Photo illustration by The New York Times; source photograph by Emily Elconin/Getty Images
ByMatthew Schmitz
Despite institutional decline and internal conflict, Catholicism retains a surprising resonance in American life — especially in certain elite circles. It has emerged as the largest and perhaps the most vibrant religious group atmanytopuniversities. It claims six of the nine Supreme Court justices as adherents. It continues to win high-profile converts, and its social teaching exerts an influence (often unacknowledged) on public debates, inspiring political thinkers who seek to challenge both the cultural left and the laissez-faire right.
The Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism after attending Yale Law School, exemplifies this phenomenon. When he was baptized into the church in 2019, he joined an influential group of conservative converts, including the legal scholars Erika Bachiochi and Adrian Vermeule, the political scientist Darel Paul, the Times Opinion columnist Ross Douthat, the theologian R.R. Reno and the writer and editor Sohrab Ahmari, one of my colleagues at the online magazine Compact. (I am also a convert to Catholicism, and I work or have worked with many of these figures.)
Such thinkers disagree, sometimes sharply, on important matters, not least the value of populism and the merits of Donald Trump. But all share a combination of social conservatism and a willingness to question many of the free-market orthodoxies of the pre-Trump Republican Party. In doing so, they can claim justification from Catholic social teaching, a body of thought that insists on a traditional understanding of the family while embracing aliving wageandtrade unionsas means of promoting “the common good.” See, for example, Mr. Vancein 2019: “My views on public policy and what the optimal state should look like are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching.”
This group’s economic thinking distinguishes its members from an earlier cohort of conservative Catholic intellectuals such as William F. Buckley Jr. and Michael Novak. Those men laid a stress on free markets, in part because the threat of Soviet Communism had led Catholic thinkers to emphasize the relative virtues of a liberal and capitalist system that had longbeensubjectto Catholic critique.
By contrast, for Mr. Vance and others like him, Catholicism seems to be a resource for pushing back against the excesses of cultural and economic liberalism. As for so many converts before them, the church represents an alternative to the dominant ethos of the age. During the Romantic period, intellectuals like Chateaubriand and Friedrich Schlegel were drawn to Catholicism in reaction to what they saw as a tidal wave of rationalism associated with the Enlightenment. In the 20th century, the writer Evelyn Waugh, another convert, described Catholicism as a welcome foil for what he saw as the “materialistic, mechanized state.”
Many of today’s converts look to resist the left-right fusion of libertarian cultural attitudes and free-market economics that has reshaped Western society over the past three or four decades. But rather than precipitating a radical overhaul of society, as some fear and others hope, they have exerted a subtler influence that is nonetheless significant: altering how the Republican Party approaches policy, and in some cases helping build a new consensus across party lines.
To get a sense of what this looks like in practice, consider the recent reorientation of U.S. trade policy. Robert Lighthizer, the trade chief for Mr. Trump, championed tariff policies against China and the withdrawal of the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade agreement. Mr. Lighthizer has described his approach as an attempt to promote “common good economics” by abandoning “the orthodoxies of free trade religion.”
Citing Pope Leo XIII, who inaugurated Catholic social teaching in the late 19th century, Mr. Lighthizerhas arguedfor the importance of meaningful work in promoting healthy families, neighborhoods and communities. Notably, the tariffs on Chinese goods championed by Mr. Lighthizer have been continued, and even augmented, by his replacement under President Biden, Katherine Tai.
Catholic thought also appears to have played a role in the right’s recent tentative opening to labor unions. When the United Auto Workers went on strike last year, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri cosponsored a supportive resolution with various Democrats, as well as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. In an article urging conservatives to back the union, Mr. HawleycitedPope Leo XIII’s 1901 encyclical on Christian democracy. In 2019, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida referenced the Catholic Church’s teaching in anargumentfor “the essential role of labor unions.”
Mr. Vance, who visited a U.A.W. picket line last year, told me in an interview in February that he is “very much aware of what Leo XIII wrote about the relationship between business and labor.” At the Republican National Convention last month, a speech by Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters, was a sign that such sympathies have been noticed by labor leaders.
To be sure, no trade policy or set of labor laws is specifically Catholic. Nor is the general ideological tendency to fuse social conservatism with calls for economic solidarity. Mr. Hawley, for example, is a Protestant who draws inspiration from the Dutch Reformed theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper. Jewish thinkers such as the British scholar and politician Maurice Glasman have also been important in developing this set of ideas. Indeed, Catholic scholars have stressed to me that the church’s social teaching doesn’t narrowly dictate policy.
One sign of just how intensely Catholics can disagree over social issues is the recent controversy over Mr. Vance’s stance on abortion. When he said on “Meet the Press” last month that mifepristone, a drug used in medication abortion, should remain accessible, some Catholicsworriedthat his comment represented a retreat from the pro-life position.
Others came to his defense. Sherif Girgis, a Catholic legal scholar at the University of Notre Dame who attended law school with Mr. Vance, reminded me that Mr. Vance has spoken in the past “about allowing some abortions as a matter of political reality, not moral legitimacy.” If that’s what Mr. Vance meant here, Mr. Girgis said, “then he’s not contradicting any general Catholic moral principle.”
But thinkers like Mr. Vance who seek to draw on Catholic social teaching today face a more basic difficulty than any specific disagreement about how to apply it. When Catholic social teaching was at the height of its influence, in the first half of the 20th century, there was an impressive array of Catholic institutions that could help carry out that vision: Catholic states, Catholic trade unions, Catholic youth groups and more. Now, those institutions have disappeared or persist only in diminished form.
In the absence of a robust Catholic culture, Catholic social teaching can seem strangely weak — like a voice raised in an empty field rather than before a full house. It may still inspire influential actors like Mr. Vance, but they will be constrained by an unchurched public’s limited appetite for Catholic ideas.
Indeed, many worry that the church itself has lost the will to resist the grimmest aspects of modern society. Some have warned that efforts to adjust the church’s sexual teaching to contemporary mores are only the latest expression of what Henri de Lubac, the Jesuit theologian, called “an endeavor that wants to dissolve the church into the world.”
Such challenges, along with recurring instances of scandal and hypocrisy, should be enough to cure even the most enthusiastic Catholic convert of triumphalism. Yet those inclined to faith may still marvel that such an imperfect institution continues to attract those like Mr. Vance who seek an alternative to much of contemporary society, and to offer intimations of how it might be improved.
