JD Vance’s Catholic conversion is part of young conservative movement

“I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I converted I would no longer be my grandmother’s grandson,” Vance wrote in a 2020 essay for the Catholic magazine the Lamp, about the woman he credits with raising him.

But Vance, the senator from Ohio who is now the GOP’s vice-presidential nominee, overcame whatever reservations he had, drawn by what he has described in interviews as Catholicism’s rich, detailed and nuanced philosophy and also its long history. Raised nominally evangelical, then dabbling with atheism, Vance was baptized Catholic in 2019, in his mid-30s.

In his conversion, he is part of a cohort of rising young conservative figures who are bucking the general trend of young Americans to reject institutional religion — and many, experts say, are choosing Catholicism. Catholicism, religion analysts say, exudes the confidence and staying power of a two-millennia-old hierarchical institution — not to mention the world’s biggest church — at a time when so much seems unstable.

The same thirst is driving rising Catholic interest in the pre-Vatican II-style Mass, where the priest speaks in Latin, many women wear veils and conservative views on theology are common. It’s also reflected in the priesthood, which has undergone a dramatic ideological change in recent decades — from the majority being very or somewhat liberal theologically and politically until the 1970s to majority conservative today, according to a study released last fall from Catholic University.

Vance has said he looked for a philosophy that incorporated doubt, embraced scientific advancements like the theory of evolution and also came from somewhere “more ancient,” he wrote in 2020 in the Lamp.

“I really like that the Catholic Church was just really old,” Vance said at a 2021 conference of the Napa Institute, a conservative Catholic think tank. “I felt like the modern world was constantly in flux. The things that you believed 10 years ago were no longer even acceptable to believe 10 years later.”

But Vance’s Catholicism, like that of many church members including President Biden, lines up with Catholic teaching only in limited — but very different — ways. Vance supports the death penalty in some cases, wants to boost fossil fuels, wants to deport millions of migrants and has voted against many government programs aimed at aiding the poor. All of those positions are in opposition to his church. A spokesman for Vance declined to comment for this story.

Religion experts say some of the same instincts Vance followed are also driving the growth of interest among younger people in general in gods and goddesses of paganism as well as saints, angels and demons and commemorations of the new moon.

“The appeal of religious tradition, whether through the [Latin Mass] or popular piety and devotions, is becoming more attractive in a society that appears to be losing a sense of deeper cultural roots in the face of identity politics, overconsumption and the individualistic pursuit of material success,” David M. Lantigua, co-director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at Notre Dame, wrote The Washington Post in an email. “As religious belief and church attendance declines among younger Americans, Vance reflects an interesting turn to institutional religion that preceded, and perhaps even inspired, his entrance into the political process.”

Other prominent conservative political, media and academic figures who have converted to Catholicism include Harvard legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, TV host Laura Ingraham, journalist Sohrab Ahmari and same-sex marriage opponent Brian Brown.

Data on the number of conversions is spotty. Polling organizations including Pew Research have long showed that many more people are leaving the Catholic faith than joining it — by more than 6 to 1. The most recent General Social Survey, in 2022, estimated that 1.4 percent of all adult Americans are converts to Catholicism, which would amount to about 3.7 million people. According to the Center for Applied Research on the Apostolate, a Catholic research center at Georgetown University, most are former Protestants or people who used to be religiously unaffiliated.

How this crop of conservative Catholic converts will apply their new faith to policy isn’t fully clear, as experts say it’s not a very unified group, and its members have differing aims. However, they are different from most recent generations of the evangelically influenced religious right, experts say, and from older, prominent Catholic converts from the Reagan and Bush eras, such as commentator Robert Novak, House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), who emphasized traditionally conservative economic policies.

Vance, like others in this era, talks more warmly about some populist economic ideas and is more skeptical about free trade and big business.

Vance has said he saw Catholicism as reflecting messages from across the political spectrum: from the right, an emphasis on personal responsibility, and from the left, an emphasis on the harm caused by systemic barriers. Social conservatism in the future needs to be about more than “issues like abortion. It has to have a broader vision of political economy, and the common good,” he said in 2019.

