J.D. Vance Used to Be an Atheist. What He Believes Now Is Telling. (2024)

In 2021, when J.D. Vance was asked at a conference why he had converted to Catholicism just two years earlier, he had a fairly simple answer.

“I really liked that the Catholic Church was just really old,” he said.

This anti-modern worldview is key to understanding Vance. In a party long dominated by anti-intellectual evangelical Christians with a hearty distrust of institutions, Vance stands out among its leaders for having embraced a church with a complex social doctrine built off the work of ancient philosophers. His enthusiasm for a particular and relatively obscure kind of contemporary Catholic political thought shows up in his politics—his longing for Americans to build robust nuclear families, his comments about banning p*rn, his scorn for childless cat ladies. It’s tempting to see these stances as old ones from the Christian right, familiar to anyone who has followed the evolution of the GOP in the past couple of decades, but Vance’s past comments indicate that they’re motivated by something newer, and more radical, than that.

Vance wasn’t always so unusual among his fellow Republicans: He grew up loosely evangelical Christian; he writes in Hillbilly Elegy that his commitment to his father’s church was strong but short-lived. As a young man, he identified for a while as an atheist. Then, as he recounted in a 2020 essay about his conversion for the Catholic magazine the Lamp, he reconnected with Christianity when he was searching for greater meaning in his life during law school. He began to feel drawn to Catholicism in particular after reading up on Catholic moral philosophers and discussing theology with conservative Dominican friars he knew.

After he officially converted in 2019, Vance explained in an interview with his friend Rod Dreher—a conservative writer and Catholic convert who later went on to convert, again, to Orthodox Christianity—that he had come to Catholicism in part because of the writings of Saint Augustine. “Augustine gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way,” Vance said. “As someone who spent a lot of his life buying into the lie that you had to be stupid to be a Christian, Augustine really demonstrated in a moving way that that’s not true.”

This approach generally made sense for Vance, a man who, despite his boasts of blue-collar roots, clearly considers himself a serious intellectual.

But as Vance would explain at that 2021 conference (held by the Napa Institute, a conservative Catholic organization), he was also drawn to Catholicism for its rules and relative stability over centuries. “I felt like the modern world was constantly in flux,” Vance said. “The things you believed 10 years ago were no longer acceptable to believe 10 years later.”

In the past few weeks, Vance has come under fire for resurfaced comments attacking “childless cat ladies” as “miserable” and bad for society; claiming that childless people tend to be “deranged” and “psychotic”; and proposing giving extra voting power to parents with young children.

“We have, I believe, a civilizational crisis in this country,” Vance said at the 2021 Napa Institute event. “Even among healthy, intact families, they’re not having enough kids such that we’re going to have a long-term future in this country.” For his Senate campaign, also in 2021, Vance praised Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán for policies that incentivized marriage and children. Orbán’s government had offered loans to married couples that were forgiven if the couple stayed together and had three children. (Orbán is not himself Catholic but has privileged Christianity in a country dominated by Catholicism.) “Why can’t we do that here?” Vance asked. “Why can’t we actually promote family formation?”

These anti-modern comments fit with a certain kind of worldview that prizes a traditional and family-oriented society above individual liberties—and even democracy. It’s a guiding philosophy of a new faction of the conservative movement that pulls from elements of both the left and far right, that champions populist economics and radically conservative social policies, and that promises a revolution in the entire political order: the postliberal right.

In recent years, a sect of the Republican Party has boomeranged away from libertarianism and toward Big Government. A set of young legislators, including Vance, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, and Josh Hawley, is snubbing the party’s policies favoring tech companies and big business, instead infusing the GOP with populist energy—and, in some cases, disdain for the liberal political order. (Liberalism here refers to the dominant political order of the modern world, with its emphasis on equality, personal liberty, and individual rights.) Those legislators who identify with the postliberal right advocate for state authority in order to build the kind of society they want to live in. They aim to control women’s reproductive choices and individual freedoms concerning gender, sexuality, and identity; they prefer isolationist economic policies; they support unions and labor protections and oppose immigration; and they seek to elevate religious organizations’ place in their schools and civic institutions.

A significant number of these legislators are influenced by Christian nationalism or philosophies that mirror the aims of Christian nationalism: to reclaim society and reorder it according to Christian values. The idea is to use soft power to gain control of the major secular institutions to align them with Christian aims, without too much concern for democratic processes.

At a practical level, we’ve seen this in the efforts in state legislatures to have schools display the Ten Commandments; in certain policy groups coming out to oppose no-fault divorce; in Florida’s restrictions on health care for transgender adults; in Project 2025’s plan to criminalize p*rn (or other materials deemed indecent that can be categorized as p*rn); in legal challenges to get prayer in public schools; and in Hawley’s proudly pronouncing himself to be “calling America a Christian nation.”

