JD Vance’s Catholicism helped shape his views. As did this little-known group of Catholic thinkers

Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, by his own admission, converted to Catholicism in 2019 and achieved a spiritual fulfillment that his Yale education or professional success did not provide him with.

It was also tantamount to a political conversion.

Catholicism gave him a new way of looking at addiction, family breakdowns, and other social issues, which he explored in his bestselling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

“I desperately needed a worldview that saw our bad behavior as simultaneously social and individual, structural and moral; that recognized that we are products of our environment; that we have an obligation to change that environment, but that we are still moral beings with individual responsibilities,” he wrote in a 2020 essay.

Vance’s conversion brought him into close contact with a Catholic intellectual movement that some critics viewed as reactionary or authoritarian, a movement that was little known to the American public until Vance rose to the national stage as the Republican Party’s vice presidential candidate.

These are not the Catholic conservatives your father believes they are.

The professors and media personalities at the network disagree on everything — even what to call themselves — but most of them describe themselves as “postliberals,” a term Vance has used to describe himself, though the Trump-Vance campaign has not responded to questions about where Vance sees himself in the movement or whether he shares some of the beliefs promoted by many postliberals.

Post-liberals share some long-standing conservative and Catholic views, such as opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.

But whereas Catholic conservatives have historically seen big government as the problem, not the solution, post-liberals want big government—one that they themselves control.

They envision a counterrevolution in which they take over government bureaucracies and institutions like universities from within, replacing entrenched “elites” with their own and acting on their vision of the “common good.”

“What is needed is… regime change — the peaceful but forceful overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class and the creation of a post-liberal order,” wrote Patrick Deneen, a prominent author on the movement, in his 2023 book Regime Change.

Vance has signaled his support for some of what Catholic post-liberals support. He has said that the next time his allies control the presidency or Congress, “we really need to be ruthless about how we govern,” and he has said Republicans should take over institutions, including universities, “to make them work for our people.” He has advocated for government policies that encourage having children, as reflected in his jabs at “childless cat women” who supposedly have no stake in America’s future.

Scholars who study the movement caution that Vance thinks independently and does not necessarily accept everything proposed by postliberals—or a subset of them known as integralists, who want the state to work in tandem with the Catholic Church. Vance did not use the latter label for himself.

Vance has, however, spoken publicly alongside prominent post-liberals and praised some of their actions.

At a 2022 conference in Ohio that featured a slew of Catholic postliberals, he told fellow speakers that he “admires many of you from afar” as “people who I think are most interesting in terms of what’s going on in this country.”

Vance praised Deneen’s book during a panel discussion with the author, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, in 2023.

Vance also met privately with leading post-liberals, who posted photos of their meetings on social media and welcomed his vice presidential nomination.

For years, debates about postliberalism have echoed in Catholic journals, but they have enjoyed little public interest — partly because its adherents are few and far from the mainstream.

But now the post-liberals have a devoted listener in vice-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

“You can go from someone writing on an unusual blog about Catholic theology to a vice presidential candidate in less than a decade,” said James Patterson, a political science professor at Ave Maria University in Florida.

As Vance said, citing his comments about childless people, his interests point to movement inspiration.

“Most average American Catholics would not treat a childless, single woman with cats with such contempt,” Patterson said. Even if Vance is not steeped in philosophy, Patterson added, “he senses a postliberal climate.”

Some Catholics, including conservatives, have expressed concern about the company Vance keeps. They say postliberalism has historical links to 20th-century European movements associated with authoritarian regimes such as Francisco Franco’s in Spain.

“We are talking about people who prefer right-wing authoritarian regimes,” Patterson said.

In a postliberal society, Patterson wrote in an August op-ed in the online journal The Dispatch, citizens become “subjects” and personal freedoms are subject to “administrative despotism.”

Vance has recently tried to downplay the influence of his Catholicism on policymaking.

Trump’s Supreme Court nominees secured a key majority to overturn Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide. But the issue has become a political liability as voters in several states have rejected abortion restrictions.

