Vice President J.D. Vance Could Spark a Religious Revival
Critic of Wall Street, Iraq War is no country-club Republican
In choosing Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio as his running mate, President Trump has picked a politician with an unusually acute sense of the interaction between religion, culture, and politics. In “Hillbilly Elegy,” the book that skyrocketed Vance to national fame, Vance writes that his grandmother “always had two gods: Jesus Christ and the United States of America. I was no different, and neither was anyone else I knew.”
In the same book, Vance writes, “Religious folks are much happier. Regular church attendees commit fewer crimes, are in better health, live longer, make more money, drop out of high school less frequently, and finish college more frequently than those who don’t attend church at all.” He goes on, “The juxtaposition is jarring: Religious institutions remain a positive force in people’s lives, but in a part of the country slammed by the decline of manufacturing, joblessness, addiction, and broken homes, church attendance has fallen off.”
In a May 2024 article in First Things, “JD Vance, Religious Populist,” Matthew Schmitz describes him as “perhaps the most eloquent champion of a new Christian approach to politics—one that is less conventionally conservative, and more populist.”
“There’s an entire Christian moral and economic worldview that is completely cut out of modern American politics, and I think it’s important to try to bring that back,” Vance, 39, who is Catholic, told Schmitz:
“The core Christian insight into politics is that life is inherently dignified and valuable,” he says. “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”—a reference to the rail disaster in East Palestine, Ohio….He has sponsored a rail safety bill with Sherrod Brown, limits on bank executive compensation with Elizabeth Warren, and the elimination of corporate-merger tax breaks with Sheldon Whitehouse—all Democrats.
I’m far more hawkish and internationalist on foreign policy than Vance is, and I’m far more free-market-oriented on economic policy. I find it encouraging, though that Vance is giving interviews to journals like First Things, a small, religiously oriented policy journal.
And I find Vance’s personal story, from a serious working-class background of not knowing what silverware to use or what clothing to wear, to the Senate and the Republican vice presidential nomination, to be a remarkable American upward-mobility story. Mitt Romney’s father was George Romney, the governor of Michigan, chairman of American Motors Corp., and a 1968 Republican presidential candidate. George W. Bush’s father was President George H.W. Bush, whose father was Senator Prescott Bush. J.D. Vance’s father, Don Bowman, gave him up for adoption; his stepfather, Bob Hamel, was “a high school dropout who drove a truck for a living.” Also, “half of his teeth had rotted out, and the other half were black, brown, and misshapen.” Vance’s mom had a drinking problem and attempted suicide, according to “Hillbilly Elegy.”
That Vance wound up a Yale Law graduate and a U.S. senator and a vice presidential nominee is a long-shot miracle on the order of that bullet not doing more serious damage on Saturday to Donald Trump. If this ticket does want to help encourage a religious revival of America as part of an overall renewal, Vance’s own personal story may help inspire it. At the very least, it’s a reminder that for all of America’s problems, we’re still a land of opportunity.
Earlier coverage of Vance: I’ve had my eye on Vance for some time. In an October 2016 column in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, “What Will the Post-Trump Republican Party Look Like,” I wrote, “The donor class — New York and Connecticut and Florida money managers, Texas oil men, Washington lobbyists — is drawn to candidates such as Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney who aren’t as good as Trump at sensing and conveying the anger and dismay of blue-collar or low-wage workers in the Rust Belt, Appalachia and the Deep South. Rural, religious conservative voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina may be looking for something different in a presidential candidate than are their fellow Republicans in Palm Beach, Fla., or Greenwich, Conn….If there’s hope to be found, it’s in the careers of those — Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, “Hillbilly Elegy” author and Marine Corps veteran turned Silicon Valley investor J.D. Vance — whose upwardly mobile biographies bridge the Republican base and its elites.”
In a January 2018 column for the New Boston Post, “Politicians on ‘Daddy Track’ Have Feminists to Thank,” I wrote about Vance’s decision not to run for Senate in Ohio. “I thought seriously about running in August 2017, but decided that the timing was awful for my young family,” Vance wrote then. “I’ve still got a family that needs more of my time than a political campaign would permit.”
In a June 2023 column for Newsmax, I took note of a tweet by Vance excoriating my former Forward and New York Sun colleague Eli Lake for a Commentary article about the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War. I wrote, “A Republican senator from Ohio, J.D. Vance, mocked a Commentary article by Eli Lake about the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War by tweeting, ‘The failure of our elites to own up to failures in Iraq proves that the country most in need of regime change is ours. These same people are the main drivers of our Ukraine policy. In a sane country they'd spend the rest of their lives begging their fellow citizens for forgiveness and warning against repeating their mistakes. Instead they're running a victory lap. It's gross.’”
And in a May 30, 2024, column for the New York Sun, I reported on Vance’s May 23, 2024, keynote address at a Quincy Institute conference.
“I am supportive of Israel in their war against Hamas,” Mr. Vance said to that group. “I certainly admire the Ukrainians who are fighting against Russia, but I do not think it is in America’s interest to continue to fund an effectively never-ending war in Ukraine.”
Mr. Vance said spreading democracy around the world is not in America’s interest. “That’s preposterous,” he said. Later, he called it “crazy.”
“Traditional neoconservative foreign policy keeps on leading to the genocide of Christians,” he said.
“The Israelis are doing the most important work to actually give us missile defense parity. That’s a very important objective,” he said.
Regarding the war in Ukraine, Mr. Vance said the Europeans aren’t carrying their fair share of the burden.
Mr. Vance caricatured and denounced neoconservatism: “I think the neoconservative approach to China is sort of the dumbest of all possible solutions: they want the Chinese to manufacture all of our stuff and they also want to go to war with China.”
How the press handled it: There’s nothing like breaking news headlines online to demonstrate where a newspaper is coming from. The Wall Street Journal approach is straight up the middle: “Choice seen as helping boost GOP’s appeal in Midwest battleground states.”
The New York Times, by contrast, sounds like a Biden-Harris fundraising email, or a Greenpeace protest poster: “J.D. Vance Is an Oil Booster and Doubter of Human-Caused Climate Change.”
At least the Times said “doubter” rather than “denier” but it’s the sort of headline that’s tailored to social sharing by the Times left-leaning readership, not for preserving whatever is left of the Times’ reputation for impartiality and independence.
Vance, the Ivy League angle: One thing J.D. Vance does have in common with George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush? A Yale degree. “Tiger Mom” Yale Law professor Amy Chua was the target of some inscrutable scandal or controversy, but Vance was one of her discoveries. Mock Yale wokeness and Ivy League mediocrity all you want—and maybe with cause—there are still cases—Marine Corps. veteran Vance is one of them—where the Ivy meritocracy and talent-elevation machine works the way it is supposed to.
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The Nation's Foremost College Newspaper says: "J.D. Vance Is an Oil Booster and Doubter of Human-Caused Climate Change.” It isn't necessary to oversell this guy's candidacy.
I’m liking this Vance. Extremely interesting. Great pick.