Trump picks Catholic Ohio senator JD Vance as his running mate
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It's official: Trump's vice presidential pick is the junior senator from Ohio, JD Vance — a Catholic.
Trump made the announcement in a post on Truth Social on Monday afternoon, shortly after the 2024 Republican National Convention got underway in Milwaukee.
"After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator JD Vance of the Great State of Ohio. JD honorably served our Country in the Marine Corps, graduated from Ohio State University in two years, Summa Cum Laude, and is a Yale Law School Graduate, where he was Editor of The Yale Law Journal, and President of the Yale Law Veterans Association. JD's book, 'Hillbilly Elegy,' became a Major Best Seller and Movie, as it championed the hardworking men and women of our Country. JD has had a very successful business career in Technology and Finance, and now, during the Campaign, will be strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond ...."
Senator Vance is the sixth Catholic to be nominated for the vice presidency by a major US political party; if elected on Nov. 5, he will become just the second Catholic vice president in American history, after Joe Biden.
ATTRACTED BY AUGUSTINE
A convert to the Faith from Protestantism, Vance was baptized and received into the Catholic Church on August 11, 2019, just days after his thirty-fifth birthday.
In an interview with Rod Dreher published that same day, Vance explained how he came to embrace Catholicism.
"I became persuaded over time that Catholicism was true. I was raised Christian, but never had a super-strong attachment to any denomination, and was never baptized," Vance recalled. "When I became more interested in faith, I started out with a clean slate, and looked at the church that appealed most to me intellectually."
Among other influences, Vance credited the theology of St. Augustine with opening his eyes to the Faith:
"I was pretty moved by the Confessions. I’ve probably read it in bits and pieces twice over the past 15 or so years. There’s a chapter from The City of God that’s incredibly relevant now that I’m thinking about policy. There’s just a way that Augustine is an incredibly powerful advocate for the things that the Church believes.
I had come from a world that wasn’t super-intellectual about the Christian faith. I spend a lot of my time these days among a lot of intellectual people who aren’t Christian. Augustine gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way. I also went through an angry atheist phase. 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."
In an April 1, 2020 article titled, "How I Joined the Resistance," Vance reflected on the role his Protestant grandmother played, indirectly, in his journey toward the Church.
"I often wonder what my grandmother — Mamaw, as I called her — would have thought about her grandson becoming Catholic," Vance reflected. "We used to argue about religion constantly. She was a woman of deep, but completely de-institutionalized, faith."
"Mamaw seemed not to care much about Catholics," he noted. "Her younger daughter had married one, and she thought him a good man. She felt their way of worshipping was rather formal and peculiar, but what mattered to her was Jesus ... the Catholic she knew cared about Jesus, and that was all right with her."
"Despite my Mamaw’s unfamiliarity with the liturgy, the Roman and Italian cultural influences, and the foreign pope, I slowly began to see Catholicism as the closest expression of her kind of Christianity: obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims; protective of children and families and with the things necessary to ensure they thrive. And above all: a faith centered around a Christ who demands perfection of us even as He loves unconditionally and forgives easily."
PERCEPTIONS AND POSITIONS
Though Vance was a bitter critic of Trump in 2016, over time he repositioned himself in the president's corner, and today, many on the Right see him as an ideal representative of the America First/MAGA philosophy.
Tucker Carlson, for example, is on record as saying: "Every bad person I've ever met in a lifetime in Washington was aligned against JD Vance."
Carlson explains that DC elites loathe the senator, as they find him "harder to manipulate and slightly less enthusiastic about killing people" via the machinery of the military-industrial complex.
Vance is opposed to funneling billions more taxpayer dollars to Ukraine, but strongly supports Israel in its war against Hamas terrorists.
The senator has been lambasted as an "isolationist and economic populist" by some in the Establishment media, while others accuse him of "playing the game" to gain Trump's trust and position himself to gain greater power.
UNORTHODOXY: REPUBLICAN VS. CATHOLIC
Undoubtedly, a distinguishing feature of Vance's politics is that he appears less beholden to Republican orthodoxy on certain economic matters than preceding generations of GOP leaders. But the senator simply chalks this up to his faith.
"My views on public policy and what the optimal state should look like are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching," Vance told Dreher in his 2019 interview. "That was one of the things that drew me to the Catholic Church."
"I saw a real overlap between what I would like to see and what the Catholic Church would like to see. I hope my faith makes me more compassionate and to identify with people who are struggling," Vance said.
"I think the Republican Party has been too long a partnership between social conservatives and market libertarians, and I don't think social conservatives have benefited too much from that partnership," the senator explained to Dreher. "Part of social conservatism's challenge for viability in the 21st century is that it can't just be about issues like abortion, but it has to have a broader vision of political economy, and the common good."
Vance reiterated this perspective in a May interview with Matthew Schmitz, suggesting that too often, some conservatives look past economic factors that work against family stability.
"I saw a lot of marriages fall apart," he said. "It wasn't always because of financial reasons, but that was a big part of it. So if you believe in the sanctity of marriage, one of the things you want is families that are more stable financially."
"The core Christian insight into politics is that life is inherently dignified and valuable," Vance continued. "If you actually believe that, you want certain legal protections for the most vulnerable people in your society, but you also want to ensure that workers get a fair wage when they do a fair job."
"You want to make sure that people don't have their town poisoned because they happen to live next to a railway line," the senator added, alluding to the February 2023 rail disaster in East Palestine, Ohio.
"When we think about Christian conservatism, we think of sanctity of marriage, sanctity of life. Of course these things are important and I certainly believe the Church’s teachings on all of these things. And yet, there’s an entire Christian moral and economic worldview that is completely cut out of modern American politics, and I think it’s important to try to bring that back."
Though Vance has repeatedly tipped his hat to the sanctity of life, one of the senator's recent pronouncements has many pro-lifers seeing red.
As Souls and Liberty reported last week, during a July 7 appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," Vance said that he supports preserving the availability of the abortion pill mifepristone for American women.
"This tawdry episode informs us that Vance has no principles, at least none that aren't for sale, and the asking price is cheap," CJ Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, lamented afterward.
How Vance will make his wider mark on the United States is yet to be seen, but pro-lifers will be watching closely. Bucking Republican orthodoxy on economic and fiscal matters is one thing — departing from Catholic orthodoxy on abortion is quite another.
Writer, editor and producer Stephen Wynne has spent the past seven years covering, from a Catholic perspective, the latest developments in the Church, the nation and the world. Prior to his work in journalism, he spent eight years co-authoring “Repairing the Breach,” a book examining the war of worldviews between Christianity and Darwinism. A Show-Me State native, he holds a BA in Creative Writing from Pepperdine University and an Executive MBA from the Bloch School of Business at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Vance is not AmericaFirst but IsraelFirst! Typical political problem in USA. 🤔😬🔯
Please take your vitrol to some raadical leftist site, who will relish the hatred that you spew. Looking for another assassination attempt? Are the haters in this nation ever going to learn that they too are human? You want one man to be perfect, before him ever being in office. The self-righteouness is disgustingly convicting.
OK conservative Catholics, shoot yourselves in the foot. He's a newer Catholic and probably believes more Catholic teachings than the Pope or his bishop. People grow in their faith as they are challenged. Just pray for him, offer a Communion for him and get on with it. Many of you brought us Biden and he's a "Pope Approved" genuine " lying - sack -0f - XXXX! "