Just over eight years ago, Donald Trump announced Mike Pence as his running mate. The choice was seen as an olive branch to the insiders of the Republican Party who appreciated Pence as a classical conservative with rock solid right-wing policy views. Pence also represented a salvo for white evangelicals still unsure of voting for Trump. “’I’m a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican — in that order,” Pence proclaimed in his acceptance speech. As Richard Land, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, told The Atlantic, “Mike Pence is the 24-karat-gold model of what we want in an evangelical politician. I don’t know anyone who’s more consistent in bringing his evangelical Christian worldview to public policy.”
Critics railed against Pence’s record on abortion rights, his opposition to gay marriage, and his response to an AIDS crisis in Indiana while he was governor. Yet, regardless of who you asked, one thing was clear: Mike Pence was a Christian conservative chosen to represent white evangelicals and their allies in the White House.
Just over a week ago, Trump announced J.D. Vance as his running mate for the 2024 election. Vance, a first-term senator from Ohio, has been largely seen as a choice bolstering Trump’s outsider image — a young Midwestern firebrand who would bring Silicon Valley money and youthful energy to the ticket. What has gone largely unnoticed is that Vance is a more radical religious politician than Pence, even though the latter was hailed as the “Christian” candidate. Though Vance’s Catholicism has barely registered as a driving factor in his political profile, it serves as an interpretive key for understanding why Vance was chosen and how he brings a populist radicalism to a potential second Trump presidency.
In 2019, Vance was received into the Catholic Church. He grew up with exposure to Christian churches, but by the time he entered law school described himself as an angry atheist. However, on Vances’ telling, Catholicism began to appeal to him because of its intellectual approach to faith and human life. He was also influenced by his first encounter with PayPal founder and leader of the Silicon Valley Reactionary Right, Peter Thiel, who convinced him that social ladder-climbing and endless pursuits of wealth were empty in comparison to living a life of significance and meaning.
Soon after he converted, Vance ran for Senate in Ohio. In 2021, the newly converted candidate spoke to the Napa Institute, a network of conservative Catholics who are known for defying the Pope, largely opposed to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, and backed by billionaire donors who are sympathetic to a Christian nationalist vision. In his speech, Vance griped that “the business community is actively pro-abortion in this country.” His solution would be to take active measures against businesses that use their First Amendment rights to express pro-choice positions. “If our answer is to continue to give more power to the business community that’s combating our values, what we’re doing is sacrificing the life of the unborn and our future on the altar of these companies.” As Rick Pidcock points out, the Napa Institute is such an extremist organization that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops ended its affiliation with the group in part because event agendas included a prayer invoking divine “continuance on our cause and our people,” using the words of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, and “questioning the authenticity of the Civil Rights movement.”
In the same year, Vance also appeared at a signature meeting for Teneo, an organization started by Evan Baehr — another Thiel acolyte — and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). Talking about the Texas abortion bounty law, Vance complained that “virtually every major big corporation in this country felt the need to issue a statement in support of not the unborn babies, but in support of people who might want to abort them.” Then he said: “If we’re unwilling to make companies that are taking the side of the left in the culture wars feel real economic pain, then we’re not serious about winning the culture war.”
Baehr, Hawley, and Thiel envision Teneo as a Federalist Society for venture capitalists. Vance is reportedly a member. The organization was fledgling until Leonard Leo stepped in to raise funds. Leo, who according to 2022 filings has served on the board of the NAapa Institute Legal Foundation and the Napa Institute Legal Foundation, is the infamous leader of the actual Federalist Society, who shepherded Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees to the bench, stepped in a few years ago. Now Teneo is funded by money from Leo’s dark money networks, the Charles Koch Foundation, the DeVos family and other big donors. The group is Leo’s new conduit for imposing his conservative Catholic agenda on American culture and institutions.
