J.D. Vance Could Become Second Catholic Vice President After Trump Picked Him

But in the wake of his recent endorsement of the abortion pill, his pro-life commitment has been questioned.

Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio addresses the conservative Turning Point People's Convention on June 16, 2024 at Huntington Place in Detroit, Michigan.
Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio addresses the conservative Turning Point People's Convention on June 16, 2024 at Huntington Place in Detroit, Michigan. (photo: Jeff Kowalsky / Getty )

Editor's Note: Former president Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance to be his running mate for the 2024 presidential election. This story was written before the announcement but offers insights into the U.S. senator representing Ohio. 


Shortly after he became a Catholic in August 2019, J.D. Vance told an interviewer the Church’s vision of a just society helped draw him to the faith.

“My views on public policy and what the optimal state should look like are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching,” Vance told Rod Dreher of The American Conservative.

Now, less than five years later, Vance is a Republican U.S. senator from Ohio and is on former President Donald Trump’s short list for vice president of the United States.

Vance’s possible candidacy for national office — which could begin any day now — has admirers excited about the prospect of a Catholic in high office who engages publicly with his faith.

“He’s very open and proud about his faith, but it’s not that gross over-piety that’s kind of fake,” said Sohrab Ahmari, a columnist, author, and editor who was raised Muslim but converted to Catholicism in 2016.

But while Vance identifies as pro-life, his recent comments in favor of keeping abortion pills available have some pro-lifers aghast.

“This tawdry episode informs us that Vance has no principles, at least none that aren’t for sale, and the asking price is cheap,” said C.J. Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts. 

The Register sought an interview with Vance and comment from his press office this week but had not received a response prior to publication.

 


Catholic Vice President A Rarity

Vance, 39, would offer Trump a young, accomplished performer who speaks to Trump’s base of white working-class voters in swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. A downside is that Vance has little political experience: He has been a U.S. senator for about a year and a half, which is his entry-level job in politics.

Trump has praised Vance in recent days  — even swatting down a question about Vance’s beard by saying he “looks like a young Abraham Lincoln.”

If Trump picks him, Vance would be the sixth Catholic nominated for vice president by a major political party, and if elected he would become the second Catholic vice president, after Joe Biden.

Vance has an unusual pedigree for a major political figure. He went from an occasional drug user as a teenager who fended off social services and almost dropped out of high school to a public affairs spokesman in the U.S. Marine Corps, double major at Ohio State, Yale Law School graduate, corporate lawyer, and venture capitalist.

Vance identifies as a conservative, but as someone who grew up in poverty, he has said he appreciates some of the services government offers to the poor.

Ahmari told the Register he first contacted Vance several years ago, after Vance’s conversion, and that they have since met and corresponded. He considers Vance a friend.

Ahmari, who along with Vance and others, represents a new generation of populist thinkers on the Right, said he admires Vance’s willingness to buck his party’s conventional wisdom on economic matters to support more safety regulations on railroads in the wake of a train derailment in Ohio in February 2023 and a claw-back of bonuses paid to executives whose banks fail and take a federal bailout.

Ahmari also calls Vance’s personal story “an individual experience that reflects the failure of both parties.”

“I like the thought of someone who’s seen the price working-class people paid for these choices helping lead the executive branch,” Ahmari said.

 


Vance The Hillbilly

Though born and raised in Middletown, Ohio, Vance’s family roots are among the Scots-Irish hillbillies of eastern Kentucky.

Vance became a public figure in 2016 with the publication of his book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.

In the book, Vance uses social research and his family’s story to describe the economic and social problems of the white underclass that originated in Appalachia and migrated north to the Midwest after World War II for jobs that eventually disappeared when manufacturing in the Rust Belt went bust.

As a child Vance experienced domestic violence, drug addiction, poverty, periodic homelessness, relentless verbal abuse, and chronic underachievement fed by low expectations.

Symbolic of his troubles, Vance has had three last names: his birth name (Bowman) the name he took after his mother’s second of five husbands adopted him (Hamel), and the name he took on his wedding day in 2014 (Vance) — that of his late grandparents, deeply flawed but loving and loyal people he credits with saving him from the chaotic home life his drug-abusing mother created.

Vance’s relationship with religion is complicated. His biological father became a serious Pentecostal after divorcing Vance’s mother, and when he occasionally stayed with his dad, Vance would go to church with him. Most of his other relatives didn’t go to church. Even so, he writes in the book, “the Christian faith stood at the center of our lives,” especially his grandmother’s.

