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

On Jul 29, 2024

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JD Vance’s beloved grandmother — Mamaw, as he called her — hated organized religion, didn’t go to church and hung a drawing of Jesus in her house that presented him as a kind everyman. So when Vance became drawn to Catholicism, with its hierarchy, intellectual rigor and art showing an imperial Jesus, he said, he worried what his late grandmother would think.

“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…