There’s a term for intellectual Catholics with a similar worldview: integralists. There’s no universally accepted platform uniting integralists; it’s more of an intellectual framework built around the idea that Catholic moral theology should govern society. Mat Schmalz, a religious studies professor at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, defined it simply as the idea of “integrating spiritual and worldly, or integrating church and state.” In other words: church before state.

Vance gave the keynote address at a 2022 conference organized by Sohrab Ahmari, another Catholic convert and conservative intellectual, at Franciscan University of Steubenville, in Ohio. The conference gathered integralist and so-called postliberal Catholic thinkers to discuss policies and tactics to bring the country in harmony with their understanding of Christian values. (Extreme proposals, such as a ban on commerce on Sundays, were floated alongside ideas often associated with the left, such as paid parental leave and antitrust action.) Ahmari has written two books laying out the case for his postliberal ideas. His particular vision of society would place a check on the destructive nature of modern capitalism and build a strong social safety net with financial support for struggling parents and people with disabilities and mental health struggles—but also banish abortion, p*rn, same-sex marriage, divorce, and drugs. Autonomy and individual liberty would be de-emphasized, meaning that people with addiction and mentally ill unhoused people would be given institutional care even if they didn’t want it.

That wasn’t an isolated incident for Vance: At a 2023 speech at the Catholic University of America by the postliberal scholar Patrick Deneen, Vance “strode into the room, made a bee-line for Deneen and wrapped him in an enthusiastic hug,” according to Politico. Deneen and Ahmari are two of the leading voices in a small group of Catholic scholars who frequently discuss and co-write treatises on integralist and postliberal ideas. Another, Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule (another Catholic convert), spoke at Ahmari’s 2022 conference that Vance attended.

Vance does not claim to be an integralist. We don’t know if he wants to put church over state or enmesh the two. But Schmalz thinks that Vance’s views, particularly around policing gender expression, indicate that he is at least “pulling from a Catholic integralist strain.”

At the Catholic University of America event, Politico reported, Vance identified as “a member of the ‘postliberal right.’” More recently, in the foreword he wrote for a book by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, another Catholic, recently republished by the New Republic, Vance praised Roberts for “articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics” that recognizes “that virtue and material progress go hand in hand.”

“Roberts sees a conservatism that is focused on the family,” Vance wrote about the architect of Project 2025. “In this, he borrows from the old American Right that recognized—correctly, in my view—that cultural norms and attitudes matter.”

Setting aside political debates among Catholic intellectuals, the Catholic Church itself is technically aligned with Vance’s stances. The church under Pope Francis certainly encourages a less individualistic outlook. And it shares Vance’s ideas about gender and family, as seen in its official ban on birth control—in practice ignored by the vast majority of Catholics—and in Francis’ declaration that it is “selfish” to have pets instead of children. (These men often, however, express dismay at Francis’ leadership, given the ways he has curtailed certain traditional worship practices and emphasized tolerance and compassion over policing sexual morality.)

The idea of forcing those values onto all of American society, through governmental policy, is what sets integralists apart from other traditionalist Catholics.

“It’s an idealization of the Middle Ages,” said Steven Millies, a professor of public theology at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. As Millies sees it, the efforts among conservatives to push “classical education” in schools and the efforts by traditionalist Catholics to worship with Latin masses, in the style of 16th-century Catholics, come from the same impulse. “All these things are selective rereading of the past.”

This longing for an imagined simple past, Millies said, is something that has drawn cultural reactionaries to the faith for decades. “You gaze at stained-glass windows and Gothic architecture and you look at the orderliness of a 2,000-year-old tradition, and it looks like a rock to cling to in the torrents of modern life,” he said. “The present is disturbing to people. They feel unprepared for it, overwhelmed by it.”

In Millies’ view, though, it doesn’t matter if Vance has a coherent articulation of some kind of postliberal political theology. Vance, he argues, isn’t so much buying into a niche Catholic ideology as advocating for collapsing the walls between church and state—perhaps in an effort to cope with the discomfort of the modern world—with some vaguely Christian reasoning built around that impulse. What matters more, Millies says, is that Vance is expressing a vision for taking us back in time to an imagined past. “It reflects a desire to regain control,” Millies said.

Vance, it seems, is optimistic the country is headed that way. As he said at the Napa conference: “I believe, I really do, that the next 30 years in this country is going to be really exciting, really prosperous, and really good for Christian virtue and the values that we care about.”