Vance seeks to reassure social conservatives about their role in Republican Party

Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, speaks to the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “God and Country Breakfast” in Milwaukee on July 18, 2024. Vance told the audience he was raised Christian but became an atheist when he was in law school before coming into the Catholic Church later in his adult life. He blamed the “arrogance” of atheism for “a lot of secular culture in our country today.” / Credit: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jul 18, 2024 / 13:40 pm (CNA).

2024 U.S. Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance promised social conservatives that they will continue to have “a seat at the table” in the Republican Party moving forward.

The senator from the state of Ohio, whom Trump announced as his running mate earlier this week, made the comment during a speech to a Faith and Freedom Coalition breakfast Thursday morning. The organization is a political advocacy group made up of social conservatives who are predominantly Christian.

“There has been a lot of rumbling in the past few weeks that the Republican Party of now and the Republican Party of the future is not going to be a place that’s welcoming to social conservatives,” Vance said in his brief address to attendees.

“And, really, from the bottom of my heart, I want to say that is not true,” Vance added. “Social conservatives have a seat at this table and they always will so long as I have any influence in this party and President Trump, I know, agrees.”

Vance’s comments come about a week and a half after Republican leadership voted to soften its official stance on abortion. The 2024 Republican National Convention’s platform committee took out a long-standing plank of the party’s platform that had affirmed an unborn child’s “fundamental right to life” and called for federal restrictions on abortion. Convention delegates ratified the removal of the plank during their quadrennial meeting on Tuesday.

The new platform simply affirms “no person can be denied life or liberty without due process” and adds that “states are, therefore, free to pass laws protecting those rights.” This conforms the plank to Trump’s campaign promise to oppose a national ban and leave abortion policy to the states.

Vance, in his Thursday morning speech, did not directly reference this shift but used a football analogy to explain the party’s gradual approach to certain socially conservative issues, saying the party must consider “how do we advance the ball one yard before you advance it 10 yards before we advance it to a touchdown.” He added that Trump “delivered for social conservatives more than any president in my 39 years of life.”

“I think he deserves a little bit of grace and he deserves a little bit of trust and I hope that we will all provide that to him,” Vance said.

Vance discusses conversion to Catholicism

Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, also discussed his faith journey at the breakfast.

“If you practice your faith, if you pray, if you think about what it requires of you, then God makes you a little bit better each and every single day and that to me has been the greatest lesson and the greatest blessing of my faith,” Vance said.

Vance told the audience that he was raised Christian but that he became an atheist when he was in law school before coming into the Catholic Church later in his adult life. He blamed the “arrogance” of atheism for “a lot of secular culture in our country today” and explained how the birth of his child led him back to Christ.

“What really brought me back to Christ was finding a wife and falling in love and thinking about what was required of me as a husband and a father,” Vance said. “And the more that I thought about those deeper questions, the more that I thought that there was wisdom in the Christian faith that I had completely discarded and completely ignored but was most relevant to the questions that were presented in my life as a husband and father.”

If the Trump-Vance ticket wins in 2024, Vance will become the second Catholic vice president in U.S. history. The first Catholic vice president was current President Joe Biden during former President Barack Obama’s presidency.