J.D. Vance’s War on Woke Theology

J.D. Vance’s successful candidacy and first two weeks in office have been impressive, especially when it comes to his own ability to talk forcefully and directly about religious matters.

Unlike Abraham Lincoln, who was somewhat ambiguous about his own religious leanings, Vance is a devout Catholic convert. But like Lincoln, Vance has established himself as a politician whose public theology is deep and real. He is a man who speaks as well about the ways of God as he does the ways of men.

Before Donald Trump tapped Vance to be his running mate, his name and part of his story were known to a large segment of the public for his best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which was turned into a Netflix movie. But who J.D. Vance is as a person was not particularly known outside certain precincts of the right.

Yet Vance’s triumphant vice-presidential debate performance, particularly his now-iconic knowing look into the camera while Tim Walz waxed dishonestly, launched a thousand memes. It also established how well Vance could talk about the specifics of policies in ways that were understandable to a broad audience and didn’t sound overly wonky.

Like Trump, Vance is not afraid of conflict, particularly with our so-called mainstream media. In October, he famously asked ABC’s Martha Raddatz, “Do you hear yourself?” when she tried to downplay our illegal immigrant crime problem by suggesting only “a handful” of apartment complexes had been taken over by violent foreign gangs.

Since the election, he has continued to slay all the media dragons attempting to breathe rhetorical fire on him, including CBS’s Margaret Brennan, with whom he did his first big interview since the inauguration. Aired on January 26, it created another mother lode of Vance jokes and memes with his response to her attempt to distract from the fact that one of Biden’s supposedly “vetted” refugees was caught planning a terrorist attack in Oklahoma a couple of months ago.

When Brennan wondered aloud if the refugee had really been radicalized before he got here or if he became an anti-American extremist while he was in the country, Vance retorted, “I don’t really care, Margaret – I don’t want that person in my country, and I think most Americans agree with me.”

That conversation had a religious angle, since Brennan brought up the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) recent statement expressing disapproval of Trump’s decision to let ICE enter churches and schools on enforcement raids. Vance’s response was that he was “actually heartbroken by that statement.”

“The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns, or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” Vance said. “We’re going to enforce immigration law. We’re going to protect the American people.” He added further, “I think the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has, frankly, not been a good partner in commonsense immigration enforcement that the American people voted for.”

Vance was technically wrong in his assumption that USCCB is turning a profit from their reception of government funds for their resettlement programs. The organization actually ends up spending more money than it is given on these programs.

But, as Catholic journalist Phil Lawler pointed out, though Vance was wrong on this one fact, he actually drew attention to a “serious problem for the bishops.” That problem? “Today more than half of the USCCB revenue comes in the form of government grants, and more than half of the USCCB expenses go into programs that carry out the government’s policies.”

Thus, the USCCB ends up lobbying for more grants. “But,” Lawler asks, “what does that lobbying have to do with the work of the Catholic Church? Government contractors do what the government wants done; he who pays the piper calls the tune.”

If that tune is for more migrants, then it is certainly permissible to ask what the reasoning is behind the USCCB’s lobbying for more immigration. Lawler notes that in official documents, “The USCCB declares that current immigration policies are ‘non-responsive to our country’s need for labor.’” In other words, the bishops are making “an economic argument, or perhaps a political argument. It is not the sort of moral argument on which bishops ordinarily speak with authority.”

Thus, Vance was largely correct in his drawing attention to a problem with the Catholic bishops, even if his reasoning about the financial incentives was slightly off-base.

But Vance wasn’t done stirring the theological and political pot last week.

In an interview with Fox News, he used a concept of biblical, philosophical, and theological origins to dispel the notion that America First policy, particularly with regard to immigration and foreign aid, is not only immoral and selfish, but violates Christian and specifically Catholic teachings. As Vance expertly argued, the idea that America has a responsibility to secure its borders and protect its citizens from foreign threats actually fits with theological orthodoxy: “There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.”

This concept of an ordering of our loves, an ordo amoris or ordo caritatis, can be traced back to Aristotle and the Bible. It was articulated by St. Augustine in the fourth century and St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth. In short, it is the notion that all our loves must be ordered toward love of God as the final end.

While we are called to an equality to our love of every human being insofar as we are to desire for each the same fulfillment and happiness in heaven with God, practically speaking we can’t do everything for everyone. Thus, we are to focus our loving actions on those who are closest to us in distance or relationship.

Vance was clearly making a point about both personal and political behavior. On both the personal and political levels, it is right to focus our resources on the welfare of our own people first and foremost. Internet critics immediately accused Vance of trying to excuse evil or selfishness. Yet if anyone is guilty of violating commands of charity, it would be the critics.

Vance clearly didn’t mean to disparage private charities doing work abroad, some justified international aid, or even legal immigration. But he was pointing to a rule of action that Americans do not think has been kept. In general, the left in America today would rather focus their charity on far-flung parts of the world where they can do little rather than on American neighborhoods and families, for whom they can do a great deal.

Politically speaking, we see the same phenomenon. American problems often seem to be on the backburner, while money for “foreign aid” is aplenty. Yet foreign aid is often itself money that is given to governments or NGOs around the world to do good. Whether it ever gets to the people in whose name we gave it is an open question.

It is much better to focus our attention, cash, and activity on the part of the world we know best and in which we can ensure that the money and time will be well spent.

This is not, as some have said, an excuse to love only those who love us already. After all, to focus our charitable actions on the people around us ensures that we will quite often have to do charity for people we don’t like. As G.K. Chesterton observed, “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.”

Acting for the good of these proximate neighbors can be quite difficult. People with whom we interact directly are often annoying, ungrateful, needy (especially the very young), and inconvenient to pursuing our own desires—which is, of course, part of the point. Loving our neighbors daily through concrete actions involves self-sacrifice. It’s too easy to love the abstraction of “humanity” and never do much at all for any actual person.

On the political level, Vance is also correct. Governments should seek first to serve and protect their own people. If a nation wants to help another country, that is fine. If it wants to allow in more immigrants, that is fine. But those who govern a people are responsible for how they care for that people—not how they fix the entire world. Vance’s arguments, far from selfish, are a good exercise in moral theology. They show that an America First policy is just and right.

This is not to say that Vance (or anybody) claims that every policy of the Trump administration is perfect or somehow dictated by God. It is to say that the supposed religious objections to Trump’s policy aims can be answered.

Indeed, Vance’s unscripted and off-the-cuff comments about the Christian concept known as the “order of charity” and how it might apply to the way we think of our nation showed that this statesman is not only extremely talented at explaining and defending policy points. He is also equally as good a public theologian as many a professional priest or preacher.

Given G. K. Chesterton’s famous dictum that political arguments are at root theological arguments, this bodes well not only for the Trump administration and the Republican Party, but for this country as a whole, which Chesterton also observed has the soul of a church.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.