JD Vance: Confused Convert

In the fallout from Donald Trump's strange pick of weirdly extreme JD Vance as his running mate, much has been made of Vance's "conversion" from bitter critic of Trump to slavish servant of his party's Dear Leader. But Vance is a convert in another, more traditional sense of the term as well. In 2019, Vance converted to Roman Catholicism and has been perceived as aligned with certain extreme currents in ultra-conservative Catholic thought. 

(The word Catholic, of course, means universal. The Catholic Church is a big tent, which incudes the widest spectrum of political stances - from far right to far left. No one should try to reduce faith - and anyone's personal conversion to faith - to merely political terms.)

That said, one cannot help but wonder how Vance will juggle some of the potentially contradictory confusions involved in his two conversions.

Speaking on Tucker Carlson's sow in 2021, when he was running for the Senate, Vance famously lamented that our country is run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” One of the supposed "cat ladies" he complained about wasVice President Kamala Harris.

Of course, Kamala Harris is a stepmother, parenting in blended families being a major reality in our contemporary society (as it in fact has been for much of human history, when lifespans were shorter and multiple marriages maybe even more common). Vance's curious comments insulted step-parents and adoptive parents and all the many couples who would like to be parents but have struggled with infertility. 

Beyond that, however, it shows a surprising confusion about one of the most distinctive institutional realities of the Church Vance has converted to. Unlike Protestantism, Roman Catholicism has long valued the vocations of those who forego marriage, indeed prohibiting marriage for most of its clergy and valorizing women and men who have chosen to live unmarried lives in religious communities. For much of its history, the Church - more than any other comparable social institution - offered women an honorable, active alternative to marriage and parenthood, in which women thrived spiritually, intellectually, and socially and have served as major cultural influencers. Anyone with even the slightest familiarity with U.S. Catholic history is aware of the incomparable activity of women's religious communities in building the Church in this country - especially in such important fields as education and health care. It would be genuinely shocking for anyone who purports to articulate a Catholic worldview to be ignorant of that history or of the vast multitude of benefits that generations of Americans (both Catholic and non-Catholics) have experienced thanks to legions of dedicated unmarried religious women.