When Faith Becomes Political Power: J. D. Vance and the Misuse of Religion in Government

J. D. Vance presents a much more consequential problem than whether Alexander Hamilton or Milton Friedman offers the better model for American economic policy. His recent arguments about Christianity expose a deeper question concerning the proper relationship between religious conviction and political authority. Vance has increasingly argued that Christianity is not merely his personal faith or an important part of American history but a necessary component of social and political order. In July 2026, he described the United States as, “in a very foundational sense,” a Christian nation and attributed significant contemporary social division to secular liberalism. His 2026 memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, similarly presents his Catholic conversion as inseparable from a broader reconsideration of family, society, morality, and political life.

There is nothing objectionable about a politician being religious, speaking about religion, or allowing deeply held moral beliefs to influence his understanding of human affairs. It would be artificial to demand that a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, atheist, or Objectivist enter public office after somehow amputating the philosophical convictions through which he understands the world. Every political judgment ultimately rests upon premises about human nature, morality, rights, obligation, and the proper purposes of government. Religious people have as much right to participate in those arguments as anyone else.

The ethical problem begins at a different point: when religious belief is used not merely to inform the politician’s own conscience but to establish the legitimacy, objectives, or moral authority of government itself. A politician may say that his Christianity leads him personally to care about poverty. He must nevertheless explain to citizens, including those who reject Christianity, why the particular law he proposes is justified in terms applicable to them as citizens. The statement that “my religion commands this” may explain his motivation, but it cannot establish their political obligation. The distinction is fundamental because citizenship is compulsory in a way that membership in a religious congregation is not. Government therefore owes a justification to the governed that does not depend upon their accepting a theology they never adopted.

Vance’s intellectual history makes him an especially illuminating example because he has himself described an unusually close convergence between his religious and political development. When he entered the Catholic Church in 2019, he explained that his conception of public policy and the “optimal state” was already substantially aligned with Catholic social teaching. He said that this overlap was one of the things that attracted him to Catholicism and argued that social conservatism required a broader conception of political economy and the common good. This does not prove that his conversion was opportunistic. Indeed, he also said that he had studied Catholicism for years and had become persuaded that it was true. What it demonstrates is that, from the beginning, Vance did not regard his conversion as something neatly separable from his developing political philosophy.

That convergence has subsequently become much more visible. During the 2025 immigration debate, Vance invoked the Catholic concept of ordo amoris, the ordering of love or charity, to defend an America-first hierarchy of obligation in which family, neighbors, community, and fellow citizens take priority over people elsewhere. Pope Francis publicly challenged that interpretation, emphasizing the Good Samaritan and a conception of Christian love extending beyond such concentric boundaries. Catholic theologians themselves disagreed about Vance’s interpretation. The dispute is important not because an American vice president must accept every papal interpretation of social policy—he plainly does not—but because it demonstrates the immediate difficulty of translating theology into government. Once Catholic doctrine becomes a justification for immigration policy, somebody has to decide what Catholic doctrine actually requires. Vance says one thing, a pope says another, theologians disagree, and citizens who are neither Catholic nor Christian are nevertheless expected to live under the resulting policy.

This problem cannot be solved by determining which Catholic interpretation is correct. The political error occurred earlier, when theological authority was introduced as an independent justification for coercive public policy. Immigration restrictions may be right or wrong for reasons involving sovereignty, labor markets, national security, fiscal capacity, criminal law, social integration, or the obligations of citizenship. Those arguments can be examined by Christians, Jews, atheists, and everyone else using evidence and reason. Invoking Augustine or Aquinas adds an entirely different type of claim: it suggests that religious doctrine confers additional political legitimacy upon the policy. A citizen who rejects the theological premise is then placed in the peculiar position of being governed partly according to a religious argument he has no reason to recognize as authoritative.

The American constitutional tradition was designed in considerable part to prevent precisely this problem. Article VI declares that no religious test may be required for federal office, while the First Amendment prohibits an establishment of religion and protects its free exercise. These provisions were not expressions of hostility to religion. Many of the people who established them were themselves deeply religious. Their insight was more sophisticated: religion is too important, and government too coercive, to allow either institution to acquire jurisdiction over the other.

