Now unlike converts, these people like the cultural husk of Christianity, because they are clever enough to know it represents the culture of Western Europe. Tom Holland has highlighted the fact that the best of Western culture has its origins in Christian thought, especially human rights and equality, as St Paul wrote “we are neither slave nor free, woman or man no more”. However, most everyday “cultural Christians” tend to speak of vague “values”. Unlike Vance and many others who have gone along the conversion path, they are not invested, mind and heart, in the great mystery of our salvation.
So, at a time when we are watching drag queens parodying the Last Supper, why is Vance’s conversion the most interesting of many modern-day converts?
It is not just because he has the potential to become very powerful and Trump sees him as a rising star. Vance is interesting because his conversion did not come from the standard playbook of born-again Protestantism common among politicians of Vance’s hard-scrabble background, documented in his autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy. However, his conversion is important for us firstly for what it tells us about his conservatism, and secondly what it tells us about the young conservative movement whose adherents will make their mark in the future
The new young conservative movement is heavily influenced by a parallel movement of youth in Catholicism towards the Latin Tridentine rite mass. (I had my doubts about this until I discovered that a friend of one of my sons, who played in the same rock band, was baptised, married with child and a Latin mass enthusiast.) The post-Vatican 2 generation of the ’60s and ’70s, socially liberal and, apparently, tone deaf, are dwindling in the pews, and in broader influence. Vance came to the faith as tabula rasa. He did not come from a religious background. He was never a formal churchgoer, and he toyed with atheism for some time. It has been noted that Catholicism has the staying power of a two millennia-old hierarchical institution – at a time when so much seems unstable. Vance said: “I really liked that the Catholic Church was just really old … I felt like the modern world was constantly in flux. The things that you believed 10 years ago were no longer even acceptable 10 years later”, something many of us over 30 have felt.
In his apologia, printed in The Lamp, Vance says he “looked for a philosophy that incorporated doubt, embraced scientific advancements, and also came from somewhere more ancient”. This was a conversion of the rational mind, as well as the heart. What led Vance to Christianity was two-pronged; both its emotional and intellectual underpinning. He sets out the emotional pull of the Catholic brand of Christianity, attributing it to his grandmother, who brought him up. He saw it as the closest to her kind of Christianity: “Obsessed with virtue, formed in the context of a broader community: sympathetic with the meek and the poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims; protective of children and families and with the things necessary to ensure they thrive.”
As this was a conversion of the rational mind, as well as the heart, he writes of his fascination for St Augustine’s Confessions. His other influences were modern philosopher of religion Rene Girard and his friend, journalist and author of The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher, who urges communities to reject modern culture and return to old morals. But Catholicism’s broad political spectrum is reflected in the new right’s politics. Vance is interested in the social project, unlike the hardcore individualism of libertarians or Reaganite monetarist conservatives.
Christian conservatism takes from the right an emphasis on personal responsibility, but on the left the emphasis is on the social good, especially the option for the poor, which means fewer barriers to economic flourishing. Vance is an advocate of industrial policy, and believes the GOP needs to become the party of the worker. But foremost on the political agenda of the new conservative movement is support for the nuclear family. Vance and others regard the falling birthrates, lack of marriage and family formation, resulting in huge numbers of ex-nuptial births, as a “civilisational crisis”. They are correct. Among black Americans the ex-nuptial birthrate is 70 per cent. In the UK over half of all births are ex-nuptial and Australia is moving in the same direction.
The solutions for this civilisational crisis are hard to see. Pro-family tax and welfare policy goes some way to helping on the fringes but, ultimately, nothing short of a huge populist movement in the whole developed world can change things. As we saw in Paris, the wreckers of civilisation have the boldness of the victors, for now. There does need to be a renaissance of real values and rejection of all the paralysing, identity-obsessed madness and punitive elitism. Whether a new, young Christian conservative movement could be the nucleus of that remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: if Kamala Harris is elected US president, the chaos will likely get a lot worse.
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Could we be seeing a movement towards a Christian cultural renaissance? After the fiasco of the Olympic opening ceremony this might seem like a silly question. However, the selection of JD Vance, a young, relatively inexperienced politician and a convert to Catholicism, as Donald Trump’s running mate has, it is safe to say, given many people on the left, and not a few on the hard right, quite a shock. A lot of prominent people have converted to Catholicism recently; overall, there are 3.7 million converts in the US. Not only that, but some very unlikely atheists have even called themselves “cultural Christians”; witness Elon Musk and the most unlikely of all, Richard Dawkins. In the case of Musk, he even likes the teachings of Jesus.