JD Vance shows the future of Christianity

The conservative Catholicism of Donald Trump’s running-mate is a countercultural form of dissent

James Marriott in THE TIMES, Wednesday July 17 2024

Five years ago, at St Gertrude Priory in Cincinnati, the man who is probably going to be America’s next vice-president was arrayed in a pure white robe and received into the Catholic church. So adorably baby-faced was JD Vance back in the days before he grew a beard that you wonder whether the priest had to suppress an impulse to scoop him into his arms and carry him to the font.

Perhaps we should not joke. Vance — the first millennial to appear on an American presidential ticket — practises a faith that is ostentatiously old-fashioned and serious-minded. He is a student of the Latin Mass, an opponent of abortion and gay marriage, and given to quoting St Augustine.

British observers of US politics are accustomed to rolling their eyes at that nation’s religious excesses. But to breeze past Vance’s faith as just another baffling Americanism is to miss 20 years of social change. The US is now far advanced down the path of European-style secularisation. Vance belongs to the first generation in American history for whom church attendance is an anomaly, not the norm.

For American politicians, Christian faith was once a way of signalling reassuring, homely normality. For Vance, the attraction of religion is its strangeness, its dissident frisson. In an essay on his conversion, tellingly titled How I Joined the Resistance, he frames his Catholicism as a form of dissent, a rejection of a spiritually vacuous liberal elite. I suspect Vance’s countercultural faith is a glimpse of the future of Christianity in the West.

Amid apathy and decline, conservative Catholicism stands out for its vigour. As liberal congregations shrink, traditional churches hold steady or grow. A recent report into the next generation of Catholic priests found overwhelming conservatism; progressive seminarians are an “extinct” species. The “modernising” Catholicism of tambourines, worship bands and inclusive language is the preserve of ageing priests who came of age in the 1970s. Meanwhile, the “trad Cath” movement that makes a fetish of the bits of the faith that tend to embarrass liberal believers — veils, Latin, the veneration of relics — is enjoying a vogue among metropolitan hipsters. “New York’s Hottest Club is the Catholic Church”, according to a headline in The New York Times.

Some of the more breathless analyses of this trend have come close to implying that the urban under-30s are on the point of being received en masse into the bosom of Mother Church. This overstates matters. The Latin Mass remains a minority enthusiasm. The West will continue its long march away from God. But in an ever more secular society, the forms of Christianity that are best fitted to survive are those that are most distinctive.

The appeal of Christian faith is no longer that it inducts you into the moral mainstream but that it offers an exclusive identity. To some young people raised in a post-religious environment, Christianity has taken on something of the exotic appeal of Buddhism in the 1960s. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former star of the New Atheism movement who recently converted, is typical in framing her faith in identitarian rather than ethical or spiritual terms. It is a matter of defending “western civilisation” and the “Judaeo-Christian tradition”. This is Christianity in the age of identity politics.

Ironically, the forms of Christianity that are fading fastest are those that have most conscientiously adapted themselves to 21st-century mores. Taken policy by policy, the Church of England should appeal to the liberal young better than almost any other denomination — it blesses gay unions, ordains women and agonises over diversity. In common with many non-believers, this is the Christian tradition for which I feel most instinctive sympathy. Its tolerance, lack of dogmatism and willingness to bend to social change strike me as infinitely more likeable than Vance’s hardline Christian conservatism.

But even I can see that inspiring the fondness of atheists is a dubious growth strategy. Only 3 per cent of under-25s are Anglicans. Similarly, the Catholic writer Dan Hitchens points out that the impeccably progressive United Reformed Church (it offers services presided over by a “womanist practical theologian” with a focus on “uplifting ethnically minoritised women and communities”) is collapsing faster than any other denomination. Britain’s most dynamic churches are evangelical congregations whose conservative moral values are directly at odds with the liberal consensus.

This is less a matter of “go woke go broke” than of basic sociology. Everything we know about human social behaviour suggests that groups are bonded by defining themselves against outsiders and by practising distinctive rituals and beliefs that may strike the uninitiated as illogical or “extreme”. Rapidly growing religious minorities, such as the Amish in America or ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel, have perpetuated themselves successfully across generations partly because their unusual behaviours and beliefs produce a powerful sense of group identity. The forms of Christianity best adapted to a secular future are probably the most distinctive and uncompromising. Elaborate rituals and unfashionable moral ideas are, paradoxically, the key to survival.

Pope Benedict XVI once prophesied that western Catholics were destined to become a “creative minority” at odds with the mainstream. It was a vision that some denounced as reactionary and pessimistic. Practically speaking, it is the most likely survival strategy. Vance represents this Christianity: marginal but distinctive — and, for better or worse, surprisingly influential.