How J.D. Vance Rejected Evangelicalism

The Republican vice-presidential candidate was turned off by its low status associations and anti-intellectualism

With Ohio Senator J.D. Vance becoming the Republican nominee for Vice President, I wanted to go back and take a look at his religious journey.

Vance was raised in an evangelical cultural milieu, became an unbeliever as an early adult, began re-exploring faith in law school, and finally converted to Roman Catholicism.

He discusses this journey, which was will in progress, in a 2016 interview in the Washington Post that hits a number of key themes I want to highlight.

Cultural Evangelicalism

In this interview, and his book, Vance does an excellent job describing a core part of the Trump “evangelical” voting block, namely people who strongly identify as a Christian culturally, but who don’t attend church and who don’t live according to Christian teaching.

J.D. Vance grew up with God but, except for a few years as a teen, without church. His family members rarely found themselves in a pew on Sunday morning, and they didn’t turn to faith leaders for help in times of crisis.

….

Vance: The second thing is that we tend to think of these areas as the Bible Belt, where everyone is going to church and everyone is actively involved in religious community. That’s not that true.

If you look at the statistics and see some of the things I’ve seen, you recognize that these people, despite being very religious and having their Christian faith as something important to them, aren’t attending church that much. They don’t have that much of a connection to a traditional religious institution.

Religion is important. That conception is right. But religion is quirky, and it’s not traditionally practiced in religious institutions.

…

The point is that for 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.

For some people, faith is a very important part of their life even if they’re not going to church. But for a few people, religion is more about what it signifies for their identity as red-state Americans.

This is very much the milieu of much of Trumpworld, and I have often cited Vance in explaining this to other people.

Vance did, as this excerpt makes clear, attend church for a period of time, when he reconnected with his father. It was a Pentecostal church that played a key role in turning his father’s life around.

But Vance, although he liked that church at the time, does not appear to have been shaped by it, and in many ways his experience there seems to have been a key reason why he rejected evangelicalism and Christianity.

Evangelicalism’s Low Status Associations

At Yale Law School, Vance got interested in Christianity again because he saw people there who were religious, but in a mode that was compatible with elite success in America. He says:

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.

Mormons and Catholics at Yale Law School, who were really smart and successful, were engaged with their faith. 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. [emphasis added]

The great irony here is that Yale was historically a self-consciously Protestant university, something that would have been true up through at least the 1950s. But today it’s the Catholics and Mormons who make a bigger impression there.

He explicitly sees religion through the lens of socio-economic status. Once he saw that it was possible to be Christian in the world of the elites, it became interesting and credible to him again.

Note again that it’s Catholics and Mormons who are key to this, not any sort of Protestants. At the time of this interview, Vance was still exploring Catholicism, to which he later converted.

I’ve been going to church for the past year or so. Not as much as I should, but more than I have been. I’ve been thinking very seriously about converting to Catholicism because of some of the things we were talking about.

Vance was involved in conservative political circles in law school. I’ve noted many times that the Christian portion of movement conservatism in the US is Catholic normative. It’s very common for young conservatives in DC to convert to Catholicism. There’s a status signaling that’s given off, and it has an effect on people. That doesn’t mean that they are converting for careerist reasons. But when you are embedded in a particular milieu, it’s very hard to avoid being affected by it.

He doesn’t say it, but I would not be surprised if Catholics on campus actively worked to cultivate Vance as a potential convert. Catholics are very good about cultivating rising elites, particularly in conservative circles. Hillsdale College has something of a reputation as a Catholic conversion factory, for example.

And, by becoming Catholic, he would slot right in to a ready made religious community of people like himself, which surely had to be a draw over adopting an evangelicalism in which such a community was not immediately evident, or so it appears.

There’s also something in evangelicalism that’s just off-putting to a lot of people like Vance. It’s not just the working class Pentecostal congregations like the one I was raised in (which was very similar to Vance’s experience). The average suburban megachurch is also incredibly cringe.

I like to distinguish between middle class and striver class. Evangelicalism appeals to the middle class, but much less so to the striver class. And the elites of our society are either people from the upper classes, or strivers like Vance.

With the loss of the mainline churches and the de-Protestantization of elite American institutions, there’s no longer a high status Protestantism in America for those people. This is a major problem for American Protestantism. And, I’d argue, the country.

What I call the cultural engagement model was an attempt to correct this problem. But it failed in that. It did find some success in helping evangelicals move into professional urban milieus and find an expression of faith that was comfortable to them in that new environment. But it didn’t create the kind of aspirational faith that Catholicism has at those levels. Vance seems to have not encountered this evangelicalism at Yale, or if he did, it didn’t make much of an impression.

I believe a big part of this is that cultural engagement evangelicalism is saturated with a kind of “cultural cringe,” or a deep sense of cultural inferiority. It lacks the cultural confidence of Catholicism. There’s also a fear of being lumped in with the kind of people who attend JD Vance’s dad’s church. Which, to be fair, is a valid concern. And, with rare exceptions such as some of Tim Keller or my old church in NYC, you rarely hear anything truly compelling or insightful from this movement.

