Are Catholic Converts More Hardcore Than Cradle Catholics?
(ANALYSIS) Here’s a religion and politics story from the 2024 election that I hadn’t really thought about until recently: J.D. Vance, Trump’s pick for vice president, converted to Catholicism in 2019.
His religious timeline began as a nominal evangelical during his childhood, dabbling with atheism in his college years and then joined the Catholic Church in his mid-thirties. When asked about this event by Rod Dreher, Vance explained it simply, “I became persuaded over time that Catholicism was true.”
Vance’s Catholicism didn’t really bubble to the surface until he gave an interview to Fox News back in early February on the issue of immigration. He invoked his understanding of a Catholic principle called ordo amoris.
I’m no theologian, and this isn’t a theology newsletter, but in short it’s a framework for how Christians should care for other people. Vance makes the claim that God wants us to care for one’s family first, then our local community, then our fellow citizens, and finally the rest of the world.
Pope Francis was none too pleased with Vance’s understanding of this concept. He wrote that, “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.”
Here’s what was really interesting to me about this whole debate — a lot of Catholics were grumpy with the fact that Catholic converts tend to be a different type of believer than people who were raised in the church from infancy.
See this tweet below:
The intimation here is pretty straightforward: Catholic converts are really hardcore about their faith and that’s often seen as being expressed through a more conservative ethic on things like abortion, immigration, etc.
I was talking with one of my friends who just so happens to be a cradle Catholic and he was just exasperated about the whole thing saying, “Why can’t these converts just be normal!”
You can probably tell where this is headed. Are Catholic converts that much different than cradle Catholics? Before we get to that question let me just answer an even more basic query: how many Catholic converts are there anyway?
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s Substack post, click here.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.