Although generally neglected, mocked, or reviled by scholars and progressive intellectuals, religion shapes and colors American politics. When it recedes from hearts and minds, traditional faith leaves a spiritual vacuum into which flow all manner of superstitions, false prophets, and utopian delusions.
Since Iran-backed Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacres in Israel, a seemingly bizarre alliance – particularly evident on college campuses – has emerged in the United States between the hard left and Islamists. Both resolutely support Hamas, which seeks Israel’s destruction, while advancing the odious inversion that Israel’s exercise of its right to self-defense constitutes genocide against the Palestinian people.
The alliance appears less bizarre but more sinister when one grasps the shared scorn for America that binds the hard left and the Islamists. Both view America as a settler-colonial power perpetrating systemic injustice at home and wreaking havoc abroad. Both view Israel as America’s settler-colonial outpost in the Middle East. And both view vehement opposition to Israel as a vital element of their resistance to America’s principles and policies.
Meanwhile, hard-right factions endeavor to increase Christianity’s prominence in American politics. Keenly aware that the United States is a Christian-majority country, signers of the 2022 document, “National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles,” maintain that “Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.” Postliberals argue that the United States should overcome its misguided separation of church and state by reorienting government around the human good, which includes pursuit of salvation. Christian nationalists contend that as it was founded as a Christian nation, America should restore the fostering of Christianity as central to the nation’s mission.
It is no coincidence that Islamists in collaboration with the hard left and Christian renegades on the hard right incite antisemitism while also disparaging the classical-liberal principles – equality in basic rights and fundamental freedoms, limited government, toleration – on which the nation was founded.
In his new book, Vice President JD Vance wades into the debate over religion and politics in America. As a remedy to the nation’s ailments, he urges nothing less than a return to Christianity. However, at this fraught moment in American politics, the vice president leaves ambiguous the answer to a key question: What is government’s role in accomplishing the restoration of faith that he believes can rescue the nation from a downward spiral of materialism, secularism, self-absorption, addiction, and decadence?
Notwithstanding his weighty government responsibilities – and, as he himself emphasizes, his weighty responsibilities as a husband and father of three with a fourth child soon to arrive – the author of the 2016 bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy” managed to complete and shepherd into print last month a second memoir. In “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” the 41-year-old Vance recounts his childhood immersion in evangelical Christianity, his embrace of atheism as a young man, and his eventual return to God and conversion to Catholicism. He tells the story of his “faith journey” against the backdrop of a fulfilling personal life and rewarding professional life: falling in love in law school with the woman who would become his wife, marrying, beginning a family, earning considerable wealth while helping working-class Americans by identifying investment opportunities in his home state of Ohio, winning election in 2022 to the Senate, and, two years later as Donald Trump’s running mate, winning election as vice president. He hopes that his story will inspire readers to grow closer to God and return or turn to Christianity.
The protagonist of Vance’s memoir is affable, earnest, and thought-provoking. He is highly intelligent, caring, and capable of laughing at himself and engaging in self-criticism. He overcame childhood hardship and heartbreak to serve as a Marine, graduate from Yale Law School, prosper as a venture capitalist, form a thriving family, and occupy a high government office one heartbeat away from the presidency. He holds firm convictions while acknowledging his imperfect knowledge and expressing respect for those who see matters differently.
Vance is also a man of contradictions. For example, his manifest ambition for wealth, status, and power is difficult to square with his harsh criticisms of meritocracy and his praise of family life as incomparably more worthy than public achievement. His February 2025 Oval Office humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy – scuttling an all-but-done deal with an American friend – clashes with his claim to early on have “learned that it is one thing to vanquish an enemy and another to humiliate him.” His reproach in early April of Pope Leo XIV for criticizing American military operations in Iran and his advice to the pontiff to stick to morality and matters of the Catholic Church and stay out of American foreign policy conflicts with his observation that “persuasion requires patience, humility, and a willingness to meet people where they are” and with his conviction that Christianity permeates all spheres of life. And his claims that the mid-June Memorandum of Understanding with the Islamic Republic of Iran that he championed would “make the entire region safer” and pave “a pathway to a new Middle East” – the MOU collapsed within three weeks – contravened his signature warnings against arrogance and overreach in U.S. foreign policy.
