries all over the world. He is a leader of a spiritual movement known as New Apostolic Reformation, which aims for Christians to dominate society and government. Major Republican figures such as Mike Pompeo, Sarah Palin, and Josh Hawley have visited Ahn’s church, reflecting the growing influence of Christian nationalism on the Republican Party.

On October 12, Yom Kippur, Ahn appeared at the “Million Women March” event on the National Mall, speaking before a crowd of tens of thousands, with many wearing prayer shawls or blowing shofars—traditionally Jewish symbols highlighting the movement’s overlap with Messianic Judaism.

“Jehu will cast down Jezebel,” Ahn said, and prophesized a victory by Trump over Harris.

The social-media user who brought the recent Jehu comparisons to wider notice through posts on X is Matthew Taylor, a scholar of the Christian right at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, a Baltimore-based interfaith research and advocacy group, dedicated to “[dismantling] religious bias and bigotry.”

“Since Harris became the candidate this summer, we’ve seen the Jehu image really rise to the surface much more,” Taylor said in an interview. “This is the story [Cahn and Ahn] want running through their followers’ heads, their lens for interpreting the election and its aftermath.”

In the grim biblical story, recounted in the book of 2 Kings, as Jehu ascends the throne, he kills Jezebel by ordering her thrown out of a palace window, after which he stomps on her body, which is then eaten by dogs. The new warrior king then goes on a killing spree, slaying the families of Ahab and Jezebel and other Baal-worshipping pagans who had despoiled the kingdom.

“Jehu came to the capital city with an agenda to drain the swamp,” Cahn said in his speech, addressing Trump, who also spoke at the National Faith Summit. “Jehu formed an alliance with the religious conservatives of the land. So, it was your destiny to do the same. Jehu overturned the cult of Baal by which children were sacrificed. So, God chose you to overturn America’s cult of Baal, Roe v. Wade.”

Cahn and Ahn did not respond to my request to their ministries to discuss the theology of their recent statements.

Neither pastor elaborated on the analogy they were drawing, and neither made an explicit call for violence. But Trump has generated widespread concern by speaking of retribution, calling his political opponents “the enemy from within,” and talking about using the military against political enemies if he wins.

Given the riot that took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, after Trump challenged the election results, and his ongoing promotion of election-fraud narratives, independent experts and government agencies are warning of increased political violence. Many Jewish leaders are particularly concerned because Trump recently blamed Jews for his potential defeat.

Taylor says the pastors’ followers would be familiar with the biblical story of Jehu, and he believes that they are priming their audience to accept violence during the election or afterward.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, that surfaced the Jehu prophecies, Taylor voiced his alarm.

“If Trump wins in this election, the Jehu ‘template’ tells Trump’s Christian supporters: some real-world violence may be needed to purge America of her demons,” Taylor wrote. “If Trump loses this election, particularly to Kamala Harris their ‘Jezebel,’ the Jehu template prescribes vengeance.”