JD Vance and the hidden religious divide erupting into politics

Less than a week after becoming vice president, JD Vance, only the second Catholic to hold the office, had a very public break with the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church in America. Without evidence, the second-in-command accused the US Conference of Catholic Bishops of settling “illegal immigrants” in order to access federal funds. Though largely used as fodder for internet “gotchas” the scuffle pointed to a wider trend — one that could remake the country’s religious landscape and the fundamental way Americans think about how they believe and where they belong.

Vance is not just a Catholic. He’s a very specific type of Catholic, part of a group of young white men who, over the past decade, have found their way (often online) into both increasingly conservative politics and traditional religion — primarily Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, rather than the Protestantism that has been a common cultural feature in America. (For the uninitiated, Eastern Orthodoxy, sometimes called “Greek Orthodox” or “Russian Orthodoxy,” is essentially the Eastern equivalent of the Catholic Church, though significant differences have arisen).

One recent study from the Orthodox Studies Institute suggests that conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy has increased 24 percent since 2021. These recent converts tend to be under 40 and single, and the majority are men. There is not a similarly comprehensive study of Catholic conversions, but dioceses are reporting increases in the number of converts anywhere between 30 percent to 70 percent since 2020.

The absolute number of converts isn’t large, but as JD Vance shows, they can be influential. These people are entering religious communities that have not had many converts in the United States and have historically been associated with specific immigrant ethnic groups, the Irish in the case of Catholicism and the Greeks in the case of Orthodoxy. In fact, American anti-Catholicism has historically been buoyed not only by the centuries-old prejudice of a Protestant society, but also by a bias against foreignness.

And — in part because of this “foreignness” and the ways it has insulated these groups — these ethnic and religious communities have remained politically moderate, or, more accurately, largely defiant of the usual political categorizations. For example, the majority of American Catholics now vote Republican, but a majority also support abortion rights in all or nearly all cases. Similarly, only a slight minority of American Orthodox Christians are Democrats, but a majority support marriage equality and access to legal abortions.

To understand this, consider that the conventional understanding of America’s contemporary religious and political landscape centers two other demographic groups for whom religion and politics are more neatly aligned. White evangelical Protestants are reliably conservative across a broad range of issues, both social and economic, and loyally Republican. Meanwhile, white secular atheists/agnostics are reliably progressive and loyally Democrats.

This alignment is (at least in part) because they are both the descendants (ideologically and in some cases quite literally) of America’s English, Dutch, and German Protestant founding stock. These traditions are about believing correctly more than they are about belonging. And, in fact, fundamentally committed to separating out the elect from the community.

On the other hand, traditionally Catholic and Orthodox communities represent different strands of American history, histories that sideline political identity in the name of big-tent community belonging. Catholicism and Orthodoxy are simply more embedded in their cultural contexts — part and parcel with an ethnic identity — and less ideologically driven than the Enlightenment era-born faith traditions of the US. Within these communities, belonging has been more important than believing correctly. This is not to say that the Pope doesn’t care about theological concerns. It means that your average Catholic grandmother in Spain is less likely to be a Catholic because she feels strongly about the Treasury of Merit than because Catholicism is simply part of who she is.

So how did someone like JD Vance, previously most famous for being “an Appalachian,” find his way into a tradition like that?

The online-to-convert pipeline

These converts are characterized by a simultaneous search for community and for answers. Nearly everyone recognizes that young men are in crisis. There is widespread disagreement as to why this crisis is happening, but it is difficult not to suspect that a lack of belonging, or rather a pervasive sense of loneliness, is at least part of the problem. Loneliness, and the desire to solve it, seems likely to be part of what drives these men into communities defined by nearly unconditional belonging.

But belonging is clearly not enough. A lot of young men are looking for answers as well as community. And like lost generations before them, they are finding it in “ideology.” The new converts want their community and their ideology to fit.

