How J D Vance found his way to the Catholic church

Cincinnati: From his new home in Cincinnati, JD Vance would go to St. Gertrude to meet the friar.

It was a fitting place for the millennial aspiring politician, who was drawn to the Catholic Church’s ancient ways. For years he had flirted with joining the church. Now he wanted to explore the desire in earnest.

St. Gertrude Church was led by the Dominican Friars from the Province of St. Joseph, part of a religious order founded in 1216. Its sanctuary smelled of incense but felt modern, its concrete walls pierced with bright stained-glass rectangles in reds and blues.

Vance would meet with the Rev. Henry Stephan. For months, they read works of theology, mysticism, and political and moral philosophy. Sometimes they went for coffee or lunch. It was bespoke private instruction, a hallmark of Dominicans who are known for their lives of intellect and study.

Then, one summer day in 2019, Vance, then 35, returned to St. Gertrude, this time to be baptized and receive his first Communion in the Dominicans’ private chapel. The friars hosted a celebratory reception for his family with doughnuts. He chose as his patron St. Augustine, the political theologian whose fifth-century treatise City of God challenged Rome’s ruling class and drew Vance to the faith.

“It was the best criticism of our modern age I’d ever read,” Vance later explained in a Catholic literary journal. “A society oriented entirely towards consumption and pleasure, spurning duty and virtue.”

Much has been made of Vance’s very public conversion to Trumpism, and his seemingly mutable political stances. But his quieter, private conversion to Catholicism, occurring over a similar stretch of years, reveals some core values at the heart of his personal and political philosophy and their potential impact on the country.

Becoming Catholic for Vance, who was loosely raised as an evangelical, was a practical way to counter what he saw as elite values, especially secularism. He was drawn not just to the church’s theological ideas, but to its teachings on family and social order and its desire to instill virtue in modern society.

That worldview served as a counterpoint to much of his messy childhood, and meshed with his own criticisms of contemporary America, from what he saw as the abandonment of workers to the unhappiness of “childless cat ladies.” It has also infused his politics, which seeks to advance a family-oriented, socially conservative future through economic populism and by standing with abortion opponents.

Converting to Catholicism was joining “the resistance,” he wrote in the Catholic journal.

This portrait of Vance’s Catholic conversion and beliefs is drawn from dozens of his public remarks and writings, and interviews with Catholics in his religious and intellectual circles in Ohio and Washington. Vance declined to comment for this story, as did Stephan, and several other thinkers and converts close to the candidate.

“My views on public policy and what the optimal state should look like are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching,” Vance said in an interview with Rod Dreher, a conservative writer and Orthodox Christian who attended his baptism. “I saw a real overlap between what I would like to see and what the Catholic Church would like to see.”

A new generation

Catholics of every generation debate how to best express church teaching. If President Joe Biden, who was raised Catholic, represents the working class and social justice-oriented Catholicism that defined his era, Vance reflects the traditionalist wing of the church that has taken root in his own generation.

His small, energetic world of conservative Catholic intellectuals, lawyers and politicians prioritizes its traditional views on family, as well as the public value of Christianity. It sees allies in people like Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

And this slice of the Christian movement has grown and increased in power in Republican circles, even as its views seem out of step with the American mainstream.

Yet on a personal level, Vance’s turn to Catholicism was tied to his maturation: graduating from Yale Law School, falling in love and marrying his classmate Usha Chilukuri, becoming a father and figuring out his professional aspirations.

He began to assess the elite, academic world around him.

“I would be judged on, did I get a Supreme Court clerkship, did I work at a fancy bank or consulting or law firm,” he said in a 2021 podcast. “I just realized to myself, this is an incredibly hollow and even gross way to think about character and virtue.”

He had a different set of questions, particularly after his troubled childhood: “How do you be a better husband, a better man, a better father?” he asked in the 2021 podcast. “How do you build a sense of masculinity that is protective and defensive and aggressive but isn’t just showy? Elites don’t care at all about the difference between men and women and how we need to inculcate masculine virtues and feminine virtues. But Christianity really does.”

His conversion happened at a time when many American Catholics have been returning to traditionalist practices, including the old Latin Mass, largely against Pope Francis’ wishes. Speaking to the Napa Institute, a conservative Catholic-oriented network, during his Senate run in 2021, Vance said he is “not a big Latin Mass guy,” though he really liked the stability of a church that was “just really old,” standing against the flux of the modern world.

Vance is also part of the changing coalition of conservative Christians in Republican politics. Traditional social conservatives, like Donald Trump’s first vice presidential pick, Mike Pence, emphasized personal morality and social causes like fighting against abortion rights and same-sex marriage.

Vance joined a stream of Catholic converts working to reshape Republican politics, challenging free market principles and championing the welfare of workers.