During this time, Vance also became close to the Catholic postliberal philosopher Patrick Deneen, who appeared with Vance and Heritage Foundation leader Kevin Roberts (also a reactionary Catholic) in May 2023 to launch Deneen’s book, Regime Change. At the event, Deneen called for something more radical than January 6th: a complete toppling of the current American order. “I don’t want to violently overthrow the government,” he said. “I want something far more revolutionary.” Deneen proposes an “aristopopulism,” in which the virtuous elite provide order and structure to public life in order to ensure the flourishing of the ordinary citizens who cannot provide it for themselves. The benevolent oligarchs are thus tasked with keeping the common good intact so that hoi polloi can enjoy the good life — even if they don’t know or believe or experience it as such.
Deneen’s “common good conservatism” is a move away from Ronald Reagan’s conservative fusionism — which combines the conservative Christian foundations of family, faith, and military strength with the libertarian idea that government is not the answer, but the problem — toward an imposition of a certain vision of the common good on all Americans through government. But Deneens’ view of the common good doesn’t include everyone. He opposes gay marriage, wants stricter laws on divorce, denounces CRT, and mocks health care for trans people as absurd. Deneen lauds authoritarian Viktor Orban’s Hungary as a place where the state actively cultivates political and moral order. “The role of the government,” writes political scientist Chelsea Ebin about Deneen and other postliberal Catholics, “is not to preserve individual rights and manage competing interpretations of the good but to impose and enforce a singular conception of the good through the regulation of social relations.”
Vance has signaled his sympathies with Deneen’s approach many times — appearing with him publicly and citing his influence. Deneen put out a statement when Vance was announced as Trump’s running mate: “J.D. combines a dedication to domestic productivity, foreign policy realism, and a deep commitment to strengthening American families and the communities that sustain them. He is a man of deep personal faith and integrity, a devoted family man, a generous friend, and a genuine patriot.” Laura K. Field, Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center, told me in an email that intellectually Vance “is closest to postliberals and Catholics like Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, and Sohrab Ahmari. They want to legislate morality (as they conceive of it), and the postliberals generally use the language of ‘the common good’ to capture this moral objective.”
Vance also has a strong bond with Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation and a fellow reactionary Catholic with close ties to Opus Dei. The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, architect of the Religious Right, a “radical right-wing movement,” and a Catholic who rejected the Second Vatican Council. Weyrich’s mission was to revolutionize American politics through what Ebin labels “the insertion of Catholic morality into American politics.”
As current head of the Heritage Foundation, Roberts is extending Weyrich’s legacy. He said in a recent interview that there would be a second “American revolution that would remain bloodless if the Left allowed it.” Project 2025, published by the Heritage Foundation, is a handbook for the next Trump presidency — and a guidebook for the founding of a new America. It is in essence, Project 2025 is a 922-page blueprint for an American regime change by way of an unchecked executive branch — what one might see as a practical application of the type of common good conservatism articulated philosophically by Deneen. When Vance was announced as Trump’s running mate, Roberts said: “He understands the moment we are in this country, which is that we have a limited amount of time to implement great policy on behalf of forgotten Americans, someone J.D. Vance personifies. At Heritage, we could not be happier.” The admiration goes both ways. Vance wrote the foreword to Roberts’ forthcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light.
The influences of Thiel, Leo, and Deneen on Vance’s approaches to government and policy are clear. Vance’s 2019 speech at Natcon appeared in print in First Things, the flagship publication of reactionary Catholic thought. It’s titled “Beyond Libertarianism,” and is a reflection on the ways that the government should play a role in shaping American social and cultural life:
We live in an environment that’s shaped by our laws and public policy, and we cannot hide from that fact anymore. I think the question conservatives confront at this key moment is this: Whom do we serve? Do we serve pure, unfettered commercial freedom? Do we serve commerce at the expense of the public good? Or do we serve something higher? And are we willing to use political power to actually accomplish those things?