Perhaps these contradictions prove a point that Vance emphasizes in his book: All individuals, even pious Christians, are flawed and sinners.
In “JD Vance makes the case for a more Christian America,” a recent interview conducted by Matthew Schmitz, religion editor for the Washington Post opinion page, Vance distills an essential political lesson about America that he learned on his journey to Catholicism: “[I]n a very foundational sense the country is a Christian nation.” The vice president maintains that “secular liberalism” was touted “as promoting unity and openness and tolerance” but since “it has created division and discord, maybe we should try something else.” In his view, “that something else is to return to the Christian foundation of the country.”
It would have been helpful if Vance had defined secular liberalism and provided evidence of how it – as opposed to, say, forsaking America’s classical liberal spirit – “created division and discord.” It would have been more helpful still if the vice president had specified “the very foundational sense” in which “the country is a Christian nation” and clarified what recovery of the nation’s “Christian foundation” entails.
He does observe in passing that religious freedom has always been part of America and that you needn’t “be a Christian to be an American.” At the same time, he asserts that “Christianity is America’s creed,” which would have come as a surprise to the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the drafters of the Constitution.
In a strange omission, in neither his book nor the interview does Vance explore America’s constitutional foundations or authoritative Church doctrine to illuminate the nation’s Christian foundation. That’s a dramatic oversight and missed opportunity since these essential sources converge in teaching that both faith and reason limit government’s role in matters of faith to securing religious liberty.
In his 1785 “Memorial and Remonstrance,” James Madison offered a variety of arguments in opposition to a bill for the public funding of teachers of Christianity. For example, true faith – “the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it” – cannot be coerced as it “can be directed only by reason and conviction.” Because of America’s numerous Christian denominations, government support for Christianity threatened Christians’ religious liberty: “Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?” History overwhelmingly attests to government officials’ incompetence in religious matters. And government’s use of religion to accomplish political purposes inevitably debases faith.
The Constitution enshrines religious liberty in several ways. In its list of Congress’ powers in Article I, Section 8, the Constitution declines to include the regulation of religion. Article VI prohibits religious tests for government service. The First Amendment bars Congress from making laws “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” And the 14th Amendment extends the bar on federal interference with religious liberty to state and local governments.
Observing the American system in the 1830s with peerless insight, the French Catholic aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville argued that Christianity bolstered democracy in America by teaching the dignity of the individual, guiding morals, disciplining the imagination, and directing hearts and minds to transcendent duties. Christianity could confer these indispensable moral and political benefits, Tocqueville stressed, precisely because the Constitution excluded religion from the state’s purview.
In the seminal 1965 statement “Dignitatis Humanae,” Pope Paul VI proclaimed, in harmony with America’s founding principles, “that the human person has a right to religious freedom.” In the Church’s view, “all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power.” In harmony with Tocqueville’s exploration of Christianity’s contribution to democracy in America, the pope maintained that a high purpose of religious freedom is “that men may come to act with greater responsibility in fulfilling their duties in community life.”
It’s true, consistent with Vance’s contention that America has a Christian foundation, that Protestant Christianity infused the 18th-century American spirit. But America’s was a mixed inheritance. Also infusing the 18th-century American spirit were views about decent conduct and good character stemming from classical Greece and Rome, and convictions about natural rights, equal liberty under law, and limited government with roots in English tradition, the common law, and John Locke’s writings.
Vance sows confusion – and he risks summoning superstition, false prophets, and utopian delusions – by failing to acknowledge forthrightly that America’s founding principles and the Catholicism to which he is devoted affirm that government serves faith best by safeguarding religious liberty for all.
It is incumbent on an American vice president who wades into matters of religion and politics to state clearly that however much America has been a nation of Christians it was not founded as a Christian nation, and promulgating Christianity, however much it may fortify and elevate democracy in America, is the task of the Church and of churches and not of government.