Vance has been staunchly opposed to abortion in the run-up to his 2022 Senate victory, saying at one point that “two wrongs don’t make a right,” referring to exceptions for rape and incest. The campaign said in an email Wednesday that it supports “reasonable” exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother.

But Vance joined Republicans’ first post-Roe platform in 2024, in which they reversed their longtime support for nationwide abortion restrictions. He promised he could “absolutely commit” that a Trump-Vance administration would not enact such an abortion ban.

Trump has been ambiguous about a referendum aimed at repealing Florida’s abortion ban after six weeks of pregnancy.

After anti-abortion activists expressed their support for the initiative, Trump said he would oppose it.

The bishops of the Catholic Church in the US have said that opposing abortion is “our highest priority.”

Vance told the New York Post in August that Catholic social teaching “certainly influences the way I think about issues.” But he acknowledged that “there are a lot of things that the Catholic Church teaches that, quite frankly, Americans would just never accept.”

He added that in a democracy “you have to give people the opportunity to reflect their own moral views in public policy. There are many non-Catholics in America, and I accept that.”

Julian Waller, a political science professor at George Washington University, said Vance has many influences beyond Catholic post-liberalism, from populists like Trump to his mentor, tech billionaire Peter Thiel.

The question remains whether Catholic post-liberals would be given important positions in a Trump-Vance administration — or even how often their phone calls would be answered.

“Someone like J.D. Vance can read them, be interested in them, attend lectures, know them personally, learn from them,” Waller said. “But he is not obligated to follow them.”

As an example of what an administration that uses state power for post-liberal purposes could look like, Waller pointed to Florida and Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to purge public higher education of diversity initiatives and critical race theory.

“If you want to find a model of what someone like J.D. Vance is really interested in, it’s probably the Florida model of forcing change on institutions and taking over institutions,” Waller said.

As Kevin Vallier, author of “All the Kingdoms of the World,” a 2023 book about contemporary postliberal and integralist movements and their centuries-old roots, argues, postliberals’ ideas are diverse but share common threads.

Depending on who is doing the talking, post-liberal regime change could include encouraging childbearing, relaxing or abolishing the separation of church and state, banning adult and child pornography, reintroducing laws restricting business on the Sabbath, supporting private-sector unions, and strengthening the social safety net for the middle class.

Post-liberals are often heard praising Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, particularly for his financial incentives for families that have more children. Orban has advocated for an “illiberal democracy” that includes restrictions on immigration and LGBTQ+ rights.

Vance praised Orban for the subsidies Hungary gave to couples with children and for his “wise decisions” to take control of universities.

Vance repeated the rhetoric of regime change, which involves using a government staffed by like-minded officials to advance post-liberal agendas.

“You have to have a functional state that does some of the things we care about. You need good people to go and work in that functional state,” Vance said at a 2022 conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio that was attended by prominent post-liberals such as Deneen and Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule.

Vermeule argued for a “common good constitutionalism” in which the government establishes “strong rule in the interest of achieving the common good.”

Deneen and Vermeule declined interview requests.

Vallier said Vance’s decision to speak in Steubenville underscored his sympathies with post-liberals.

“He could have given that speech anywhere,” said Vallier, a professor at the Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership at the University of Toledo in Ohio. “Why is he appearing with these intellectuals if he doesn’t sympathize with their ideas?”

Vance’s religious journey began in a family that rarely went to church when he was young, he wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy.” But he said his grandmother — the most level-headed adult in his turbulent home — read the Bible regularly and taught a Christianity that required hard work, forgiveness and hope.

For a time, young JD accepted the strict biblical literalism of his father’s Pentecostal church, viewing it as a stabilizing force, he wrote.

In college, however, Vance embraced what he later saw as an arrogant and fashionable atheism.

Ultimately, as he wrote in a 2020 essay for the Catholic magazine The Lamp, he concluded that he “needed grace” to equip him with the virtues needed to be a good husband and father.

“In other words, I had to become Catholic,” he wrote.

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