Vice-Presidential candidate J.D. Vance is a Catholic of a different stripe

Trump’s Vice-Presidential pick is a Catholic of a different stripe than Joe Biden

By Darrick Taylor, Ph.D.

US senator from Ohio, J.D. Vance, author of the best-selling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

Former President Donald Trump, shortly after surviving a July 13 as sassination attempt, selected J.D. Vance, a senator from Ohio, to be his Vice-Presidential candidate in his 2024 run for the Presidency. Vance is a first-term senator famous for his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, about growing up in a poor white family in Kentucky, published at the time of Trump’s election in 2016.

Vance, a Catholic convert, was baptized into the Church in 2019. He has stated publicly that he is influenced by Catholic Social Teaching, calling it in a 2021 interview “one of the things that drew me to the Catholic Church.”

Catholics, whatever their political stance, should know something about this potential future Vice-President.

The first thing to know about Vance is that he has ties to several figures on the “New Right” or the “Postliberal Right.” These “postliberal” thinkers have gained notoriety for their espousal of a politics that uses state power to further what they consider the common good. Many are Catholic, such as the Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen and journalist Sohrab Amari, another convert to Catholicism.

Vance has also mentioned the French Catholic thinker René Girard (1923-2015) as an influence. Girard is famous for his theory of “the Scapegoat” — that all societies begin with the scapegoating of victims. He was a lapsed Catholic who returned to Catholicism later in life.

Vance is also friends with the journalist and Catholic-turned-Orthodox journalist Rod Dreher, who attended his baptism.

Vance is also connected to figures on the secular wing of the “New Right.” He worked for billionaire Peter Thiel, and Thiel backed his 2022 Senate campaign financially. Vance shares Thiel’s convictions about the fecklessness of liberal elites and remains close with him.

Another influence is Curtis Yarvin, a former computer programmer turned blogger whose ideas about political power are popular on the New Right. Vance has spoken at gatherings of organizations like the Claremont Institute in California, an organization inspired by the thought of philosopher Leo Strauss, and National Conservatism, an outfit founded by the Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony. Both support a “nationalist” brand of conservatism favoring the use of state power to protect or promote national interests and national culture.

Catholic Social Teaching

All that said, there are several issues Vance promotes that relate more directly to Catholic Social Teaching. The plight of workers is one. Vance has argued for tariffs on foreign imports and lowering immigration as a means of stimulating wages for workers. Vance has sponsored 36 bills so far in Congress, none of which have passed into law as yet. One of them is a bill (co-sponsored with Democrats) which bans the sale of products with lethal levels of sodium nitrate, a drug used to commit suicide. He also has sponsored several “culture war” bills, such as one that would eliminate DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) programs from the federal government.

More controversially, Vance has backed Trump’s vow to close the border and deport illegal immigrants. Vance promotes this as a way of raising wages for native workers. This policy is not popular with the Catholic left, and Pope Francis in Fratelli Tutti decried what he called “narrow forms of nationalism” and opposition to immigrants (§141). Francis has repeatedly condemned the type of populism Vance appears to espouse, but both he and his predecessors have also stated that nations have a right to control their borders.

Some describe Vance as an “economic populist” though he said he is not against raising taxes. He has also sponsored bills which would limit the compensation of bank executives when their banks fail and have the federal government backstop community and regional banks. Old comments of his have surfaced recently in which he expressed support for tax policies that favor families but disfavor “childless cat ladies,” as he called them. While not the most diplomatic way to put it, this kind of policy is already a reality (in the form of child tax credits) and conforms to Catholic Social Teaching, as Popes since Leo XIII have encouraged the state to enact policies supporting families.

Perhaps the most controversial stands Vance has taken are those regarding abortion.

Trump gutted the Republican party platform, removing the plank that calls for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning abortion. Moreover, Vance responded to a reporter’s question about the abortion-pill drug mifepristone by saying it should be legal. Several pro-life and Catholic commentators have criticized both Vance and Trump on this issue, urging Vance and Trump to restore the plank and commit to banning the pill.

Finally, as regards international order, Vance has been one of the strongest critics of the United States’ support for Ukraine’s war with Russia. He has criticized the amount of aid given to Ukraine as well as the war itself, which he regards as irrelevant to American interests, and supports a negotiated settlement to end the conflict. Like most Republicans, he is a staunch supporter of Israel (one representative at the Republican convention said in an interview that “America First is pro-Israel”). Vance supports Israel in its war with Hamas and has consistently defended its wartime policies in the Senate.

In sum, Vance is articulate, highly connected in non-traditional conservative circles, and possesses clearly-defined ideas about politics.

Darrick Taylor, Ph.D., the author of this article. He teaches history at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida, and writes for a number of Catholic magazines

A marked departure

How then do his views actually square with Catholic Social Teaching?

One should remember that the Church proclaims principles that must be satisfied to make a just social order, but does not enjoin particular political programs to enact them. As John Paul II stated in Centesimus Annus, the Church “respects the legitimate autonomy of the democratic order” and does not insist on “this or that institutional or constitutional solution.” (§47) Ideally, the state should govern according to natural and divine law, but there will not always be agreement about how to do that or what that entails.

Vance himself represents a marked departure from the recent past both of Republican Party politics but also of many Catholics on how they have approached questions of social order, at least in America. Many orthodox American Catholics have adhered to a “limited government” philosophy since the 1980s, in line with Republican Party ideals, but a Vance-led party would likely change all that.

Catholic religious liberty advocates such as Andrea Piccotti-Beyer are critical of Catholic postliberals for their willingness to pursue “power politics,” for example. And, of course, the current pontiff and his allies dislike intensely his brand of nationalist populism (when the Vatican issued a statement on the attempted assassination of Trump it did not even name the former president, so strong, apparently, is the Vatican’s dislike for him).

But Vance’s recent statements on abortion have drawn the most criticism from Catholic pro-life activists. John Paul II said of laws attacking human life that Catholics could neither promote nor obey such laws. (Evangelium Vitae, §73) Vance has not supported any such laws, but has refused to commit to passing a particular law against abortion.

This doesn’t satisfy Catholic critics like the philosopher Edward Feser, who has grilled Vance over this issue on X/Twitter. Pro-life activists, Catholic and not, have sacrificed a great deal in their campaign to end abortion, including spending time in prison for it, and Vance’s approach is not likely to win them over.

From my perspective, nothing Vance has proposed necessarily violates the principles of Catholic social teaching but there are some points of tension, and the strategy he is utilizing in pursuit of some of his goals appears questionable.

Nonetheless, if his interest in improving the lot of workers is genuine, it would make him the kind of politician that has not been seen on the American right in some time — perhaps ever.

His construal of Catholic Social Teaching is in marked contrast to that of the Democratic party, which has become the party of big business and the sexual revolution. (There is a reason why, as the liberal Catholic journal La Croix has noted, Vance is popular among younger clergy in the U.S., who are both theologically and politically more conservative than older priests.)

Should Trump win, Vance will automatically become the most important Catholic politician in America. And so, for better or worse, his career is one Catholics, in particular, must reckon with.