James Madison articulated the principle with exceptional clarity in his 1785 Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments. Opposing a proposal to subsidize Christian teachers, Madison argued that religion must be directed by “reason and conviction, not by force or violence” and described it as outside the proper cognizance of civil society. He also understood the danger in explicitly political terms: majorities can violate the rights of minorities, and government officials exceed their legitimate authority when they intrude into matters of religious conscience.

Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom made a closely related argument. Jefferson warned that allowing fallible legislators and rulers to assume dominion over religious opinion corrupted both civil freedom and religion itself. Particularly relevant to the contemporary problem, he observed that attaching political advantages to religious profession encourages hypocrisy by rewarding people who publicly conform for worldly benefit. Virginia’s enacted statute consequently declared that civil rights do not depend upon religious opinions and that citizens must remain free to profess and argue for their beliefs without those beliefs altering their civil capacities.

Jefferson’s warning about hypocrisy raises the uncomfortable question surrounding Vance and every other politician who prominently deploys religion: where does conviction end and political utility begin? In Vance’s case the electoral utility is undeniable even though his internal motives cannot be known. Christianity provides a language through which he can criticize secular liberalism, justify family-centered policy, defend a more paternalistic political economy, appeal to socially conservative voters, give national identity a transcendent dimension, and distinguish his political project from the libertarian individualism he increasingly rejects. His emergence as a major prospective Republican presidential contender makes the political value of that religious identity even more obvious. None of this demonstrates that he does not believe what he says. It demonstrates something more important: sincerity and political usefulness can coexist.

Indeed, excessive attention to whether Vance is cynically pandering may obscure the more serious problem. A cynical politician exploiting religion knows, at some level, that religion is a political instrument and may therefore abandon it when its usefulness disappears. A completely sincere politician who believes that his conception of divine or natural order should shape the state may have fewer internal reasons for restraint. His certainty can become part of the justification for extending power. From the standpoint of political liberty, sincere theocracy is not safer than cynical religious pandering merely because the theocrat genuinely believes what he is saying.

Vance’s case is particularly revealing because his Catholicism has sometimes supported his political positions and sometimes collided with the institutional Church. When Catholic concepts appeared useful in defending immigration restrictions, he invoked ordo amoris. When Pope Francis rejected his interpretation, Vance continued defending it. In July 2026, he described Vatican criticism of American immigration policy as “troubling” after Pope Leo XIV also criticized aspects of the administration’s treatment of migrants. There is nothing inherently inconsistent about a Catholic disagreeing with a pope on prudential political questions, but the episode illustrates why religious doctrine cannot solve political disagreement. If even members of the same church cannot agree on what their theology requires of the state, invoking Christianity as a source of governmental direction merely relocates ordinary political disagreements into competing claims about religious authenticity.

The difficulty becomes even clearer if Vance’s instrumental argument for Christianity is taken seriously. He has suggested that earlier American economic liberty operated within strong Christian institutions that supplied cultural and moral restraints that have since weakened. If Christianity is being invoked because it produces socially desirable consequences—strong families, responsibility, discipline, social cohesion, or productive economic behavior—religion has effectively become one variable in a theory of national development. But once that principle is admitted, there is no intellectually coherent reason to assume Christianity must win the competition.

The obvious reductio is Judaism. Jewish communities have produced extraordinary levels of educational, professional, entrepreneurial, scientific, financial, and intellectual achievement while representing a tiny percentage of the world’s population. If Vance’s standard is that religion deserves a privileged role because its cultural characteristics contribute to economic success, one could mischievously propose that America should abandon Christianity and adopt Judaism instead. That proposal is obviously absurd, but not because Jewish achievement is imaginary. It is absurd because economic performance cannot establish theological truth or political authority. Statistical evidence that Jews, Christians, Hindus, or adherents of any other tradition perform exceptionally well on some social measure cannot give the state jurisdiction over anyone’s religious convictions.

The same argument applies universally. If Muslim-majority societies were shown to perform better on some desired social measure, the finding would not justify Islamic government. If Hindu social institutions produced some superior economic outcome, that would not give the state authority to promote Hindu theology. If Orthodox Judaism produced stronger family continuity than secularism, that would not justify enforcing Jewish religious law on non-Jews. The point is not that all religions make identical claims or produce identical institutions. They plainly do not. The point is that no empirical advantage enjoyed by the adherents of a religion can transform theological propositions into legitimate political commands.