Since the church needs to be present in all cultures and all parts of society, I see addressing this gap in a genuinely higher status Protestantism as a major problem.

Evangelical Anti-Intellectualism and Young Earth Creationism

Vance is also appears to have been very turned off by the anti-intellectualism of evangelicalism, which he expresses by talking about the Big Bang.

That creates a stark choice in a lot of people: You can believe in certain parts of modern science, or you can be a good Christian. But you can’t do both. It creates isolating pressure from the faith. I eventually got to the point where I was like, “Well, if I can’t believe in the Big Bang Theory and be a good Christian, then maybe I’m not a good Christian.”

[Catholicism and Mormonism] are very intense about the moral rules they want their followers to follow, but they’re also engaged not just with modern science but with the modern world.

The cosmological origins of the universe are very unclear. It’s by no means certain that there actually was a Big Bang.

I gather that what Vance is really reacting against is Young Earth Creationism, the belief that the Earth was created in six literal calendar days about 6,000 years ago.

Young Earth Creationism (YEC) is extremely common in evangelicalism, maybe even the majority position. I know many highly educated evangelicals who espouse it. My wife says that in her church growing up, YEC was one of only three major areas of apologetic focus. Even the Presbyterian Church in America, perhaps the most intellectual evangelical denomination, has a strong YEC contingent. YEC is very much foregrounded. For a lot of people, failure to accept YEC makes you a theological liberal.

I do not believe in YEC.

Scientific findings obviously disagree with YEC. Physics, the hardest of hard sciences, says the earth appears to be about 4.5 billion years old. Physics not only says things about the past, it makes predictions about the future. And those prediction are 100% accurate. The physics that tells us the age of the earth - certainly at least that it is very old - is the same physics that lets us send a probe to Mars or Pluto, to allow for satellite internet, that make TV and radio work, that allows to make nuclear power plants, etc.

There’s obviously no way to prove that God didn’t create the world to look old. But the insistence on YEC says you must reject the laws of physics, and by extension the mind that knows them, in order to be a faithful Christian. This approach is repellent to many people, like Vance, who, if they become Christian at all, are likely to end up Catholic or Orthodox. It also reinforces the essentially low status, middle class nature of evangelicalism.

It’s a good example of the explicit anti-intellectualism of evangelicalism, as documented by Mark Noll and others, and how that has become sort of core to the beliefs and culture of evangelicalism. I have my differences with Noll, but he’s not wrong in his core thesis.

We live in an era in which our intellectual domains like academia have become politicized, dominated by ideology rather than the search for truth, even corrupt, and certainly experiencing a delicate in trust. There are plenty of places where an intellectually serious Protestantism that’s culturally confident enough could challenge secular thinking. This could make and impact and reach people that evangelicalism currently doesn’t speak to, ranging from the J. D. Vance’s of this world to the followers of Jordan Peterson. There’s a huge need and opportunity here. But the culture of evangelicalism is not presented aligned with seizing it.

My Review of Hillbilly Elegy

J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy is back on the best seller lists. If you didn’t see it, here’s my view of the book from when it came out.

As someone who came of age 15 years before Vance, in a very different white working-class milieu, I see problems in the book that deserve more attention. The most significant is Vance’s conflating of his Appalachian Scots-Irish hillbilly world with the white working class generally. Appalachia has been a byword for poverty and dysfunction for generations. Vance’s culture has no living memory of anything else, so it’s natural for him to see the culture of his people as overwhelmingly influential in their fate. But this is not the case for the majority of the white working class. For example, sociologist Robert Putnam had a different experience in his hometown of Port Clinton, Ohio. The Port Clinton of his 1950s upbringing, as related in his book Our Kids, certainly had its share of working class poverty, but it was socially intact and functional—a world away from that experienced by Vance’s family.

I grew up in white, working-class, rural Southern Indiana during the 1970s and 1980s. While it had some Appalachian cultural influence, its demographic and social conditions were different. German was the dominant ethnic background of the area. My family is of mostly German Catholic stock, with one Sicilian grandfather added to the mix. My recently divorced mother, brother, and I moved to Harrison County in 1976, when I was seven. We lived in a trailer on a gravel road. We soon built a house, but our water came from a cistern, we had a party-line telephone, and we burned our trash in a 55-gallon drum. I was a classic case of “poor but didn’t know it.” There was certainly a lot of poverty around. Yet I, too, recall a functional and socially intact, if hardly idyllic, community.

Today, however, both Putnam’s Port Clinton and my Southern Indiana are a lot more like Vance’s Appalachian world than Putnam or I would have believed possible, even after allowing for nostalgia. We face a different question from the ones that confront Vance. We must ask what changed in only a generation or two to damage communities that once did broadly sustain healthy working-class marriages, families, and community life. It’s harder to blame culture entirely here when that same culture was producing respectable if unglamorous success as recently as 30 years ago.

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Cover image credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0