JD Vance’s Catholicism helped shape his views. So did Catholic Post Liberal thinkers
Republican Vice President Candidate JD Vance and Catholic Post-Liberalism
Summary
How is post-liberal Catholocism different than the medieval Church's ties to state between Constantine and Luther, where the combined power controlled all aspects of life.This question highlights some important parallels and differences between medieval Church-state relations and modern post-liberal Catholic thought. Let me break down some key points:
Medieval Church-State Relations vs. Modern Post-Liberal Catholicism
Similarities
- Emphasis on religious values in governance**: Both systems advocate for incorporating religious principles into political and social structures.
- Skepticism of individual liberties**: Both tend to prioritize communal good over individual rights.
- Desire for moral authority**: Both seek to shape societal morals and ethics through institutional power.
- Critique of secular authority**: Both challenge purely secular forms of governance.
Key Differences
Scope of authority**:
- Medieval: Church had direct political power, often superseding secular rulers.
- Post-liberal: Seeks influence through democratic processes, not direct theocratic rule.
Institutional structure**:
- Medieval: Unified Church hierarchy with Pope at apex.
- Post-liberal: Diverse movement without centralized authority.
Technological and social context**:
- Medieval: Pre-industrial, largely agrarian societies.
- Post-liberal: Addressing challenges of modern, globalized world.
Approach to pluralism**:
- Medieval: Often intolerant of religious diversity.
- Post-liberal: Generally accepts religious pluralism within a Christian-influenced framework.
Economic views**:
- Medieval: Feudal economy, suspicion of commerce.
- Post-liberal: Critical of unfettered capitalism, but not rejecting market economies entirely.
Intellectual foundations**:
- Medieval: Primarily based on scholastic philosophy and canon law.
- Post-liberal: Draws from various sources, including modern Catholic social teaching and secular political theory.
Relationship to democracy**:
- Medieval: Predates modern democratic systems.
- Post-liberal: Operates within democratic frameworks, albeit critically.
Conclusion
While there are surface-level similarities in the desire to integrate religious values into governance, modern post-liberal Catholicism is fundamentally different from medieval Church-state relations. It operates within a democratic, pluralistic context and does not seek direct theocratic rule. Instead, it aims to influence policy and culture through existing political structures.
The key distinction lies in the context and methods of each approach. Medieval Church-state relations existed in a pre-modern world where the Church was often the dominant political and social institution. The modern post-liberal movement, however, operates within a pluralistic, democratic society and doesn't seek to establish a theocracy.
Post-liberals like Vance are not advocating for direct Church control over the state. Instead, they're proposing to use democratic processes to implement policies informed by Catholic social teaching and their interpretation of the common good. This is a significant departure from the medieval model where the Church often had direct political authority.
Moreover, the post-liberal movement is much more diverse and decentralized compared to the medieval Church hierarchy. It includes various thinkers and politicians who may disagree on specific points, unlike the more monolithic structure of the medieval Church.
It's also worth noting that post-liberals are responding to modern challenges like globalization, technological change, and perceived cultural decay - issues that didn't exist in the medieval period. Their proposed solutions, while drawing inspiration from Catholic tradition, are tailored to these contemporary problems.
In summary, while there are some philosophical similarities in the desire to integrate religious values into governance, the practical implementation and context of post-liberal Catholicism is fundamentally different from medieval Church-state relations.
Here's a summary of some of the key points about JD Vance and Catholic post-liberalism:
1. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, converted to Catholicism in 2019 and has aligned himself with a Catholic intellectual movement known as "post-liberalism."
2. Post-liberalism rejects both progressive leftist ideology and traditional economic conservatism, instead advocating for a strong government that promotes their vision of the "common good."
3. Key aspects of post-liberal thought include:
- Emphasis on community over individual rights
- Support for nationalist policies and protectionism
- Criticism of free-market capitalism and globalization
- Desire to use state power to reshape institutions and society
4. Vance has spoken at post-liberal events, praised post-liberal thinkers, and used post-liberal rhetoric in his speeches and policy positions.
5. Notable post-liberal Catholic thinkers include Patrick Deneen, Gladden Pappin, and Sohrab Ahmari. Vance has close ties with some of these figures.
6. Critics argue that post-liberalism has connections to authoritarian regimes and may be at odds with Catholic teaching on individual rights and religious liberty.
7. Vance's potential vice presidency could significantly increase the influence of post-liberal ideas within conservative and Catholic political circles.