An Objectivist analysis reaches the same conclusion from first principles. Religion belongs to the realm of individual belief and voluntary association because no person has a moral claim to another person’s mind. One may attempt to persuade, teach, preach, criticize, condemn, or evangelize, but a genuine belief cannot be produced by coercion. The state can compel behavior; it cannot compel conviction. When political authority attempts to promote a religious conception of the good, it necessarily treats individuals as instruments of a collective moral project rather than as autonomous beings entitled to reach their own judgments about ultimate questions.

This does not mean that political arguments must be morally empty. Quite the contrary. Objectivism itself makes demanding moral claims about reason, rights, productive achievement, and human flourishing. The relevant difference is that political propositions must be defended through reasons accessible to rational examination rather than by an appeal to revelation or ecclesiastical authority. If abortion should be prohibited, the argument must establish why the entity being protected possesses rights and why those rights justify state coercion. “My religion says abortion is wrong” may explain why someone entered the debate, but it cannot complete the political argument. The same rule must apply to taxation, marriage, immigration, education, economic regulation, foreign policy, and every other exercise of governmental power.

Rational Paternalism provides another reason for resisting religious politics. RP allows intervention where there is a genuine asymmetry of expertise and an identifiable beneficiary whose interests the professional is obligated to serve. A physician may properly exercise stronger guidance because she possesses specialized knowledge relevant to the patient’s condition. An adviser may resist a financially disastrous decision because the client has specifically retained him for expertise in that domain. Religious conviction creates no comparable fiduciary relationship between politician and citizen. Vance’s belief that Catholic social teaching provides a superior understanding of the common good does not make him the religious adviser of 340 million Americans, nor does election to office establish expertise in determining their ultimate purposes.

RP also requires the paternalist to distinguish his interests from those of the beneficiary. That requirement becomes particularly important when a politician gains personally from the moral doctrine he advocates. Religious rhetoric can generate votes, loyalty, organizational support, moral prestige, and immunity from certain forms of criticism. The politician may sincerely believe the doctrine and still acquire substantial political benefits from promoting it. Under RP, precisely such a convergence should increase the demand for scrutiny rather than reduce it because the paternalist’s incentives are no longer obviously aligned with those of the people supposedly being protected.

Cipolla’s framework makes the incentive problem still sharper. If religious rhetoric helps a politician acquire power while the resulting coercive policies impose losses upon citizens who do not share his beliefs, the behavior begins to resemble Cipollian banditry: benefits accrue to the actor while costs are transferred to others. This does not require assuming that Vance consciously wakes each morning plotting how to exploit Christians. A sincere believer can benefit politically from imposing sincerely held convictions. Motive does not determine the distribution of gains and losses.

Institutional stupidity becomes possible when the process progresses further. Political leaders adopt policies because they are morally validated by a religious worldview, those policies produce adverse consequences, and evidence of failure is discounted because abandoning the policy now appears equivalent to abandoning the moral principle behind it. Religious certainty can make ordinary political correction more difficult because empirical disagreement becomes entangled with questions of virtue and faith. A tax policy can be revised when the numbers are wrong. A policy understood as an expression of divine or civilizational truth is psychologically and politically harder to reconsider.

This is one of the reasons religion itself should be wary of political power. Political patronage does not merely threaten unbelievers; it corrupts believers. Once politicians discover that public demonstrations of faith generate votes, status, legitimacy, or access to power, incentives arise for increasingly conspicuous religious profession. Clergy who acquire political influence face corresponding incentives to modify teaching to preserve access. Religious communities become electoral blocs, theological disagreement becomes partisan identity, and politicians begin deciding which religious authorities count as authentic. Jefferson’s warning that government support could corrupt the very religion it intended to encourage was therefore not merely speculative. Political power changes the incentive structure surrounding faith.

Religion is strongest when the state cannot manufacture adherence to it. A synagogue, church, mosque, temple, or philosophical community that survives through persuasion, education, family transmission, charity, scholarship, ritual, and personal commitment demonstrates genuine cultural authority. Its members remain because they believe, because they value the community, or because they are persuaded that its obligations are worth assuming. A religion that requires political privileges to maintain influence has already admitted a weakness in its capacity to persuade.

