Why Catholics Should Be Rooting for J.D. Vance

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Jul 17, 2026

J.D. Vance exploded onto the scene in 2016 with Hillbilly Elegy. It was a case of man meets moment. A phenomenal memoir of the very demographic that elected Donald Trump. A window into a people forgotten, issues ignored. Vance is as good a thinker as you’ve heard.

He’s not as good a politician. But he’s getting better.

The first time I saw him speak in person, at the inaugural National Conservatism conference in 2019, his delivery was flat. But what he had to say was brilliant. At least it was to me, a blue state social conservative activist who had long suffered a GOP that told its base that only the market mattered. Vance was having none of that. From my notes of his talk:

We shouldn’t prize libertarianism over protecting kids from opioids and pornography. We must prize family and children. But we have a society more hostile to having family and children than ever before. Libertarians would say the choice not to have children is made by free individuals. That’s not a good enough answer. It hurts society. We want more babies because children are good, not just for economic reasons. Just telling parents to monitor their kids’ screen time isn’t enough when the whole culture is swimming in this same stuff. Whom do we serve? The market? I serve my son.

Vance is now Vice President and the author of a second memoir, about his conversion to Catholicism. His critics are ripping him for inconsistencies, for cynically altering his worldview to match his ambitions. My reaction is just the opposite. The J.D. Vance that I read in Communion is the same J.D. Vance that I read in Hillbilly Elegy. Same man, same journey. Just further along. Even his then-possible conversion to Catholicism was something he was already publicly discussing as far back as 2016.

I do have some bones to pick with Vance. He dismisses Bush-era religious conservative opposition to the euthanizing of Terri Schiavo as “obsessing over extraordinary circumstances.” In fact, the public sided against us because it is not so extraordinary. By 2005 many families had already made similar decisions privately, making them instinctively unsympathetic to saving Schiavo.

Like Vance, I want religious conservatives to have a more Catholic-inflected wholistic concern for the human person and for society. But when he writes “We confine Christianity to the most private of questions—relations between husbands and wives, reproductive decisions,” he does not sound like someone who is really with us on issues of life and human sexuality. It reminded me of George W. Bush, whose only mention of abortion in Decision Points was strangely detached.

As examples of “toil [that] doesn’t always lead to instant gratification,” Vance mentions Christians who fought against slavery and hunger who did not live to see the success of their efforts. I would have added pro-life activists who did not live to see the overturning of Roe v. Wade. But it would have been awkward for Vance to do so. The Trump-Vance campaign gutted the pro-life plank in the GOP platform and the administration has thus far allowed pro-abortion states to undo Dobbs by invading pro-life states with abortion drugs via telehealth. This is Trump undoing his greatest accomplishment. It would be as if Ronald Reagan, having won the Cold War, decided he was okay with communism after all.

But the go-slow abortion politics of Trump-Vance at least has a logic to it, given public opinion being so against the unborn child at present. It’s Trump’s unilateral decision to take the U.S. to war with Iran, sans congressional resolution or public debate, that makes no political sense whatsoever. Here Vance shines and whether he is clever, or slyly ambitious, or just plain sincere in how he goes about opposing it and trying to end it, I say more power to him. The Trump coalition is an electorally-necessary-but contradictory mix of Barstool hedonists, tech bro transhumanists, and social conservative America Firsters. Vance and Rubio—who differ more in tone than in substance—represent the Catholic wing of Trumpism and Catholics should be rooting for either one of them to emerge as the standard bearer of the new populism.

Reading Communion, I am struck by how normal Vance is. How much he has his head screwed on right. So much of what he came to reject is familiar. The arrogance of the atheists. The vapidness of the “spiritual but not religious.” The unacknowledged privilege of being “fiscally conservative and socially liberal.” The backwards priorities of the “strivers.”

Yale looms large here in Connecticut and not in a good way. In 2012 Sherif Girgis, then a fellow Yale Law School student of Vance’s, and I appeared together on WNPR to debate a Yale-affiliated author and a Yale-based religion writer who claimed God favors gay marriage. The condescending arrogance of our opponents was not subtle.

That Vance overcame all that and became Catholic is, in its way, bigger even than the things he overcame in Hillbilly Elegy. Catholics should celebrate his journey—and pray for him to keep going.