What JD Vance and Harrison Butker have in common

The most disturbing truth we’re learning this week about Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance isn’t his demonization of the poor in Appalachia, his words about staying in abusive marriages for the sake of the kids, his claim that becoming pregnant through rape is an inconvenience, or even his reversal from comparing Trump with Hitler to becoming his running mate. It’s about the one thing you’re not supposed to criticize, and the one thing that holds all of those other claims together — his religious faith.

While Donald Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025 as more Americans are learning about the Religious Right’s plan for a theocracy, he chose as his running mate the poster child for Project 2025.

“There seems to be a real consensus emerging in our movement for what’s gone wrong in this country and how to push back against it,” Vance told the Catholic organization Napa Institute in 2023. “I believe, I really do, that the next 30 years in this country is going to be really exciting, really prosperous and really good for Christian virtue and the values that we care about.”

The Napa Institute is such an extremist organization that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops ended its affiliation with the group in part because:

• Event agendas include praying the Patriotic Rosary, a prayer invoking divine “continuance on our cause and our people” using the words of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, for a cause that was the perpetuation of slavery.
• Napa Institute’s founder has stated the minimum wage acts an “anti-market regulation that leads to unemployment” and does “great harm” to workers.
• A conference on “woke capitalism” hosted speakers questioning the authenticity of the Civil Rights movement.

Given that many are touting Vance to be the future of the MAGA movement, and his appearance at an institution touting white supremacist talking points, one wonders what Vance envisions by the next 30 years of our supposedly pluralistic society being good for “Christian virtue.”

But to understand what Vance’s plans are for our country, we have to take a step back and consider his religious faith journey to discover what the people influencing Vance have planned for our country as they promote his rise to power.

A more powerful Harrison Butker?

It doesn’t take long to discover that Vance’s faith journey has taken him into a sect of Catholicism that’s run by Christian nationalist extremists. It’s a version of Catholicism we were introduced to earlier this year through Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker when Butker claimed his wife’s life started after she met him, converted to his religion and became his homemaker.

Butker’s views of the family and of women’s roles in particular are informed by his “radical traditionalist” Catholic theology, often referred to as “Rad Trad.” This particular sect of Catholicism was born as a reaction to Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council deciding in the 1960s to transition the Catholic Church from using the Traditional Latin Mass in their liturgies into using the language people understood. While most Catholics were enthusiastic about the change, a small group of extremists opposed the change and began spreading conspiracy theories about gay Freemasons controlling the church and about the devil being afraid of Latin.

During the past half century, this group of radicals have become increasingly militaristic. In fact, Timothy McVeigh met with one of their priests from a fringe group known as the Society of St. Pius X the night before the Oklahoma City bombing.

Over the decades, TLM Catholics have continued promoting antisemitic propaganda, opposing Civil Rights, spreading QAnon conspiracy theories and equipping seminaries and churches with rifle ranges as training grounds for using weapons.

Their obsession with violence and public weapons training became so extreme that it led to an FBI investigation that was stopped by U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and insurrectionist Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri based on “freedom of religion.”

While most Americans would be horrified to read about this group, men like Butker and Vance find it quite attractive.

“I attend the TLM because I believe, just as the God of the Old Testament was pretty particular in how he wanted to be worshipped, the same holds true for us today,” Butker explained. “It is through the TLM that I encountered order and began to pursue it in my own life.”

Of course, Vance’s wife is still Hindu. So not everything about Butker’s story parallels to Vance. But they’re both being indoctrinated by Rad Trad and so-called neocon Catholics.

Trump and Vance’s opposition to Pope Francis

One of the defining characteristics of the TLM today is opposition to Pope Francis. Trump has been especially opposed to Francis since Francis objected to his building the wall and had a less than enthusiastic meeting with him compared to the meeting he previously had with President Barack Obama. Since then, Steve Bannon, a TLM Catholic who was working in the White House, has been influential in promoting TLM Catholics who oppose Francis and support Trump.

So it makes sense that Trump’s new vice presidential candidate would also be somehow associated with TLM and neocon Catholicism.

In his 2021 conversation with Napa Institute, Vance noted: “One of the things that I’m just not totally sure how to deal with as a public figure who sometimes does agree, disagree, and agree too with the Holy Father on some core issues is what is my role especially as a new Catholic that has some public voice. Like what should I do when, for example, the pope issues an order on the Latin Mass that I think is not the right order for the church?”

