Other than Chicago native Pope Leo XIV, Vice President JD Vance is probably the nation’s most well-known Catholic figure. And, as Vance’s new book shows, he is not afraid to make his faith a major facet of his public persona — something that would have been taboo just a few years ago.
It was only 100 years ago that Catholics were persecuted alongside African and Jewish-Americans by the Ku Klux Klan. In more recent times, American Catholics have come to hold a unique position in American political life.
Catholic voters, for example, have decided the presidential election since George W. Bush in 2004. Both President Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024 and President Joe Biden in 2020 succeeded in winning a majority of Catholic voters. Since about 1 in 5 American adults identifies as Catholic, it’s no wonder that the Catholic vote has so much sway.
On top of this massive shift in demographics in the last few decades, the Trump administration is increasingly filling top government positions with American Catholics. Other than Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe are all Roman Catholics. In the Supreme Court, six of the nine justices identify as Catholic.
The vice president has been very open about his Catholic faith for that reason: In his mind, if he can secure a positive sentiment among Catholic voters, he will be on the fast track to the White House.
However, it would be disingenuous to treat Vance’s faith journey solely through the lens of political pandering. Instead, it is better understood as one instance of the “Catholic moment” that America has entered.
Even before the publication of Vance’s new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, Vance spoke openly about his Catholic faith. In a 2020 article for the Catholic magazine The Lamp titled “How I Joined the Resistance,” Vance covered his falling away from evangelical Christianity before he eventually found faith in the Catholic Church.
Interestingly, Vance’s conversion story does not center on any overtly supernatural experiences. Instead, he bases his faith on a movement of the mind back to what he grew up learning from his “Mamaw.”
In a similar vein, Vance, speaking with podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey on Friday, said that “[Mamaw and I] didn’t really have a church community. Occasionally, we’d go to church, but not that often. And so, one of the things I’ve realized in hindsight is that Mamaw was my link to Christianity.”
Vance continued by saying that, as he was joining the Marine Corps in his early 20s, he fell away from Christianity largely due to the death of his Mamaw, which was strengthened by the secularism of students at Ohio State University.
Finally, Vance wrote, “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.”
Although he has his rational and theological reasons, a lot of Vance’s faith journey stems from the people he surrounded himself with — whether that was a Jesus-loving evangelical grandma, Ohio State atheists, or Rene Girard-reading intellectuals.
For Vance — and thousands of new Catholic converts every year — a main reason for converting is a sense of community, not just theology.
Some commentators have tried to dismiss Vance’s conversion story as little more than hypocritical pandering to a broad Christian audience. Vance is surely aware of his audience. But the more important point is what his conversion reveals: Catholic intellectual and cultural life in America has grown strong enough to reach even atheist students at Yale.
This shift is what CatholicVote President Kelsey Reinhardt, drawing from a prominent Catholic theologian, calls a unique “Catholic moment.” Reinhardt’s organization is a conservative Catholic non-profit focused on encouraging Catholics to participate on the public stage.
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“Now is the time for faithful Catholics to bring their full intellectual, moral, and cultural inheritance to bear on America’s future,” Reinhardt said recently in a speech at an event in Washington, D.C.
As a part of this Catholic moment, Vance’s faith journey is both a product of the times and likely a catalyst for future demographic change.