Religion scholars warn Vance risks alienating both evangelicals and Catholics
Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019 and recently published the memoir Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, addressed the Republicans’ midterm convention in Dallas on Thursday evening, drawing on scripture and the Apostle Paul to honor Kirk, who was assassinated last year.
“We live in the city of man, not the city of God,” Vance told delegates. “But I believe that our founders built this nation on a promise that echoes our creator.”
Larry Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, said the address amounted to “the beginning of 2028 Republican primary competition.” “Vance has thrown his hat in the ring,” Jacobs said. “One of the dimensions that JD Vance is bringing to the Republican ticket is the white Christian nationalism. He is trying to put together a coalition that will support him, and he wants the white Christian nationalists to be a key part of that.”
Vance met the late Pope Francis at the Vatican on Easter Sunday in 2025, a day before the pontiff died. But religious analysts said his path from evangelical childhood through atheism during his Marine Corps years and on to Catholicism has left him with an identity problem that complicates appeals to either community.
His dilemma surfaced in a recent interview with Bryce Crawford, a 22-year-old Christian podcaster with 929,000 subscribers on YouTube. When Crawford asked Vance for his views on “end times” — a doctrine central to evangelical theology but treated with more reserve in Catholicism — Vance acknowledged owning a John Hagee bible, which emphasizes end times teachings, before trying to sidestep the question.
“What I’m trying to focus on is doing as much of God’s work as possible right now, and if that leads to the end times, OK,” Vance said. “And if that leads to, you know, us building a better world that thrives and survives for a very long time after I’m gone, that’s great too. I just think you’ve got to kind of try to have an attitude of the end times may be coming. In fact, they are coming. It’s just a question of whether they’re coming thousands of years down the road, or a few months down the road, and we’ve got a lot of work to do right now. I’ve got to try to do the work I can right now.”
Robert Jones, president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, said the exchange showed Vance trying to “have things both ways.”
“It reminded me of the kind of conversation that young evangelical men would have sitting around in their dorm room at university,” said Jones, who comes from an evangelical Christian background. “He’s basically saying, ‘I have no stake in the debate.’ Anyone schooled inside that evangelical debate would find that position either dismissive of theological of deep theological concerns, or deeply uninformed about them.”
Tensions between Vance and Catholic authorities surfaced in February 2025, when the vice president invoked the medieval Christian concept of “ordo amoris” — Latin for “order of love” — in a social media post defending the Trump administration’s policy of detaining and expelling undocumented people. “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country,” Vance wrote. “And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” The late Pope Francis answered with an open letter rejecting Vance’s interpretation, citing the parable of the Good Samaritan.
More recently, after Pope Leo XIV criticized the Trump administration over the war with Iran this year, Vance told the pontiff to “be careful” if he was “going to opine on matters of theology.”
Daniel Hummel, director of the Lumen Center, a Christian research group in Madison, Wisconsin, said the public exchanges illustrate Vance’s core challenge. “Vance is a recent Catholic convert, and he still talks a lot like an evangelical,” Hummel said.
That pattern, Hummel warned, could antagonize even conservative Catholics. “There’s a certain way that Catholics, even conservative Catholics, who might actually disagree with the pope — his view on the Iran war, or something — but respect the pope and would never speak ill of whatever he says,” Hummel said. “Versus an evangelical tradition, where … it’s fine to tell Christian leaders to stay in their lane.”
Hummel added that the content of Vance’s religious views remains difficult to pin down even for close observers. “It’s pretty clear to me that he understands himself to be a Christian, who is being driven into politics in part because of his Christian faith,” Hummel said. “But it’s unclear to me — even as someone who observes him regularly — what exactly is the content of that Christianity.”
Hummel added that it is also unclear where Vance is drawing his ideas from on political theology. “It’s unclear sort of where he’s actually drawing his ideas from when it comes to political theology or how he understands the relationship between religion and politics.”
That ambiguity is itself a vulnerability, Hummel said. “I think that’s a huge threat to him, because he’s with communities that have strong opinions on these things, and talk about them in very certain ways,” Hummel added. “So there’s a danger he’ll either commit too much to one side, or the other, and then alienate the other side.”
Jacobs, the University of Minnesota political scientist, said Vance — once a fierce critic of Trump, and warned that he could be “America’s Hitler” — could be derailed by less abstract factors than theological differences. “The challenge with Vance is authenticity,” Jacobs said. “The thing with Trump is the guy resonated authenticity with a variety of Americans, even if the reality behind the scenes would suggest otherwise. He came off as someone who meant what he said. But JD Vance too often comes off as someone who is playing the political game.”
Jones pointed to demographic factors that underwrite Vance’s appeal to religious conservatives. Self-identified Republicans are “more than two-thirds white and Christian,” he said, and “a majority of them explicitly support this Christian nationalist movement.”
The Crawford interview also revealed what Jones called a “deeply troubling” trait. In the interview, Vance appeared to attribute Trump’s survival of the July 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania to divine providence, noting that Trump had bowed his head slightly to look at a chart on immigration at the instant the bullet passed. Shots fired by a lone gunman grazed Trump’s ear and killed one rallygoer and critically injured two others.
If Trump had been killed that day, Vance argued, millions of Americans would not have accepted the election result, and the country would have been irreparably split. “A view like that, un-interrogated — especially from a leader as high up as he is — is quite dangerous,” Jones said, “because it is always interpreted as the hand of providence when it is something that favors you.”
“If Trump had been killed that day, he even says he would not have taken that as the hand of God,” Jones added. “He would have taken that as a grand conspiracy. So that tells you right there that the hand of God will only be seen in things that benefit you.”
The Guardian contacted Vance’s office for comment.