8. Some see post-liberalism as a response to perceived hostility from liberal institutions towards religious believers.
9. Vance has cited Catholic social teaching and thinkers like St. Augustine as influences on his political views.
10. The rise of post-liberalism through figures like Vance represents a potential shift in the direction of American conservatism, particularly among Catholics.
JD Vance’s Catholicism helped shape his views. So did this little-known group of Catholic thinkers – San Diego Union-Tribune
By PETER SMITH and MICHELLE R. SMITH
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.
Vance’s preoccupations show an influence from the movement, he said, citing his remarks about the childless.
“Most ordinary American Catholics would not treat a childless single woman with cats with this kind of contempt,” Patterson said. Even if Vance is not steeped in the philosophy, Patterson added, “he is picking up on the postliberal vibe.”
Some Catholics, including conservatives, have raised alarms about the company Vance has kept, saying postliberalism has historical connections to 20th century European movements that are associated with authoritarian regimes like Francisco Franco’s in Spain.
“We’re talking about people that prefer right-wing authoritarian regimes,” Patterson said.
In a postliberal society, Patterson wrote in an August commentary in the online journal The Dispatch, citizens become “subjects” and personal liberties subjected to “administrative despotism.”
Vance has recently tried to downplay his Catholicism’s impact on policy-making.
Trump’s Supreme Court appointees provided the crucial majority to overturn Roe v. Wade, which had legalized abortion nationwide. But the issue has become a political liability, with voters in several states rejecting abortion restrictions.
Vance had strongly opposed abortion, in the runup to his 2022 senatorial win, saying at one point that “two wrongs don’t make a right” when referring to exceptions for rape and incest. The campaign said in an email Wednesday that he supports “reasonable” exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother.
But Vance has aligned with the Republicans’ first post-Roe platform in 2024, in which it backed off from its longstanding support for nationwide abortion restrictions. He pledged he could “absolutely commit” that a Trump-Vance administration would not impose such an abortion ban.
Trump has spoken inconsistently about a ballot measure repealing Florida’s ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
After facing backlash from anti-abortion activists for seeming to indicate he would support the measure, Trump said he would oppose it.
The Catholic Church’s U.S. bishops declared opposing abortion “our pre-eminent priority.”
Vance told the New York Post in August that Catholic social teaching “certainly influences how I think about issues.” But he acknowledged “there are a lot of things the Catholic Church teaches that frankly, Americans would just never go for.”
He added that in a democracy, “you have to give people their ability to have their own moral views reflected in public policy. There are a lot of non-Catholics in America and I accept that.”
Julian Waller, a political science professor at George Washington University, said Vance has numerous influences outside of Catholic postliberalism — from Trump-style populists to his mentor, tech billionaire Peter Thiel.
It remains to be seen whether Catholic postliberals would get prominent appointments in a Trump-Vance administration — or even how often they’d get their calls returned.
“Someone like JD Vance can read them, be interested in them, attend talks, know them personally, get insights from them,” Waller said. “But he’s not on the hook to obey them.”
For an example of what an administration using state power for postliberal ends might look like, Waller pointed to Florida and Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to rid public higher education of diversity initiatives and critical race theory.
“If you want the model for what someone like JD Vance is really interested in, it’s probably the Florida model, forcefully changing institutions, capturing institutions,” Waller said.
Postliberals’ ideas vary, but there are common themes, said Kevin Vallier, author of “ All the Kingdoms of the World,” a 2023 book on the modern postliberal and integralist movements and their centuries-old roots.
Depending on who’s talking, a postliberal regime change could involve encouraging childbearing, easing or removing church-state separation, banning pornography for adults and children alike, reimposing laws limiting business on the Sabbath, supporting private-sector unions and strengthening safety nets for the middle class.
It’s common to hear postliberals praising Hungary’s nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orban, particularly for his use of financial incentives for families that have more babies. Orban has championed an “illiberal democracy,” which includes restrictions on immigration and LGBTQ+ rights.
Vance has praised Orban for Hungary’s subsidies to married couples with children and for “smart decisions” in seizing control of universities.
Vance has echoed the regime-change rhetoric of using government, staffed by likeminded officials, for postliberal goals.
“You need to have a functional state that accomplishes some of the things that we care about. You need good people to go and work in that functional state,” Vance said a 2022 conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. It featured prominent postliberals like Deneen and Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule.
Vermeule has advocated for “common-good constitutionalism,” in which the government enacts “strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good.”
Deneen and Vermeule declined requests for interviews.
Vance’s choice to speak at Steubenville underscored his affinity with postliberals, Vallier said.
“He could have given that talk anywhere,” said Vallier, a professor at the Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership at the University of Toledo in Ohio. “Why is he appearing with these intellectuals if he’s not sympathetic to their ideas?”
