JD Vance, Religious Populist

Matthew Schmitz, writing at First Things:

He believes that America remains more religious than people acknowledge—it’s the elites who have changed. “If you look at one measure of religious participation, just church membership in 1980 versus 2023 versus 1840, the country is not substantially less religious today . . . than it was 150 years ago.” Yet there is a profound obstacle facing anyone who aspires to be unapologetically both Christian and American. It is the conviction, shared by many of our elites and increasingly endorsed by the government, that anyone who dissents from progressive ideas on gender and sexuality is an enemy not only of progress but of the United States. Underlying this belief is an identification of America with the ideals represented by the Progress Pride flag.

Vance’s religious populism stands in opposition to a simply creedal conception of the United States. “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 says. “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.”

Vance says that the identification of the American project with progressive ideals is “a recipe for colonizing your own people.” When American leaders justify foreign conflicts in the name of LGBTQ rights (as has happened with the war in Ukraine), they are articulating a casus belli against much of their own population. The result is “militaristic adventurism overseas, war with your own people at home.”

Religious populism was not magically conjured by Trump. It has come to the fore because religious believers are increasingly excluded from important institutions. It is a response to social and legal developments championed by progressives and endorsed by America’s leading institutions. Justice Samuel Alito acknowledged these forces in February when he observed that a decision to exclude potential jurors who objected to same-sex marriage from a court case involving a lesbian woman “exemplifies the danger that I anticipated in Obergefell v. Hodges, . . . namely, that Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.”

So long as religious believers are disfavored for their beliefs by important American institutions, they will skew anti-institutional and populist. They will seek to challenge the elite and its orthodoxies. Of course, certain religious groups in America—notably Catholics and Jews—have a long history of exclusion. But now a similar situation is faced by traditional believers of all kinds, including Protestants. If they want to exercise the duties of citizenship rather than withdrawing from politics altogether, they will need to look to leaders like JD Vance.

A must read, however, is Vance's account of his conversion to Roman Catholicism, "How I Joined the Resistance."  If you want to see the depth of thought exemplied in a man who may be the next Vice-President of the United States, and possibly President of the United States in 2029, you need to read this.  It's a long read, but worth it.