What's not so well-known about Vance is his account of his gradual conversion from atheism to Roman Catholicism in the period between 2016, when he first announced that he was thinking of adopting the Catholic faith, to his eventual baptism into the Church in 2019.
A piece at TheBlaze.com by Joseph MacKinnon fills in a lot of the details. MacKinnon writes:
President Donald Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), is now a practicing Catholic, but that was not always so.One wonders how many intelligent young people who are searching for answers to the questions they're beginning to have about life and the world, have been influenced by people like Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins. It's really a shame that anyone has been taken in by them since their anti-theistic arguments are usually superficial and unconvincing unless the reader is eager to be convinced of them.
Years before his baptism and reception into the Catholic Church, Vance told Deseret News he grew up in a "pretty chaotic and hopeless world. Faith gave me the belief that there was somebody looking out for me, that there was a hopeful future on the other side of all the things I was going through."
Vance's Pentecostal father would occasionally take him to church.
"Going to church showed me a lot of really positive traits that I hadn’t seen before. I saw people of different races and classes worshiping together," said Vance. "I saw that there were certain moral expectations from my peers of what I should do."
The future Marine, venture capitalist, and senator indicated that unlike the other children on his block in Middletown, Ohio, the kids his age at the evangelical church he would occasionally attend expected him "not [to] do drugs or have premarital sex or drink alcohol."
Although he found a supportive community through church that could serve as a check against the negative influences he encountered elsewhere, he felt that the particular kind of evangelical Christianity he practiced with his father encouraged "a cultural paranoia where you don't trust and want to withdraw from a lot of parts of the world."
Years later, when he entered Yale Law School, he indicated he "would have called [himself] an atheist." He elsewhere indicated that his reading Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris corresponded with this turn away from faith.
I did a series of VP posts on Dawkins's book The God Delusion which you can find in the archives starting here (2/1/2023) and running through 2/15/23.
MacKinnon continues:
By the time of his graduation, however, he began exploring his faith again.You'll have to go to the link for the rest of MacKinnon's account. It's a quite interesting look into a side of Vance that hasn't been prominent in stories about him since his selection by Trump as his running mate.
"Back home, kids who grew up to be relatively successful tended to abandon their faith," Vance told Deseret News. "All of my close friends growing up were all really religious but, with the exception of one of us, we all considered ourselves nonreligious by age 25."
At Yale, I was exposed to faith groups in which that didn't seem to be happening. Mormons and Catholics at Yale Law School, who were really smart and successful, were engaged with their faith. There was a moment when I was like, 'Maybe it is possible to have Christian faith in an upwardly mobile world.' You can be a member of your faith and still be a reasonably successful person. That's not the world I grew up in, but maybe that's true.
Vance hypothesized at the time that the practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Catholicism, contra the variety of Evangelicalism he was exposed to early on, did not apply the same type of "isolating pressures."
Months prior to the 2016 election, he indicated that he was "thinking very seriously about converting to Catholicism."