Vance Disparaged Protestants in 2016 Interview
"Christian faith isn’t motivating their behavior. It’s just another identifier."
The Vance Files: This article is one of a series examining the early writings and record of vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH). You can support TFN’s reporting with a one-time donation or by becoming a subscriber.
Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) said in 2016 that Catholics and Mormons seem “much better” than evangelical Protestants “at figuring out how to practice their faith in a multicultural world.”
It was one of many criticisms of Protestants that Vance shared before entering politics.
He gave Catholics and Mormons the upper hand on smarts and success, too. Those faiths are “engaged…with the modern world,” Vance said, without the “paranoia” of evangelical Protestantism.
Vance also questioned the authenticity of religious faith in the Bible Belt. “[A]t least a fair number of people” there aren’t motivated by faith, Vance said, dismissing their Christianity as “a cultural tchotchke,” like fishing or country music.
The comments were made during a 2016 interview with the Religion News Service (RNS).
In essays that same year, he wrote in disparaging terms about the faith of Donald Trump supporters, specifically.
And in another interview, three years later, Vance rejected a number of Protestant tenets, including the transformative power of prayer. Another — the idea that people get a place in heaven when they accept Jesus as their savior — is a core Protestant belief.
The RNS interview focused on Vance’s own faith journey, and his childhood experience of evangelical Protestantism, now a fervent cohort in his running mate’s political base.
At the time of that interview, Vance spoke of himself in non-denominational terms. He later converted to Catholicism.
Trump is Presbyterian but has not addressed Vance’s remarks about Protestants. Vance has recanted his past critiques of Trump, but not about Protestants.
Much of the attention to Vance’s memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” focused on his moralizing about personal responsibility, but his analysis of evangelical Protestantism has drawn little media attention.
But Vance’s faith journey almost perfectly flips right-wing narratives about American culture and religion.
An Unexpected Journey
Vance was raised in an evangelical environment, embracing extreme ideas popular on the religious right. It didn’t stick.
“The kind of conservative, evangelical Christianity I practiced encourages a cultural paranoia,” Vance told RNS. As he wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy,” he “devoured books about young-earth creationism, and joined online chat rooms to challenge scientists on the theory of evolution.”
Vance subscribed to Rapture theology, which isn’t in the Bible but incorporates apocalyptic elements. Vance writes, “I…convinced myself that the world would end in 2007. I even threw away my Black Sabbath CDs.”
The world didn’t end, but Vance’s changed dramatically. As a now-famous author, Vance was asked by RNS to compare faith at Yale Law School to that of his childhood.
“Back home, kids who grew up to be relatively successful tended to abandon their faith. All of my close friends growing up were all really religious but, with the exception of one of us, we all considered ourselves nonreligious by age 25.
“At Yale, I was exposed to faith groups in which that didn’t seem to be happening.”
In fact, it was Yale, where — contrary to the right’s portrayal of a godless Ivy League — the diversity of academia put Vance back on the road to Damascus, at the intersection with other denominations.
“Mormons and Catholics at Yale Law School, who were really smart and successful, were engaged with their faith,” he said.
Their upward mobility, Vance suggested, wasn’t compatible with the evangelical Christianity he knew before Yale.
“There was a moment when I was like, ‘Maybe it is possible to have Christian faith in an upwardly mobile world.’ You can be a member of your faith and still be a reasonably successful person. That’s not the world I grew up in, but maybe that’s true.”
Vance’s explanation for the perceived sectarian difference was still another critique of evangelical Protestants. Catholics and Mormons, Vance hypothesized, don’t experience “a lot of the isolating pressures I experienced as a young, conservative, evangelical Protestant.”
Unlike evangelical Protestantism, Vance said, Catholicism and Mormonism are “engaged not just with modern science but with the modern world.”
By contrast, Vance said, some Bible Belt Christians aren’t even engaged with The Bible.
“The other way religious belief is expressed is not especially good. Faith becomes what I’d call a cultural tchotchke. It’s like something you wear on your breast or that you pin to your identity. But it isn’t actually that significant to you in a lot of ways.