Vance’s religious journey began in a family that rarely went to church when he was young, he wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy.” But he said his grandmother — the most stable adult in his turbulent household — regularly read the Bible and taught a Christianity that demanded hard work, forgiveness and hope.
For a time, the young JD embraced the strict biblical literalism of his father’s Pentecostal church, crediting it as a stabilizing force, he wrote.
But in college, Vance embraced what he later viewed as an arrogant and fashionable atheism.
Eventually, he wrote in a 2020 essay for the Catholic journal The Lamp, he concluded he “needed grace” to provide him the virtues to be a good husband and father.
“I needed, in other words, to become Catholic,” he wrote.
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Takeaways from AP's report on JD Vance and the Catholic postliberals in his circle of influence
Ohio Sen. JD Vance’s 2019 conversion to Catholicism helped shape his political worldview, he has written.
It has also put him 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.
That’s changing with Vance’s rise to the national stage as the Republican vice presidential nominee and running mate to former President Donald Trump.
The professors and media personalities in this network are generally known as “postliberal.” Vance has used that term to describe himself as well.
Here are some takeaways from the AP’s reporting on Vance’s Catholicism and the Catholic thinkers in his circle of influence.
What is postliberalism?
It’s a movement primarily among Catholic intellectuals that rejects both the progressive left, with its focus on individual rights and identity, and “economic liberalism,” the ideology that favors a free market and small government.
Postliberals do share Catholic conservatives’ longstanding opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
But Catholic postliberals want a muscular government — one that they control.
They envision people who share their views taking over government bureaucracies, universities and other institutions from within, replacing entrenched “elites” 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.”
Is JD Vance a postliberal?
Vance has identified as postliberal, spoken alongside prominent postliberals at public events, met with them privately and praised some of their work.
And he has taken stances similar to those of other postliberals.
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.” He has 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 the nation’s future.
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.
How big is this movement?
Not big, but it has a following among influential Catholic professors and writers.
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.
Some Catholics, including conservatives, have raised alarms about the company Vance has kept. They say postliberalism has historical connections to 20th century European movements that are associated with authoritarian regimes like Francisco Franco’s in Spain.
“We’re talking about people that prefer right-wing authoritarian regimes,” Patterson said. In a postliberal society, he said, citizens become “subjects” and personal liberty subjected to “administrative despotism.”
What do postliberals want?
Postliberals’ ideas vary, but there are common themes, said Kevin Vallier, author of “ All the Kingdoms of the World,” a 2023 book on the modern postliberal and integralist movements and their centuries-old roots.
Depending on who’s talking, a postliberal regime change could involve encouraging childbearing, easing or removing church-state separation, banning pornography for adults and children alike, reimposing laws that limit business on the Sabbath, supporting private-sector unions and strengthening safety nets for the middle class.
It’s common to hear postliberals praising Hungary’s nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orban, who has championed an “illiberal democracy.” Vance himself has praised Orban for Hungary’s financial subsidies to childbearing couples and for “smart decisions” in seizing control of universities.
How has Catholicism shaped Vance’s politics?
Vance has said his faith helped shape his political worldview — emphasizing the need to promote both individual moral responsibility and social reform.
But Vance has recently tried to downplay his Catholicism’s impact on policy-making.
Trump’s Supreme Court appointees provided the crucial majority to overturn Roe v. Wade, which had legalized abortion nationwide.
But the issue has become a political liability, with voters in several states rejecting abortion restrictions.
Vance strongly opposed abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, in the runup to his 2022 senatorial win. But Vance has aligned with the Republicans’ first post-Roe platform in 2024, in which it backed off from its longstanding support for nationwide abortion restrictions.
Vance told the New York Post in August that Catholic social teaching “certainly influences how I think about issues.” But he said he accepted that there are “a lot of things the Catholic Church teaches that frankly, Americans would just never go for.”
Would Vance advocate for postliberalism as a vice president?
Vance has other influences besides postliberals, said Julian Waller, a political science professor at George Washington University.
“Someone like JD Vance can read them, be interested in them, attend talks, know them personally, get insights from them,” Waller said. “But he’s not on the hook to obey them.”
For an example of what an administration using state power for postliberal ends might look like, Waller pointed to Florida and Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to rid public higher education of diversity initiatives and critical race theory.
“Forcefully changing institutions, capturing institutions. He’s interested in firing federal bureaucrats. This has been a long standing interest, that he’s interested in reformatting or abolishing certain departments.”