He has said that when he entered law school he considered himself an atheist. By the end of law school, though, he was re-connecting with faith.

He married his law school girlfriend, a Hindu, in 2014. They have three children and live in Cincinnati when not in Washington.

As for why he became a Catholic, Vance has cited the influence of Catholics in his life that he admires, including an uncle-by-marriage, and the writings of Catholic intellectuals, including St. Augustine and French historian and philosopher Rene Girard. 



From Never-Trumper to Possible Running Mate

Vance had harsh words for Trump during the 2016 election. In a February 2016 column for USA Today explaining Trump’s appeal to alienated Rust Belt voters like the ones he wrote about in his then-forthcoming book, Vance wrote that Trump’s “actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd.” In August of that year, in a column in The New York Times he called Trump “unfit for our nation’s highest office.”

During an appearance on MSNBC in October 2016, Vance implied that he believed a woman who accused Trump of sexual assault and implied that Trump often lies. That same month, Vance told Charlie Rose, “I’m a Never-Trump guy. I never liked him.”

Vance says he changed his mind during Trump’s presidency, saying that Trump governed effectively, and he later sought and got Trump’s endorsement when he ran for and won as a Republican a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio in 2022.

"I've been very open about the fact that I did say those critical things, and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy," Vance said in 2021 during an appearance on Fox News, according to multiple media reports. 

 


Vance and Abortion

As a first-time political candidate, Vance ran as a staunch opponent of abortion.

“I am pro-life. I’ve always been pro-life,” Vance said during a 2022 campaign debate. Asked about a possible federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks, Vance said states should be able to set their own policies on abortion and that “some minimal national standard is totally fine with me.”

In the same debate, he went on to express support for a pregnant 10-year-old girl’s ability to get an abortion, and he noted that his grandmother who largely raised him “believed that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.”

Vance supported the pro-life side in Ohio’s abortion referendum in November 2023, in which the state’s voters added a right to abortion to the state constitution by a margin of 57% to 43%. Vance called the result “a gut punch.”

Vance’s rhetoric on abortion has shifted since he was identified as a top prospect to become the running mate of Trump, whose three U.S. Supreme Court picks helped overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 but who subsequently has blamed Republican losses on the party’s positioning on abortion.

During the presidential debate with President Joe Biden on June 27, CNN co-host Dana Bash asked Trump if he would block abortion pills.

“First of all, the Supreme Court just approved the abortion pill. And I agree with their decision to have done that. And I will not block it,” Trump said.

Trump was referring to the U.S. Supreme Court’s limited decision on June 13 in a case called Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, in which the court ruled that pro-life doctors and organizations who challenged the FDA’s regulations on abortion pills lacked the legal standing to bring the suit, although allowing the possibility that other plaintiffs could bring a similar case.

Kristen Welker, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, asked Vance about abortion pills during an interview on Sunday, July 7.

Vance replied: “On the question of the abortion pill, what so many of us have said is that: Look, the Supreme Court made a decision that the American people should have access to that medication. Donald Trump has supported that opinion. I support that opinion. I think it’s important to say that we actually have to have an important conversation in this country about what our abortion policy should be.”

Welker later asked Vance about mifepristone, one of the two abortion pills.

“But just to be clear: You support mifepristone being accessible?” Welker pressed him.

“Yes, Kristen, I do,” Vance replied.

Chris Quinn, editor of The Cleveland Plain Dealer, said of Vance in a podcast released July 11: “Well, if he’s doing this because he did learn from the vote that he’s not in line with Ohio, then I would give credit to him. But when he ran, he ran as absolutely against abortion. And if you’re O.K. with the abortion drug, that’s abortion. I mean, there’s no playing around here. This isn’t exceptions for rape and incest. That pill, that’s abortion. There’s no way around it. So I don’t know what to think.”

In 2019, three years before he was elected to the U.S. Senate, Vance talked with Dreher about the tension between being a politician and being a faithful Catholic.

“At a fundamental level, being in public life is in part a popularity contest,” Vance said then. “When you’re trying to do things that make you liked by as many people as possible, you’re not likely to do things that are consistent with the teachings of the Catholic Church. I’m a Christian, and a conservative, and a Republican, so I have definite views about what that means. But you have to be humble and realize that politics are essentially a temporal game.”