“Look, my basic view is that if the Republican Party, if the conservative movement stands for anything — and I’m running as a politician trying to advocate for what we should stand for — the No. 1 thing that we should be is pro-babies and pro-families,” he said at the Napa event. “That’s what this whole thing is all about.”

At an evangelical prayer breakfast with anti-abortion supporters the week of the Republican National Convention, he suggested that he and Trump would be with them in a second term, despite their apparent softening on abortion.

And he told the room he saw the hand of God in the failed assassination attempt of Trump. “You will never be able to convince me that that last-second turn of a head was anything other than a miracle,” he said. “I absolutely believe that.”

Path to Catholicism

Growing up, Vance rarely went to church but absorbed the lived Christianity of his grandmother. “In the broken world I saw around me — and for the people struggling in that world — religion offered tangible assistance to keep the faithful on track,” he wrote in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

As an adolescent, he went to his father’s church, where he was immersed in evangelical teaching. He learned to defend young-Earth creationism, abandon his Black Sabbath music, anticipate the rapture and try to convert people, like his seventh-grade science teacher who was Muslim. He became “pro-life” at age 14. He said that Christianity provided structure and “moral pressure” to his father, and to him.

“Not drinking, treating people well, working hard, and so forth, requires a lot of willpower when you didn’t grow up in privilege,” he said in a 2016 interview with Dreher. “That feeling — whether it’s real or entirely fake — that there’s something divine helping you and directing your mind and body, is extraordinarily powerful.”

By the time he started Yale Law School, after joining the Marines and graduating Ohio State, he had been through an “angry, atheist phase,” he said in a later interview with Dreher, where he rejected the anti-intellectualism of his family’s Christianity. But he encountered Catholic groups at Yale, and his own intellectual curiosity grew. He also admired the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known for its family focus, in part because of its emphasis on community.

In Washington, he connected with a Yale Law alumnus who had become a priest at the Dominican House of Studies. Before joining the order, the Rev. Dominic Legge had clerked for Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. And he was the first priest with whom Vance discussed becoming Catholic.

The Dominican House of Studies is known in Washington for attracting a conservative intellectual crowd, and potential converts who hold high professional positions. “Like Nicodemus, they come knocking on the door at night,” said the Rev. Aquinas Guilbeau, a Dominican priest.

In 2016, to commemorate the 800th anniversary of the order’s founding, the Dominican House of Studies hosted a celebration with speakers including Supreme Court Justices Alito and Antonin Scalia, as well as guests like conservative activist Leonard Leo. Some of the younger Dominicans formed a bluegrass band called the Hillbilly Thomists, taking their name not from Vance’s book, but from a quote from Flannery O’Connor, the Southern gothic novelist.

When Vance moved to Cincinnati in 2018, Legge connected him with Stephan at St. Gertrude Church. As a Princeton undergraduate, Stephan had interned with O’Scannlain, who suggested he become a Catholic priest.

St. Gertrude is hub for the order in the region — the place where Dominican novices, the young men considering joining the order, spend their first year before going to the House of Studies in Washington.

Designed by an architect in the 1960s determined to counter the “God is dead” philosophy of his time, St. Gertrude was built to show that the church could be both modern and deeply rooted in the past. On summer evenings, friars hosted “Drinking With Dominicans” at a local bar to explore the thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas. It advertised retreats for husbands and fathers on how to become “a courageous leader for your family and in your workplace.”

And like Vance, it is deeply opposed to abortion. Parishioners bring their own hammers to pound thousands of small white “crosses of the innocents” into the lawn to commemorate children not born.

Adults who convert to Catholicism tend to be known for their zealous commitment to their new worldviews. They are rare, just 2 per cent of the adult population, according to the Pew Research Center. And for every 1 new convert, 6 Catholic adults have left the church.

Vance worried about joining a church mired in yet another sexual abuse crisis, and that his conversion might be “unfair” to his wife, who had not married a Catholic, he wrote. She was supportive, he often pointed out, and saw it made him a better father and husband, more forgiving and patient.

And, as with many conversions, there is often an element of mystery that can be hard for those on the outside to understand.

On that 2021 podcast, he described his pull toward the church. Riding a train to Washington, missing his wife and young son, he listened to a beloved recording of a priest chanting an old psalm in Aramaic during Pope Francis’ visit to Georgia in 2016. He went to the Dominican House to meet a priest for midday prayers — and heard the same psalm.

“‘The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. Corrupt are they, and have done abominable iniquity: there is none that doeth good,’” the psalm reads, according to a translation from Dreher. It felt, he wrote, like a “touch from God.”

After Vance’s conversion, he had planned to write a second book to be called, A Relevant Faith: Searching for a Meaningful American Christianity. But after he won his Senate primary, his publisher announced that the deal would not proceed.

Instead, he is raising his three children in the Catholic Church, and bringing his views directly to the American political stage.