What does this ideology look like? Many are disillusioned with what they see as the products of “modernity,” specifically the fruits of feminism and, in many cases, the civil rights movement. To their minds, feminism and racial equality have rendered white men — particularly working- and lower-middle-class white men — less socially and economically powerful. As a result, they have turned to “traditionalism,” a worldview that combines conservative views of gender and sexuality with fear of immigration and increasing multiculturalism, often overlaid with back-to-the-land living and large families.

Their ideal is a white, English-speaking, Christian, American straight couple living on a homestead, raising a dozen children. Its public face online is largely female: the “trad wife” influencers. But make no mistake: despite its TikTok and Instagram aesthetics, this is primarily a men’s movement. It frames the personal and social crises facing white American men as part of an imagined broader crisis of “Western civilization,” a crisis that, in their view, inevitably includes a “crisis of Christianity” — an idea pushed by no less than the likes of right-wing celebrity Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist turned media pundit.

But not a crisis of just any Christianity. For many of these young men, the perceived crisis of Christianity and of Western civilization itself has led them to question Protestantism as a whole, from far-right evangelicals to liberal mainline beliefs. If Christendom is in decline, they reason, how can its dominant tradition in American society not be to blame?

This is shown by the fact that a lot of “trad” content is dedicated to how masculine the respective traditions are. For instance, the Russian Orthodox Church website ran (on its English channel, notably) a piece entitled “Why Orthodox Men Love Church.” The piece makes liberal use of the work of Leon Podles, whose work includes The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity and Losing the Good Portion: Why Men Are Alienated from Christianity. And even the relatively liberal, Jesuit-run Catholic magazine America has run an article titled “Men and boys are lost. The Catholic Church can give them a better model of manliness.”

The “crisis of Protestantism” is a reality that evangelicals themselves have been most apt to acknowledge. There is also the example of Rod Dreher, the Protestant-turned-Catholic-turned-Orthodox convert and American Conservative editor whose book The Benedict Option is premised on the idea that society has devolved so completely that the only choice Christians have is to flee from it.

This reasoning, combined with what one must imagine is not a little bit of video game and fantasy movie-inspired nostalgia for an imagined Middle Ages, has led many of these young men to Catholicism and others to Eastern Orthodoxy. By converting to these faith traditions, they wrongly think they are converting not only to a liturgically and theologically conservative tradition, but also to an explicitly politically conservative one in the American tradition.

And like the rest of the culture surrounding the Lost Young Men of Postmodernity, this religious dimension has taken place largely online, with many of these converts encountering the academic theology of these faith traditions on YouTube, TikTok, and forums, long before they become connected to any living communities. This is very evident this time of year in online Orthodox circles, as converts gather on Facebook and Reddit to discuss the nuances of how to apply medieval fasting rules in a way that would never occur to those from traditionally Orthodox backgrounds. There is also Matt Fradd’s YouTube series Pints With Aquinas that regularly brings obscure Catholic theology to upward of half a million viewers or Rev. Chad Ripperger’s channel Sensus Fidelium, where medieval theology meets anti-vax modernity.

The mix of obscure academic theology and very modern politics doesn’t stay online. Vance, for example, has cited the influence of the French Catholic philosopher René Girard as an impetus for his own conversion. Vance has also referenced St. Augustine as a major source of his personal theology. And it was to Augustine that he turned to in his spat with the bishops, telling his X followers to “google ‘ordo amoris.’” A request one can only imagine most cradle Catholics (ones born into the faith) responded to with a resounding, “Huh?”

To save you the internet search, “ordo amoris” is a concept first attributed to Augustine and picked up by St. Thomas Aquinas, who laid out a list of the order in which we should love people and things, starting with God. But Aquinas doesn’t stop there. As the Pope — I know how absurd this sounds — explained in a letter to the American bishops following the clash with Vance, while there is an order in which we should direct our affections, any person’s pressing need should take precedence, so it is not a violation of Catholic teaching to help refugees and the poor.