Of course, he attempted to cover his tracks by adding, “Even though I’m not a big Latin Mass guy.”

A number of scholars familiar with Catholicism and the Napa Institute have said this may be due to the fact the Napa Institute attracts radical Catholic speakers and rich financial donors. So a line has to be walked in that gathering of saying what many radicals there want to say while still maintaining an image in an attempt to woo the rich.

But of all the issues he could have disagreed with Pope Francis on as a member of Congress — including topics like climate change, immigration policy or the treatment of LGBTQ people — why was the issue at the top of his mind the Latin Mass if he’s supposedly “not a big Latin Mass guy”?

It seems reasonable to consider that statement as a sign he’s more invested into TLM Catholicism and Catholic nationalism movements than he wants to let on.

JD Vance’s conversion to ‘Resistance’ Catholicism

“Why did I become a Catholic?” Vance asked at Napa. “One, I really like that the Catholic Church was just really old. I felt like the modern world was constantly in flux. The things that you believed 10 years ago were no longer even acceptable to believe 10 years later. The Catholic Church was just very old.”

Then he added, “I like the fact that I felt like it had stood really strong on some of the core moral issues.”

But like Butker, what drew Vance to Catholicism was not the core moral vision of Francis. Instead, it was the moral vision of a “resistance” version of Catholicism.

“The Resistance” is a term made popular by Michael Voris through his book Resistance: Fighting the Devil Within as well as through his Church Militant Resistance Boot Camps. Voris is well known for spreading QAnon conspiracy theories about the COVID vaccines and the 2020 election.

Voris, a self-proclaimed “recovered homosexual,” once was publisher of a controversial website known as Church Militant. In early 2024, he was removed by the board of directors for engaging in what they considered to be immoral acts and inciting scandal. The website was ordered to shut down in April 2024 as part of a settlement agreement in a slander case.

In a piece titled “How I Joined the Resistance” for The Lamp, a Catholic journal, Vance describes the anti-Catholic stereotypes he believed as a child in a nondenominational Christian environment, the atheist phase he went through as a young adult, and how the Numbers 14 promise of God punishing the guilty by punishing their children for three and four generations began to draw him back to Christianity.

As we discover more specifics about Vance’s vision, we’ll learn he’s quite fascinated with the not-so-nice purity and punishment paradigms of authoritarianism. So perhaps one reason Vance resonates with this conspiracy-laden, child punishment version of Catholicism is that he agrees with Butker’s statement at Benedictine College: “We need to stop pretending that the ‘church of nice’ is a winning proposition.”

If Vance is correct that the next 30 years will be good for “Christian virtue,” it’s reasonable to be concerned that his winning proposition will not include the church being very nice to outsiders.

Referring to God punishing the children in Numbers 14, Vance admitted, “A decade ago, I took this as evidence of a vengeful, irrational God.” But now he sees the idea of intergenerational divine punishment as explanatory of what is happening in the United States.

Rescuing the children from God’s punishment

“Who could look at the statistics on what our early 21st-century culture and politics had wrought — the misery, the rising suicide rates, the ‘deaths of despair’ in the richest country on earth, and doubt that the sins of parents had any effect on their children?” Vance asked in his piece for The Lamp.

Of course, liberals would agree with Vance that there is such a thing as intergenerational poverty. But when Vance credits that reality to the intergenerational punishment of God, he’s giving an explanation that’s rooted in a history of white supremacy.

In a piece subtitled “Eugenic Mythologies and Internet Evangelism” published by The Journal of Legal Medicine, Paul A. Lombardo demonstrates how eugenics started in 1873 to promote the idea that “physical, mental and moral deficiencies were based in heredity and were passed down predictably within families from generation to generation.”

“Vance is blaming Black poverty on Black people and absolving white people of any responsibility.”

Based on the intergenerational curses written about in places like Exodus 20 and Numbers 14, Lombardo showed how a fear spread of “problem families, seemingly infected with bad heredity that explained their social failure over many generations” that was evidenced in “moral evil and social dependency.”

Elisha Harris, secretary of the Prison Association in 1871, said the intergenerational curses of these Bible passages were an explanation of why Americans could “trace the descent of a criminal family … ‘to the third or fourth generation.’”

