Good Reads: How JD Vance Found His Way to the Catholic Church
His conversion reveals some core values at the heart of his personal and political philosophy and their potential impact, The New York Times reports.
How JD Vance Found His Way to the Catholic Church
Much has been made of JD Vance’s very public conversion to Trumpism, and his seemingly mutable political stances. But his quieter, private conversion to Catholicism, occurring over a similar stretch of years, reveals some core values at the heart of his personal and political philosophy and their potential impact on the country.
Becoming Catholic for Mr. Vance, who was loosely raised as an evangelical, was a practical way to counter what he saw as elite values, especially secularism. He was drawn not just to the church’s theological ideas, but also to its teachings on family and social order and its desire to instill virtue in modern society.
That worldview served as a counterpoint to much of his messy childhood, and meshed with his own criticisms of contemporary America, from what he saw as the abandonment of workers to the unhappiness of “childless cat ladies.” It has also infused his politics, which seeks to advance a family-oriented, socially conservative future through economic populism and by standing with abortion opponents.
Converting to Catholicism was joining “the resistance,” he wrote in the Catholic journal The Lamp in 2020.
This portrait of Mr. Vance’s Catholic conversion and beliefs is drawn from dozens of his public remarks and writings, and interviews with Catholics in his religious and intellectual circles in Ohio and Washington. Mr. Vance declined to comment for this story, as did Father Stephan, and several other thinkers and converts close to the candidate.
“My views on public policy and what the optimal state should look like are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching,” Mr. Vance said in an interview with Rod Dreher, a conservative writer and Orthodox Christian who attended his baptism. “I saw a real overlap between what I would like to see and what the Catholic Church would like to see.”
Catholics of every generation debate how to best express church teaching. If President Biden, who was raised Catholic, represents the working class and social justice-oriented Catholicism that defined his era, Mr. Vance reflects the traditionalist wing of the church that has taken root in his own generation.
His small, energetic world of conservative Catholic intellectuals, lawyers and politicians prioritizes its traditional views on family, as well as the public value of Christianity. It sees allies in people like Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
And this slice of the Christian movement has grown and increased in power in Republican circles, even as its views seem out of step with the American mainstream.
Read the full story by Elizabeth Dias in The New York Times.