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Newt and I recently attended the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. On July 17th, we heard Ohio Senator J.D. Vance accept the Republican nomination for vice president and say, “My friends, tonight is a night of hope — a night to celebrate what America once was and, by God’s grace, what it will soon be again.”
In his acceptance speech, before thousands at Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum and millions watching from home, Vance shared his own experiences, articulated the values he lives by and vowed to fight for Americans who have been overlooked, forgotten or ignored.
Vance spoke of being raised by his Christian grandmother, “Mamaw,” in Middletown, Ohio, “a small town where people spoke their minds, built things with their hands, and loved God, family, community and country with all their hearts.”
Republican vice presidential nominee Senator J.D. Vance boards “Trump Force 2” at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport in Arizona on July 31, 2024. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
While Vance was raised surrounded by Christian beliefs and values in his youth (he had a highly respected Catholic uncle), he did not join the organized church until his teenage years.
Vance argues that social conservatives will always have a “seat” in the Republican Party when it comes to debates about faith.
As a young man, after reuniting with his father, Vance attended a large Pentecostal church: “I’m not sure whether I liked the structure of the church or whether I simply wanted to share something important to my father—probably both—but I became a devout believer,” he wrote in his best-selling autobiography, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
But Vance’s faith waned throughout his adolescence, as he explains in a nearly 7,000-word essay for The Lamp magazine titled “How I Joined the Resistance.” After completing his service in the Marines and attending Ohio State University, Vance abandoned his faith and claimed to be an atheist.
Surrounded by secularism in college, Vance was steeped in a culture that viewed faith as “provincial and stupid at best, and evil at worst,” so he got caught up in the “madness of the crowd” and abandoned his faith. “Much of my new atheism was born out of a desire to be socially accepted by the American elite,” he wrote.
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Vance acknowledged at the time that he had adopted a worldview tinged with arrogance, but doubts about his newfound understanding persisted throughout his undergraduate years and later law school.
For Vance, the “first crack” was [his] “Proverbial Armor” comes from St. Augustine’s Meditations, which he read while at Yale Law School, in which he pondered “the twin aspirations of success and character and how they clashed (and did not clash).”
This passage from St. Augustine criticizes man’s arrogant attempt to make the Bible conform to his own opinions, when man’s aim should be to conform his own opinions to the truth of the Bible.
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While Augustine gave Vance “a way to understand the Christian faith in a very intellectual way,” a lecture by Christian venture capitalist Peter Thiel at law school prompted him to rethink his goals and learn more about the Christian faith. Later, French philosopher René Girard’s work The Scapegoat Theory and What it Reveals about Christianity prompted Vance to “rethink the Christian faith.” [his] faith.”
After pondering faith and virtue, Vance sought out “a worldview that would make sense of our bad behavior” and ultimately realized he had “already been exposed to that worldview: Mamaw’s Christianity.”
In an essay for The Lamp, Vance discussed how reading St. Augustine’s portrayal of Roman debauchery in The City of God, studying policy analyst Oren Cass’s book that criticized the cult of consumerism, and learning from Dominican friars all contributed to his eventual decision to become Catholic.
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Vance wrote about his conversion: “I realized that there was a part of me that was inspired by Catholicism, the best part of me. … The Catholic part of my heart and mind was asking me to think about the things that really mattered. … And I needed grace; in other words, I needed to be Catholic, not just think.”
J.D. Vance entered the Catholic Church in August 2019. His lifelong path to Catholicism has been an inspiring and motivating journey of faith.
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