___
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
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JD Vance Is a Catholic ‘Post-Liberal’: Here’s What That Means — And Why It Matters
ANALYSIS: Breaking with conventional conservatism, the GOP vice-presidential nominee draws from a controversial, Catholic-inspired approach to politics that emphasizes communal good over individual liberty.
JD Vance is an election away from becoming the first Catholic vice president from the Republican Party.
But the Ohio senator, who is running alongside Donald Trump on the GOP ticket, is not your typical Catholic conservative — at least not the kind that has been the norm in American politics over the past half-century.
Instead, Vance is a self-described member of the “post-liberal right,” an upstart political movement that flips the conventional conservative script and emphasizes the good of the community over individual liberty. The controversial approach, which is both inspired by and contested within the Catholic Church, includes harnessing state power to secure its aims, another break from the standard operating procedure of the American right.
And if Vance is elected vice president, “post-liberalism” won’t merely shape federal policy in new and unprecedented ways. It’s also likely to have a major impact on the entire political outlook of the American right — perhaps especially among Catholic conservatives.
“I expect the election of a Trump-Vance ticket to give post-liberalism renewed intellectual energy,” said Bowling Green political theorist Kevin Vallier, who wrote a book on the rise of religious, anti-liberal political movements. Vallier anticipates a Vance vice presidency would lead to post-liberal ideas becoming “more commonplace” in conservative circles.
Post-liberalism, as its name suggests, is a rejection of liberalism. Liberalism refers not merely to the worldview of the American political left, but to a broader political philosophy that puts a premium on individual liberty and is arguably the dominant outlook in American political and social life.
Post-liberals argue that liberalism’s emphasis on freedom has come at the expense of America’s common good, leading to a broken, atomized society, the decimation of working-class communities, and ruling elites with no loyalty to their fellow citizens.
“The liberal ordering of the world is exhausting us,” contends Postliberal Order, a leading online publication of the movement.
In contrast to the innovation, internationalism and individualism of liberalism, post-liberals emphasize stability, nationalism and communal duty — themes that were evident in Vance’s acceptance speech last Wednesday.
In a break from the GOP of yesteryear, the vice-presidential contender criticized free trade and globalism, condemned the “disastrous” invasion of Iraq, where he served as a Marine, and denounced not only the “ruling class in Washington,” but also “Wall Street barons.” In contrast, Vance advocated for protectionist economic policies, military restraint, and prioritizing Americans before outsiders.
“Together, we will put the citizens of America first, whatever the color of their skin,” said the Yale Law grad, who commentators have said adds “philosophical heft” to Trumpian populism.
Like Vance, many of the leading lights of post-liberalism are Catholic. They include Gladden Pappin, a political theorist-turned-adviser to the Hungarian government; the journalist Sohrab Ahmari, co-founder of the anti-liberal Compact magazine; and Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen, author of two pivotal post-liberal texts, Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future.
These figures all have clear ties with Vance, especially Deneen, who Vallier described as “the paradigm” of post-liberal thought. Vance appeared alongside Deneen at a 2023 discussion of Regime Change and borrowed the professor’s vocabulary when describing his political goals as “explicitly anti-elitist, explicitly anti-regime,” aimed at replacing the current slate of government bureaucrats with administrators deemed committed to America’s common good.
In a possible sign of their closeness, Deneen took to social media following Trump’s selection of Vance as his running mate to reiterate his recently established policy of not speaking with journalists. When reached by email, he declined comment for this story. (Pappin also did not respond to a request for comment.)
But the post-liberal thought leader did issue a statement, describing Vance as “the ideal choice” to carry Trump’s brand of populism forward.
“JD combines a dedication to domestic productivity, foreign policy realism, and a deep commitment to strengthening American families and the communities that sustain them,” said Deneen. “He is a man of deep personal faith and integrity, a devoted family man, a generous friend, and a genuine patriot.”
Some Catholics, however, worry that Vance, a recent convert, has fallen under the influence of thinkers who have their own agendas in mind. Three of them took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal on July 21 to express their concerns.
“We hope that Mr. Vance … will not be manipulated by a small, power-hungry faction inside the church he has joined,” they wrote.
Catholicism and Post-Liberalism
Catholic post-liberals draw heavily from Church teachings to make their case, particularly pre-conciliar popes like Pius IX and Leo XIII, who emphasized social and economic responsibilities to one’s community. Contemporary Catholic critics of liberalism, like the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, are also prominently cited in post-liberal works, as is the political thought of Aristotle.
