By his own account, Ohio Sen. JD Vance’s 2019 conversion to Catholicism provided a spiritual fulfillment he couldn’t find in his Yale education or career success.
It also amounted to a political conversion.
Catholicism provided him a new way of looking at the addictions, family breakdowns and other social ills he described in his 2016 bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
“I felt desperate for a worldview that understood our bad behavior as simultaneously social and individual, structural and moral; that recognized that we are products of our environment; that we have a responsibility to change that environment, but that we are still moral beings with individual duties,” he wrote in a 2020 essay.
His conversion also put Vance in close touch with a Catholic intellectual movement, viewed by some critics as having reactionary or authoritarian leanings, that has been little known to the American public until Vance’s rise to the national stage as the Republican vice presidential nominee.
These are not your father’s Catholic conservatives.
The professors and media personalities in this network don’t all agree on everything — even on what to call themselves – but most go by “postliberal.” Vance has used that term to describe himself, though the Trump-Vance campaign did not respond to questions about where Vance sees himself in the movement and whether he shares some of the beliefs promoted by many postliberals.
Postliberals do share some longstanding Catholic conservative views, such as opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
But where Catholic conservatives of the past have seen big government as a problem rather than a solution, the postliberals want a muscular government — one that they control.
They envision a counterrevolution in which they would take over government bureaucracy and institutions like universities from within, replacing entrenched “elites” with their own and acting upon their vision of the “common good.”
“What is needed … is regime change — the peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class and the creation of a postliberal order,” wrote Patrick Deneen, a prominent author in the movement, in his 2023 book, “Regime Change.”
Vance has signaled his alignment with some of what Catholic postliberals advocate. He’s said the next time his allies control the presidency or Congress, “ we really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power” and said Republicans should seize institutions, including universities “to make them work for our people.” He’s advocated for government policies to spur childbearing, a notion reflected in his digs at “childless cat ladies” with allegedly no stake in America’s future.
Scholars who study this movement caution that Vance does his own thinking and doesn’t necessarily embrace everything proposed by postliberals — or by a subset of them known as integralists, who want a state working in tandem with the Catholic Church. The latter is not a label Vance has used for himself.
But Vance has spoken alongside prominent postliberals at public events and praised some of their work.
At an Ohio conference featuring a who’s who of Catholic postliberals in 2022, he told fellow speakers he has “admired a lot of you from afar” as “some of the people who I think are most interesting about what’s going on in this country.”
Vance praised Deneen’s book at a 2023 panel discussion with the author, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame.
Vance has also met privately with leading postliberals, who have posted photos of their gatherings on social media and cheered his vice presidential nomination.
Catholic journals for years have bristled with debates about postliberalism, but with little public attention — in part because its adherents are few and its views are far from mainstream.
But now, postliberals have an avid listener in Donald Trump’s running mate.
“You can go from people writing on an unusual Catholic theology blog to the vice presidential candidate in the course of less than a decade,” said James Patterson, professor of politics at Ave Maria University in Florida.
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