In the Senate since 2023, he has not proposed any bills that have become law, and he has voted against every major spending bill that has come forward. Largely, he has approached help for those in need by favoring boosting economic growth over government welfare programs — contrary to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ position that the government can levy taxes to meet its responsibility to “assist and empower” the poor and unemployed. He has at times supported initiatives that break with Republicans, however, including legislation that would have given low-income people subsidized internet access.

Some Catholics are pushing back on Vance.

“Many of those seeking the so-called American Dream today, to the point of risking everything, are undocumented Hispanic migrants that Trump has villainized and stereotyped in unjust and deceptive ways,” Lantigua said. “If Vance is serious about putting virtue and duty back into a politics concerned about the common good and low-income workers, especially those who pick the produce he eats, then he will have to reckon with Trumpist policies that are overly isolationist, downright nativist, and rhetorically racist.”

The church teaches that “the dignity and rights” of a person aren’t dependent upon that person’s political and citizenry status, Lantigua said.

The very different policy priorities of Vance and Biden, both churchgoing Catholics, show “there is no one Catholic faith,” said Geoff Layman, head of the University of Notre Dame’s political science department and an expert on political behavior and religion. Vance, he said, is very committed to church teachings on abortion and gender, while Catholic officials like Biden adhere on economic justice and immigration.

Vance has addressed several recent Catholic conferences focused on new right ideas like post-liberalism. During a panel at a 2023 book event at Catholic University in Washington, Vance identified himself as a member of the “postliberal right,” Politico reported.

Broadly, the post-liberal movement seeks a greater government role to form a society run on socially conservative Christian values.

He also spoke at a 2022 “Restoring the Nation” conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio, where he and other speakers advocated against a secular and neutral public square.

Some in the movement are focused on the idea that humans need a social authority — like the pope — and want the government to join parents and schools in encouraging some ways of life and discouraging others, said Mark Lilla, an intellectual historian from Columbia University. Others also believe in objective moral truths but are less focused on using state power to lead people to those truths, he said.

Lilla says he sees a lot of Catholic converts and a huge Catholic subculture at elite universities, including his own.

“It’s kind of a reboot of what [President George W.] Bush called ‘compassionate conservatism,” Lilla said of one view of Catholic post-liberalism. Another view, he said, is that it’s essentially made up of Christian nationalists who want “an American Constitution 2.0.” It doesn’t necessarily make the Vatican an authority, he said, but “reinterprets American law and the Constitution in such a way that there are a set of values and principles that should be taken as foundational to the regime.”

Vance’s description of his journey from unaffiliated evangelical to Catholic convert says a lot about modern American religion, Layman said.

White people like Vance’s grandmother who are strongly anti-institution and don’t go to church but consider themselves very much Christian were a huge part of the Trump base from the start and explain how religious conservatives could connect with him, Layman said. This phenomenon was so common that Layman and a co-author of a 2020 book about new religious-political fault lines used the term “mamaw” to describe nominally Christian Trump supporters, an allusion to Vance’s grandmother, by then well known because of his popular memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.”

Vance, fluent in both evangelical and Catholic cultures, is now navigating a party whose rank and file is dominated by the former, even as he represents the rising power of the latter in the conservative movement. He has sought to unify the groups around a common social conservatism, as opposed to any differences.

In a talk this month to the evangelical advocacy group Faith & Freedom Coalition, which lists “marriage and family” as its top priority, Vance mentioned his “Christian” faith several times but never used the word “Catholic.” When he told his story of returning to faith, he spoke not of the intellectual pull of his new faith or the comfort of its longevity, but of his desire to be a more gentle father and husband.

He urged the group not to be discouraged by Trump recently omitting references to same-sex marriage and a federal abortion ban in the GOP platform, moves that irked some Republicans.

One of Trump’s great virtues, he said, is “he is uniquely aware of politics being the art of the possible. How do we advance the ball one yard before we advance it 10 yards, before we advance it to a touchdown?”

Liz Goodwin contributed to this report.