“... [F]or at least a fair number of people in these areas, Christian faith isn’t motivating their behavior. It’s just another identifier. They listen to country music, live in a rural area, like to fish and they’re also Christians.
“... [F]or a few people, religion is more about what it signifies for their identity as red-state Americans…
“Catholics and Mormons seem to be much better at figuring out how to practice their faith in a multicultural world. My sense is that it’s because there aren’t those isolating pressures. They don’t feel like they had to choose between the world and their faith. They can influence the world through their faith.”
That’s not always the case with evangelical Protestants, Vance told RNS.
“The kind of conservative, evangelical Christianity I practiced encourages a cultural paranoia where you don’t trust and want to withdraw from a lot of parts of the world.
“It’s very hard to be a practicing Christian in the 21st-century world if you set things up as, ‘Everyone is against us. You can’t believe modern science, modern media or modern political institutions because they’re all conspiring against Christians.’ … It creates isolating pressure from the faith.”
In at least two articles earlier the same year as his RNS interview, Vance wrote that Christian Trump supporters are less observant than others and abandoned the faith that their families once observed.
How Trump’s Christians Are Different
In the National Review, Vance compared the Christian backers of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Trump, then rivals in the Republican primary. Cruz voters went to church, Vance wrote. But Georgia and Virginia especially “teem with the sort of less-observant Christians who turn out for Trump.”
Around the same time, Vance wrote a USA Today column in which he said, “Trump relies on unmarried voters, individuals who rarely attend church services and those without much higher education.”
Vance described the religion of Trump voters as failing them. “Many of these Trump voters have abandoned the faith of their forefathers and myriad social benefits that come with it. Their marriages have failed, and their families have fractured.“
And by the time Vance had converted to Catholicism, in 2019, he was speaking about more than the social drawbacks of evangelical Protestantism, but its theological shortcomings, as well.
Vance discussed his conversion in an interview with The American Conservative’s controversial Contributing Editor Rod Dreher.
Vance said his world growing up “wasn’t super-intellectual about the Christian faith.” He spoke dismissively about the kind of personal epiphany of grace and salvation that’s a central experience for so many evangelical Protestants.
“One of the most attractive things about Catholicism is that the concept of grace is not couched in terms of epiphany. It’s not like you receive grace and suddenly you go from being a bad person to being a good person. … I like that.
“...One thing I’ve had trouble relating to about some corners of Christianity is this idea that transformation is easy, and it happens whenever you say a prayer. That’s not consistent with how I’ve seen people struggle, and improve, and change.”
Vance even suggested in 2016 that evangelical Protestantism impedes personal improvement. He offered this critique in the New York Times, the religious right’s journalistic bête noire.
Evangelical Protestantism, Vance wrote, misleads adherents about themselves and the world around them. He warned against evangelical anti-intellectualism and the same brand of scapegoating now powering his campaign.
“The [‘Left Behind’] books are riveting, but their core message is that corrupt, evil elites have gone to war against Christians. Some version of this idea … finds its way into many topics in a modern evangelical sermon: Evolution is a lie that secular science tells to counter the biblical creation story, the gay rights movement usurps God's law. … [T]he Federal Reserve achieved satanic ends by manipulating the world's money supply. Paranoia has replaced piety.”
Vance included a cautionary warning that would likely make headlines coming from a Democrat today. “A Christianity constantly looking for political answers to moral and spiritual problems gives believers an excuse to blame other people when they should be looking in the mirror. Evangelicals appear to have taken this message to heart.”
Jonathan Larsen is a veteran journalist and TV news producer who’s worked at MSNBC, CNN, ABCNews, and TYT. You can support his independent reporting with a paid subscription to his newsletter or with a one-time donation.
The headline uses”Protestant” although the article specifies evangelical. There’s a big difference between mainline Protestants and evangelicals.
Also I’m also not convinced that faith had anything to do with converting to Catholicism. It most likely had to do with advancing his career. And the Catholicism he chose isn’t the one that supports helping others, but the one that tells others what to do.
The idea that Mormons are an outward-looking group is pretty crazy. Maybe for men it’s that way. I’ve met a number of women who made it out of the religion, and the stories they tell are harrowing.