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.
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:
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."
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.
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.
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