Vice President–elect JD Vance has an opportunity to play an important role in the incoming administration and the Republican Party’s realignment following Tuesday’s election results: No one is better situated than Vance to serve as a bridge between the ascendant populist wing of the GOP and the Christian social conservatives who remain an important part of the party’s electoral coalition.
Vance is an evangelical convert to Catholicism, and it is social conservatism more than the economic variety that defines his politics. He is a family man, genteel where President-elect Donald Trump is brusque. His faith journey was an important part of his initial appeal as an author and commentator, even before he ran for the Senate and joined the 2024 Republican ticket.
In fact, it is Vance’s style of traditionalist Catholicism that differentiates him from free-market conservatives in a party that is increasingly pitching itself to workers, not management. For better and worse—like the now-infamous “childless cat ladies” remark—he has focused his attention on strengthening the family, sounding the alarm over falling fertility rates and the practical struggles of working parents.
“At a fundamental level, if we’re worried about moms and dads not being as involved at home, if we’re worried about rising rates of childhood trauma, if we’re worried about the fact that in this country today, for maybe the first extended period in our country’s history, we’re not even having enough children in this country to replace ourselves—if we’re worried about those problems,” he said at a gala in Washington, DC, in 2019, “then we have to be willing to pursue a politics that actually wants to accomplish something besides just making government smaller.”
Sometimes small government is a priority, Vance added, but it’s not the highest priority in his pro-family “vision of conservative politics.”
That theme has been consistent for Vance since well before this campaign cycle, and he routinely ties his ideas about family back to his faith. “How do you be a better husband, a better man, a better father?” Vance asked in a podcast the year before he became a Republican senatorial nominee.
“How do you build a sense of masculinity that is protective and defensive and aggressive but isn’t just showy?” he continued. “Elites don’t care at all about the difference between men and women and how we need to inculcate masculine virtues and feminine virtues. But Christianity really does.”
Trump doesn’t talk like this. But many conservative Christians who have voted for him do. The president–elect, a thrice-married, twice-divorced, one-time playboy and sexual libertine, has developed quite a following among people who care deeply about family cohesion and declining birth rates.
Trump’s selection of his first running mate, Mike Pence, was intended to address that dissonance. He needed to establish ties to evangelicals and other social conservatives, not least because he’d briefly run for the presidential nomination of Ross Perot’s Reform Party as a “very pro-choice,” socially liberal candidate in 1999. Even in 2016, the organized Christian Right largely preferred rival Republican candidates like Ted Cruz. That cycle, journalist Tim Carney found Trump had a strong appeal for Christians who professed certain evangelical beliefs but no longer attended church regularly.
But Pence was always an uneasy fit with Trump’s bid to remake the GOP in his populist image. Pence’s conservatism was that of the Ronald Reagan era. He served as Trump’s ambassador to the old-guard Republican leadership, lawmakers like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, never effectively bridging the gap between conservative Christians and Trump’s crude populism. It’s no accident that Pence ultimately broke with Trump’s wider political project after their falling out over January 6, 2021, and began inveighing againstthe “siren song of populism.”
Vance has taken a different route, not hearkening back to the small-government approach of the Reagan years but pushing the GOP toward a new kind of Christian conservatism. “Look, my basic view is that if the Republican Party, if the conservative movement stands for anything—and I’m running as a politician trying to advocate for what we should stand for—the number one thing that we should be is pro-babies and pro-families,” The New York Times quoted him as saying at a conservative Catholic event. “That’s what this whole thing is all about.”
Whether that will remain “what this whole thing is all about” for Vance—and Christians who want a pro-faith, pro-life, pro-family conservatism from the new Trump administration—remains to be seen.
Trump has borrowed some of Vance’s family rhetoric himself. But he has also compromised on abortion—despite facilitating the reversal of Roe v. Wade through his judicial appointments—and endorsed in vitro fertilization practices that entail a high amount of embryo destruction. Unlike Pence, Vance has gone along with this. And where Pence did the right thing in certifying the 2020 election results, Vance has raised questions about what he would have done in a similar set of circumstances.
Thus there’s no guarantee Vance will steer Trump’s party more successfully than Pence did, whatever we conservative Christians may hope. But there is an opening here to create a brand of faith- and family-friendly politics that moves beyond the limitations of the old Moral Majority. Vance, as understudy to a term-limited Trump, could be the right person to take that chance.
W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