Catholicism has long had its critics of liberalism and related ideologies like capitalism. But since John F. Kennedy’s election and the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on human rights in Dignitatis Humanae, American Catholics trying to advance political outcomes consistent with Church teaching have tended to do so within the liberal order — appealing, for instance, to religious-liberty protections, the right to life, and the importance of bringing about positive societal change via cultural change, not legal imposition. Figures who embraced this approach, like George Weigel, Michael Novak and Father John Neuhaus, defined the terms of conservative Catholic political engagement for decades.
That all began to change in 2016. The shocking populist victory of Donald Trump not only indicated major dissatisfaction with the liberal status quo, but also an opportunity for Catholic critics of liberalism to promote their vision in unprecedented ways. Post-liberalism — and the related, though more explicitly Catholic, political theory of Church-state relations known as integralism — has been especially popular among young conservative Catholics at elite universities and seminaries and even on Capitol Hill.
But post-liberalism’s critics are pushing back, especially conservative Catholics who advocate for working within the liberal order, not overthrowing it.
The authors of the recent Wall Street Journal letter argued that post-liberal thinkers depart from the Church’s teaching by diminishing the inalienable rights of persons and families, which are prior to the state.
“The frequent refrain of many post-liberals, including at times Sen. Vance, is that government should be used to reshape the private sphere in accord with their desires,” wrote the trio, which included Andrea Picciotti-Bayer of The Conscience Project, Richard Reinsch II of the American Institute for Economic Research and James Patterson of Ave Maria University.
Patterson, a political theorist, told the Register that “post-liberalism is an attempt to rehabilitate right-wing Catholic authoritarianism once prominent in Europe and Latin America during the late 19th and 20th centuries.” He added that post-liberals have pointed to the reign of figures like Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar as “superior to the American Constitution.”
Additionally, many Catholics have criticized Vance’s recent support for access to the abortion pill, a compromise of his pro-life principles that was likely necessary to join Trump’s ticket. Critics contend that the move is inconsistent with the senator’s post-liberal appeals to the common good.
Other Catholic critics, like University of Tulsa philosopher Jennifer Frey, have argued that post-liberals are attempting to promote a stronger political community “by bullying everyone into it.”
“With all apologies to Deneen, I don’t think you can get Aristotelian ends by Machiavellian means,” Frey recently commented on X, formerly Twitter. “It does not work that way.”
Some Catholics sympathetic to post-liberalism, however, say that their prescriptions are simply a response to systemic hostility from American institutions and the elites who run them.
“What distinguishes yesterday’s religious conservatism from today’s religious populism is less a shift in principle than a change in circumstance,” said Matthew Schmitz, a co-founder of the liberal-critical magazine Compact. “As religious believers have been denounced as bigots and excluded from America’s leading institutions, they have naturally become more suspicious of their operation.”
Vance’s Post-Liberalism
Vance has intellectual influences other than Catholic post-liberals, such as neo-reactionary atheist philosopher Curtis Yarvin and the libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel.
But post-liberalism holds a unique place in the vice-presidential candidate’s intellectual wheelhouse, given its connection to his relatively new Catholic faith.
Vance explicitly cites the importance of post-liberal-adjacent Catholic perspectives in the story of his own conversion, such as St. Augustine’s account of the debauchery of the Roman elites in The City of God. Vance also told the Orthodox Christian conservative writer Rod Dreher that “his views on public policy and what the optimal state should be like are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching” and that the Church’s teaching was “one of the things that drew” him to Catholicism in particular.
Vance has said that Augustine influences his policy positions, and the senator chose the doctor of the Church as his confirmation saint when he entered the Church in 2019. That conversion was facilitated by Dominican members of the Province of St. Joseph, something of an irony, given that the East Coast Dominicans have supported skeptical appraisals of post-liberalism, at least at the institutional level.
In another powerful indication of his post-liberal commitments, Vance took a break from the campaign trail during his tighter-than-expected race for the U.S. Senate in October 2022 to speak at a post-liberal conference being held at Franciscan University of Steubenville. The conference was organized by Ahmari and included figures like Deneen and Pappin as keynote speakers.
The post-liberal movement has been picking up steam in Catholic intellectual circles for years. But with an adherent like Vance an election away from the second highest office in the land, it has a chance to make a far bigger impact.
The significance of this moment was evident last Thursday, when Donald Trump referenced his new running mate at the Republican National Convention.
Looking over at Vance during his convention-closing speech, Trump shared some simple advice to his heir apparent:
“JD, you’re going to be doing this for a long time, so enjoy the ride.”
If that’s the case, then Catholic conservatives should also prepare for a ride, one that could see the American right taken in a decidedly post-liberal direction..
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