By demonizing any reflection of systemic injustice as Critical Race Theory and setting the narrative of God’s intergenerational punishment for sin, Vance is blaming Black poverty on Black people and absolving white people of any responsibility.

Eugenics and ‘the biblical family’

Audrey Clare Farley wrote in a piece titled “The Eugenics Roots of Evangelical Family Values” that evangelicals began promoting positive eugenics after World War II for the purpose of increasing “the breeding of the ‘fit’ (able-bodied, middle-class whites), providing a far more respectable face for the movement.”

Paul Popenoe, one of the leaders of the movement, hired a psychologist named James Dobson, who went on to found Focus on the Family and become one of the most influential promoters of what evangelicals assume to be the “biblical family.”

As Farley notes, “Such history reveals how fears of racial decay have shaped the conservative imagination of morality.”

“The major problem confronting the United States today is there aren’t enough white babies being born.”

One of the major concerns of the modern eugenics movement is the lack of white babies being born today. Ben Wattenberg argued in his 1987 book The Birth Dearth: “The major problem confronting the United States today is there aren’t enough white babies being born. If we don’t do something about this and do it now, white people will be in the numerical minority and we will no longer be a white man’s land.”

He was especially concerned that a decreasing white population would lead to no longer being able to “support the defense systems which are the basis of national power and security.”

In his conversation with Napa, Vance seemed to echo these talking points.

“We have, I believe, a civilizational crisis in this country,” he said. “Even among healthy, intact families, they’re not having enough kids such that we’re going to have a long-term future in this country.” Then he said, “If you don’t have babies, if you don’t have life, you do not have a future country.”

Vance’s influencers

Given the fact that Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, it could be that he lacks awareness of the white supremacist roots of his current talking points. But if he doesn’t know the history, where is he getting these ideas from?

The Independent released a piece a few days ago about who Vance is following on social media. They noted how he follows “several accounts on X that espouse far-right and white nationalist views.” Some of the people Vance follows are rightwing bodybuilders.

“Their ‘theology of the bodybuilder’ is rooted in the idea that demons are afraid of buff men who speak Latin.”

Although that may sound strange, men in the TLM and neocon Catholic movements are notably obsessed with bodybuilders. Their “theology of the bodybuilder” is rooted in the idea that demons are afraid of buff men who speak Latin. This perhaps explains why a TLM Catholic like Butker spoke alongside Sen. Josh Hawley at the Stronger Men’s Conference this year.

One of the bodybuilders Vance follows is Raw Egg Nationalist, which according to The Independent is “an account that has shared Adolf Hitler memes, quoted Mein Kampf and promoted the Great Replacement conspiracy — a theory positing that Western elites are intentionally replacing white populations with migrants — to its 200,000 plus followers.”

Another bodybuilder Vance follows is Bronze Age Pervert, which The Atlantic says is run by the bodybuilder Costin Alamariu. Politico reported in 2023 that Alamariu’s book Bronze Age Mindset is “a word-of-mouth phenomenon, slowly gaining more and more fans, including, reportedly, a number of Donald Trump staffers.” Politico says the book is responsible for bringing “anti-democracy, pro-men ideas into the GOP.” And The Independent quotes a 2021 essay by Alamariu claiming, “I have said for a long time that I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics.”

If this book is circulating among young Trump staffers, and the 39-year-old Vance is following them on social media, it makes sense that he’s probably getting his white supremacist eugenics ideas from them.

Backed by Bannon and the billionaires

Of course, it’s not merely a few body builder social media accounts Vance follows that should concern us.

“Steve Bannon and I are pretty close,” Vance said in an interview with Politico. In fact, the Washington Post reported in 2017 that Vance met with Bannon about possibly becoming president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025. This was two years prior to Vance converting to Catholicism.

When Bannon began aligning the Trump White House with TLM and neocon Catholics, the first group he worked with was Church Militant, which was started by Voris, the one who coined the term “the resistance” that Vance uses. Church Militant signed conservative influencer Milo Yiannopoulous, who converted to Catholicism during a private service conducted in Latin.

And then Bannon began working with powerful MAGA donors to fund podcasts and blogs for influencers who all started converting to TLM Catholicism during the Trump administration. As Basil Dannebohm told me in my piece about Butker, “95% of the growth in the movement was due to an influx of converts. … You have probably about 40 key players who are making big money off of fear and division.”