This is the way most cradle Catholics probably learned this (perhaps these days sans Latin). Whether Vance was personally aware of the normal way the ordo amoris is taught is irrelevant, because the entire incident demonstrates an important point about these new ideological converts: They have encountered largely medieval theological traditions in a vacuum devoid of community and when they do encounter these living communities, made up of people for whom community is usually much more important than the medieval theology, they are frequently surprised.

The converts have encountered medieval theological traditions in a vacuum devoid of community and when they do encounter these living communities […] they are frequently surprised.

And when this happens the response has not been to change their views — Vance expressed “surprise” at the pushback from the Pope and then doubled down on his position.

This is not the “done” thing. It is, in fact, a very Protestant way of viewing church hierarchy, whereas one might argue that since the Reformation, Catholicism and Orthodoxy have been defined by a refusal to break from the powers that be. The vice president of the United States and many of his fellow new converts have nonetheless sought to change the views of the hierarchs of institutions they have joined in no small part because of their hierarchical nature — and in doing so remake these organic communities in their own idealized, ideological image.

This dynamic won’t stay in the church

While many are not yet ready to put it in this stark of terms, the “cradle” vs. “convert” divide in Catholicism and Orthodoxy is very real and it can become a problem for those outside the traditions as well as inside. These emerging, highly politicized conflicts inside what were once communities largely bound together by family and cultural ties are only accelerating the political division of American religion.

This is not a good development for civil society, because houses of worship were places where people once regularly and peacefully encountered those with different political views. Slavery and prohibition did cause schisms but, for the most part, until the middle of the 20th century, American churches were politically diverse. (While Protestantism was about believing correctly, the beliefs in question were nearly always about one’s theological beliefs. Over time, the requirement extended to political beliefs too.) This possibility has already largely vanished within most Protestant circles as evangelicals moved ever more right and mainline Protestants more left over the past 50 years, simply breaking apart (as in the case of the United Methodist Church) when their culture war differences became too grave. Now, largely as a result of these new converts, Catholicism and Orthodoxy are also becoming more polarized.

Laypeople attacking their hierarchs is about the least “trad” thing one can do. It reveals just how little these conversions have to do with anything organic to these traditions, but are instead an act of rebellion against the American mainstream, with a dose of cultural appropriation thrown in.

But perhaps even more important is the dangerous lesson these converts are learning from their challenges to the hierarchy and cultural traditions of their new faiths: Namely, that even some of the most ancient existent authorities do not have real control over them and that, with enough noise and obfuscation and with enough requests to “Google that,” they can create a version of reality where a recent convert’s opinion of Catholic theology is as valuable as the Pope’s.

Thus, when the Pope declares a more kind approach to LGBTQ Catholics, online influencers like Taylor Marshall feel comfortable simply saying the Pope is wrong, that the successor of St. Peter “persecutes the good and promotes evildoers.” Or the pseudo-anonymous writers of the Orthodox Reflections blog can attack the decision of the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of America to march with Black Lives Matter. It’s why Michael Warren Davis, another Orthodox convert at the American Conservative, could directly call the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of America a CIA asset without any evidence.

This is not just a challenge to the institutional power of the Catholic Church but a reminder of the ways this milieu of young men seeks to challenge authority and to remake our institutions in the image of their ideological aims — the ecclesiastical wing of DOGE’s engineers if you will. It is not a great jump between Vance challenging the Pope on the meaning of St. Augustine to Vance challenging the Constitution on the meaning of citizenship.

It can be difficult for many secular progressives to care much about the inner workings of religious–particularly Christian–institutions. “It’s all bad,” is a common refrain. But considering the central role religion continues to play in our politics, wishing it would just not is not a helpful way to approach the problem. This religious conflict between “cradle” and “convert” is shaping America’s political institutional authority, as religious identity becomes yet another front in the battle over America’s political future — at a moment when that war could probably do without another front.

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