In another era, a conservative viewing government as the answer to human problems would have been unthinkable. But for Vance, the solution to what he sees as the decline of the American dream is more government shaping the country actively in service of a higher power. The common good, in other words, needs to be lawfully implemented upon the nation for it to be ordered rightly. Following Deneen, Vance sees the government’s role not as progress toward a society where humans can exercise their rights freely, but where humans are structured by their government in order to live in accordance with God’s divine order.
In 2022, Vance spoke at a conference at Franciscan University with the intellectual luminaries of common good conservatism. On one panel, theologian Chad Pecknold argued that the way toward civic happiness “is a public orientation to God” through the restoration of Sabbath laws, religious national holidays, and public liturgies.
Vance seems to resonate with such sentiments, even if his rhetoric is more politically measured.
“We have to recognize that America is not just a principle. It is a group of people. It’s a history. It’s a culture. And yeah, part of that story is that people can come and assimilate,” Vance said in a 2024 interview at First Things. “But if your attitude is that . . . the only thing you need to become an American is to believe that with a little bit of hormonal therapy a man can become a woman, then you’re making it so that massive numbers of your own country either need to be re-educated, or need to be cast out of the political community.”
As the Catholic theologian Massimo Faggioli puts it, “For Vance, Christianity and the church are not the problem but the solution to the ills of the political-religious project called the United States of America.”
One of the reasons Vance was chosen to be Trump’s running mate is that since entering the Senate in 2022 he has become a reliable MAGA spokesperson. Vance is often better than Trump himself at outlining policies related to Ukraine, trade and tariffs, and reproductive rights. He also seems to be up to the task that Mike Pence wasn’t — not certifying the election results if necessary. But he is not simply an instrument for achieving Trump’s MAGA coronation. He’s the vanguard of a new religious populism Roberts, Deneen, Leo, and others believe will right the nation.
“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said to the journalist James Pogue. In doing so, Pogue observes, he “evoked the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. Vance continued: “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
On a 2021 appearance on the Jack Murphy podcast, Vance reiterated a position from the reactionary monarchist Curtis Yarvin to fire government employees.
“I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” said Vance. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single mid level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say . . . the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
Yarvin is a self-proclaimed monarchist; the house philosopher of Thiel’s entourage; and someone who has remarked that the end of democracy would be joyous. He wants an American king to rule a post-constitutional America.
Following the blueprint of Silicon Valley monarchists like Yarvin, Project 2025 architects like Roberts, and D.C. chaos agents like Steve Bannon, Vance favors a unified executive branch that has incredible power over the federal government. In essence, he envisions a chief executive with the power to make sweeping changes to American life through government policy, executive orders, and institutional reform. “I think the basic idea is that we have to seize the institutions and make them actually work for our people,” he said in a 2023 interview.
In this sense, Vance is not a complement to Trump’s MAGA agenda. He is the bridge to something more radical — a religious populism intent on bending the United States into a narrow reactionary Catholic, and perhaps monarchical, order. “Trump will, at most, serve four years in the White House,” Vance told Ian Ward in March of 2024. “There is a big question about what comes after him.”
If Trump was crowned the MAGA messiah at the 2024 Republican convention, then it seems Vance is the apostle who will bring forth a conservative vision more extreme than even the MAGA Chosen One imagines.
“You know, Jesus played the small rooms until St. Paul came around,” Bannon told Ward. “It took the zeal of St. Paul to turn Jesus into a headliner.”
And Mike Pence, the embodiment of Christian conservatism and Reaganite dreams, can do nothing more than watch from home. When the January 6th mob erected gallows for the then-vice president, they didn’t succeed in hanging him. But it does seem that on that day one brand of American conservatism — fusionism — was finally put to rest and a violent religious populism took the throne. This is not a crusade for a Christian nation. It’s a march toward American Christendom. Vance is the political symbol of that movement — even if there are growing doubts about whether he was the right pick. For now he’s running to be vice president. Someday, he (or someone like him) may try to be king.
God, save us all.