One of the influencers is Father Frank Pavone, a defrocked radical priest who once placed an aborted fetus on an altar in support of Trump. Pavone also speaks at the Napa Institute.

In Vance’s interview with Napa, he said one of the reasons he chose to convert to Catholicism in 2019 was that “a lot of the people who were really, really influential to me as I thought about how to be a good Christian in this new era of my life were Catholics.”

Given how close Vance is to Bannon, how Vance spoke with Bannon about becoming the president of the organization that created Project 2025, and how Bannon was funding a movement of influencers all converting to Bannon’s radical version of Catholicism during Trump’s presidency, it makes sense that an aspiring politician like Vance also converted to Bannon’s radical version of Catholicism.

Why did Trump select Vance?

It’s probably safe to assume Trump doesn’t care the least bit about TLM Catholicism. And given Vance’s lack of experience and weaknesses on topics where Trump is vulnerable, he doesn’t bring much to Trump’s ticket. So why would Trump select him?

On a recent episode of the “Straight White American Jesus” podcast, Bradley Onishi and Daniel Miller explored how Vance’s conversion to radical Catholicism connected him with a cast of billionaires.

They reference a Pro Publica piece that explains how tech entrepreneur Evan Baehr met with venture capitalist Peter Thiel at a Baja Fresh in Washington, D.C., and came up with the idea to start the Teneo Network, which Baeher founded in 2008 with future insurrectionist Josh Hawley.

As Pro Publica reports, the Teneo Network never raised more than $750,000 in a given year from 2009 to 2017. But then Leonard Leo, whom Pro Publica describes as “the longtime Federalist Society leader who helped create a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court,” joined the cause. When Leo joined the network, suddenly they raised $2.3 million in 2020 and almost $5 million in 2021.

Members of the Teneo Network include JD Vance, Josh Hawley, Ben Shapiro and three senior aides to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Pro Publica writes that in addition to PayPal founder Peter Thiel, other billionaire funders include “hedge fund investor Paul Singer, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, the Charles Koch Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the DeVos family.”

When Vance spoke at Teneo in 2021, he said conservatives have “very few oligarchs on our side,” have “lost every institution in American society” and should start making corporations who are “taking the side of the left in the culture wars feel real economic pain.”

In other words, Vance’s strategy is to garner the support of billionaires and then use the government to force companies to support what he considers to be “Christian virtues.”

Onishi reflected: “So he’s willing to work with the Peter Thiels of the world because they’re the ones that offer power and influence. Is he a Catholic? Is he an atheist? Is he a hillbilly? Is he a Silicon Valley magnate? What is he? Well, he’s a guy that wants to be with the oligarchs and rule the world, I think.”

“Trump needs the support of religious extremists and billionaires to reach his goals. And Vance connects Trump with both.”

And that’s precisely why Trump selected him. Trump’s priorities are money and power. But Trump needs the support of religious extremists and billionaires to reach his goals. And Vance connects Trump with both. The money from billionaires brings the power. And the language of culture wars from religion masks the true motives and sacralizes the cause.

One day after Trump announced Vance as his running mate, Elon Musk, who like Thiel is a billionaire from South Africa, promised to donate $45 million a month to the campaign.

As Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg explained to Bill Maher this week: “These are very rich men who have decided to back the Republican Party that tends to do good things for very rich men.”

Inspired by Augustine’s ‘City of God’

Of course, Vance has to put a religious veneer on his messaging in order to garner the support of the masses. So when he converted, he chose St. Augustine as his patron saint.

Quoting Augustine’s City of God, Vance said: “It was the best criticism of our modern age I’d ever read. A society oriented entirely toward consumption and pleasure, spurning duty and virtue.”

Vance also mentioned a book by Oren Cass that, according to Vance, argued that “American policy makers have focused far too much on promoting consumption as opposed to productivity.” In Vance’s mind, this meant the solution could be found in American policy makers.

In St. Augustine’s City of God, the fifth-century church father presented reality as a conflict between the City of Man and the City of God, with the City of God eventually being victorious in the end. To Augustine, history is a war between God and the devil. So for Vance, a neocon Catholic and apparently a Christian nationalist, his reading of Augustine resonated with his neocon Catholic nationalist theology of warring against the devil and sacralized his ideas of subjecting society (City of Man) to the virtues and values of the church (City of God).

Freedom and democracy are incompatible in power hierarchies

For Vance to pursue these ends, he needed the financial backing of billionaires. So along came Peter Thiel.