This is also why the objection to political religion cannot be selectively applied according to which religion is involved. Christians who object to Islamic political authority but welcome Christian political authority have not defended religious liberty; they have defended denominational advantage. Secular progressives who condemn Christian nationalism while attempting to exclude religious citizens from ordinary public argument make the reciprocal mistake. Religious liberty means that every person may bring his convictions into civil society while no person acquires additional political authority because those convictions are religious.

The proper standard should therefore be demanding but neutral. A political leader may say that Christianity taught him compassion, Judaism taught him justice, Islam taught him charity, Buddhism taught him restraint, or atheism taught him intellectual independence. Such statements explain the individual. They do not bind the citizen. The moment the politician proposes to use governmental power, he incurs a different obligation: he must justify the exercise of that power using evidence and arguments that do not require the governed person first to accept the politician’s religion.

Vance’s growing emphasis upon America as a Christian nation is troublesome precisely because it weakens this distinction. The United States unquestionably has a deeply Christian historical inheritance, just as it contains important Jewish, Enlightenment, classical, deist, and later secular influences. Historical influence, however, is not political jurisdiction. George Washington’s famous 1790 response to Newport’s Hebrew congregation described the new American government as one that gave “to bigotry no sanction” and “to persecution no assistance.” The significant innovation was not toleration granted by a Christian majority to religious minorities as an act of generosity. It was the recognition that citizenship did not depend upon receiving religious permission from the majority at all.

That principle is considerably more important than whether Vance’s Catholic conversion was the result of brilliant intellectual inquiry, motivated reasoning, emotional need, political convenience, or some combination of all four. We cannot examine his private consciousness, and a serious political argument should not depend upon pretending that we can. His faith may be entirely sincere. His conversion may also have provided an intellectual framework extraordinarily congenial to political conclusions he was already developing. His increasing public religiosity may simultaneously strengthen his sense of moral purpose and improve his position among constituencies important to his political future. Human motivation is perfectly capable of containing all these things at once.

The proper response is therefore not to psychoanalyze Vance but to deny the political relevance of the question. Whether he is sincere or cynical, brilliant or mistaken, devout or opportunistic, his theological conclusions do not enlarge the legitimate jurisdiction of his office. If Christianity provides a good argument about economics, immigration, family policy, or social order, that argument must survive translation into evidence and reason without relying upon Christianity for its authority. If it cannot survive that translation, it has no legitimate claim upon citizens who do not share the faith.

This separation protects religion as much as it protects liberty. It allows Vance to be as Catholic as he wishes, a Jew to be as Jewish as he wishes, an evangelical to preach conversion, an atheist to criticize them all, and an Objectivist to reject the premises of supernatural religion entirely. They may establish institutions, educate their children, publish books, support charities, criticize one another, persuade converts, and shape culture. What none may legitimately do is acquire governmental authority and then convert a private conception of ultimate truth into a political claim upon everyone else.

The danger of political religion is therefore not confined to theocracy in its crude historical form. Long before priests formally govern, religion can become an instrument through which politicians classify citizens, validate economic programs, justify restrictions, define national belonging, and present contested policies as expressions of a transcendent moral order. Vance’s importance lies in making this development unusually visible. His language of Christian nationhood, Catholic social teaching, the common good, and religiously informed economic policy illustrates how easily personal faith can migrate from conscience into political architecture.

The American answer to that temptation should remain the one Madison and Jefferson understood more than two centuries ago. Religion should be protected precisely because it is beyond the proper jurisdiction of government. Political power should be justified without demanding theological assent precisely because citizens possess different consciences. A politician should be free to pray before making a decision, but the citizen should never be required to accept the prayer as part of the argument for being governed.

The issue is consequently much larger than J. D. Vance. He is merely an unusually useful contemporary example. The principle must apply to every religion, every political party, and every ideological coalition. Once religious conviction becomes a currency with which political power is purchased or a source from which coercive authority is derived, both politics and religion are degraded. Politics acquires an authority it cannot rationally justify, while religion acquires incentives for conformity, opportunism, and political manipulation. A free society should demand something more difficult from both institutions: religion must persuade without commanding, and government must command only where it can justify doing so without invoking religion.