When Vance was a student at Yale in 2011, Thiel was a guest speaker.

“By the time Vance ran for the Senate in 2022, Thiel donated $15 million to his campaign.”

“Peter’s talk remains the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School,” Vance recalled. So he reached out to Thiel and was hired two years after graduation by one of Thiel’s friends. And by the time Vance ran for the Senate in 2022, Thiel donated $15 million to his campaign. According to Politico, this was “the largest amount ever given to boost a single Senate candidate.”

Thiel also is a Catholic and one of the people Vance names as being influential in his conversion to radical Catholicism.

Thiel wrote in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

He added: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the (voting) franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

To billionaires like Thiel, providing safety nets for the poor and giving women the right to vote has diminished freedom. And the politician he has selected to support with the largest donation ever is JD Vance.

Catholic Integralism

So how are the next 30 years going to be “really good for Christian virtue and the values that we care about,” as Vance suggests?

According to Mathew Schmalz, professor of religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross: “The basic position of Catholic Integralism is that there are two areas of human life: the spiritual and the temporal, or worldly. Catholic Integralists argue that the spiritual and temporal should be integrated — with the spiritual being the dominant partner. This means that religious values, specifically Christian ones, should guide government policies.”

“When considering Vance’s current policy commitments, some certainly seem consistent with Catholic Integralist views,” Schmalz observes. He points to Vance’s views about immigration and his desire to criminalize gender-affirming care for minors. It’s not simply that Vance personally holds these views, but that he plans to wield the power of government to enforce them.

“If Vance is elected vice president, it will be interesting to see what happens if he clarifies — or expands — his apparent Catholic Integralist connections,” Schmalz concludes.

If TLM and neocon Catholic influencers like Voris have their way, that is exactly what Vance will do. In his Church Militant Resistance Boot Camp, he says Catholic presidents like Biden or John F. Kennedy who separate their personal convictions from their public policy stances are using “Jiminy Cricket theology” and “mental pretzel calisthenics” by not enforcing Catholic teachings.

He calls government workers “Beuroquacks.”

Vance’s 30 year vision for ‘Christian virtue’

Vance seems to agree with the publicly disgraced Voris. Echoing the words of Project 2025, he said: “I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people, and when the courts, because you will get taken to court, and then when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.”

Vance also claims, “If our answer is to continue to give more power to the business community that’s combating our values, what we’re doing is sacrificing the life of the unborn and our future on the altar of these companies.” His plan is to make companies that don’t submit to his culture war values “feel real economic pain.”

And what are his plans for solving “the birth dearth” and dealing with Thiel’s concern about freedom and democracy being destroyed in part by women receiving the right to vote?

He says: “When you go to the polls in this country as a parent you should have more power. You should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic Republic than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences. If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”

“Doesn’t this mean that nonparents don’t have as much of a voice as parents? Doesn’t this mean that parents get a bigger say in how democracy functions?” Vance asked. Then he answered, “yes” and claimed the media would criticize him for it.

“If suppressing the votes of the wrong people doesn’t go far enough, enhancing the votes of the right people could be another option.”

As Ed Kilgore wrote for the Intelligencer: “If suppressing the votes of the wrong people doesn’t go far enough, enhancing the votes of the right people could be another option.”

Ironically, some of the people who stand to get hurt by this are committed Catholics. Basil Dannebohm, a former ministerial executive and legislator who writes for Baptist News Global, said in an interview: “Sen. Vance has dual membership in two very deranged cults: MAGA and the neocon Catholic movement (emphasis on con). Most of his views contradict the gospel and the catechism of the Catholic Church. However, due to decades of poor catechesis and a cafeteria (pick and choose what you like) approach to Catholic doctrine, the lay faithful are none the wiser to the risk he poses to both their faith and their politics.”

A 30 year vision for “Christian virtue” with Vice President Vance is not vague at all. It’s not a conspiracy conjured up in the minds of a paranoid left. It’s staring us all in the face telling us what is going to happen.

A future with Vice President Vance is one where religious extremists will have the funding of billionaires to assert their power over everyone by enticing those who submit with greater political power and by economically punishing those who won’t.

Or as The Gospel Coalition’s Kevin DeYoung once put it: “The future belongs to the fecund!”

 

Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He recently completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.

 

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