It has been a tough month for American social conservatives. At the Republican National Convention platform committee, pro-life delegates were silenced and sidelined, and the resulting 2024 platform is the first since 1984 to leave out a commitment to the right to life. At the RNC itself last week, pro-life talking points were entirely absent, with Trump surrogates and LGBT activists touting the shift away from social conservatism. On July 18, vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance addressed the issue directly at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s “God and Country Breakfast.”
“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,” he told the Faith & Freedom Coalition. “And really, from the bottom of my heart, that is not true. 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.” He reminded the crowd that Trump had previously delivered for social conservatives and on that basis, asked for “a little bit of trust” going forward.
As Ronald Reagan’s favorite Russian proverb puts it, “Trust, but verify.” At the moment, it appears that Trump is steering the GOP away from social conservative issues because he never believed in them—at least, that’s what his son Eric Trump told NBC. But there is also good reason to believe that Vance, based on his own record, is sincere in his statements. I hope that his own toeing of the new party line on abortion—such as his statement in support of access to the abortion pill—will be clarified in the months ahead, when he will be challenged on his previously articulated pro-life principles by the press.
Over the past several years, Vance has established himself as one of the more interesting social conservative intellectuals on the Right. Those cited as an influence on his thinking are almost all social conservatives, as well. Much has been made of his transition from ‘Never Trumper’ to Trump supporter; but, as Michael Brendan Dougherty observes in National Review, Vance’s intellectual trajectory has actually been quite consistent. Vance described the evolution of his religious views in a 2022 essay in The Lamp and the development of his political beliefs—including his view of Trump—in a conversation last month with Ross Douthat of the New York Times.
I first saw Vance speak in 2019, at the National Conservatism conference put on by the Edmund Burke Foundation in Washington, D.C. Vance gave a speech titled “Beyond Libertarianism,” in which he cited the ubiquity of digital porn consumption, even among children, as an example of how libertarianism has failed us. Born in 1984, Vance is young enough to recognize the transformative effects of internet porn on the young, and I was very interested in his approach to the issue. I believe that pornography is fundamentally transforming our sexual economy and poisoning the culture—but few politicians are willing to countenance doing something about it. In the first of several interviews during his 2021 Ohio senatorial campaign, Vance revisited that theme.
“There have been a lot of examples throughout history where we’ve recognized that a given product or service is harmful and made a decision to protect those kids through legislation or regulation,” Vance told me. “You could do a straightforward ban on pornography for kids under the age of 18; you could give parents more control over the devices in their kids’ hands … Some of these fixes aren’t going to be easy, but it requires the political willpower for us to say enough is enough. The idea that you can’t regulate the internet in a way that protects children is just absurd.”
“In the scope of American history, the internet is very new,” he added. “The idea that a 9-year-old can watch a gangbang on the internet is very, very new. We have to keep making the argument that this is a bad deal for America’s kids. I happen to think we’re persuading people. When they hear the argument, they recognize it. There’s a lot of barriers, but I really don’t think most Americans want a 9-year-old to get on the internet and watch really disgusting material on their computer or on their phones.”
We have to make the argument that this is objectively bad for kids, bad for parents, and bad for society to have an entire population that grows up being exposed to something no generation in American history has been exposed to … I think what we have to appreciate is that we’re living in an era where the internet companies have very maliciously taken power away from parents and put it onto themselves—and in that era, parents need help.
We also discussed abortion. “I’ve known many people who had abortions,” he told me. “They all felt it was the choice of last resort.” Many, he said, felt cultural pressure to abort, or feared that they would never amount to anything; or, “There were straightforward economic pressures, and they couldn’t take care of their baby. I think any truly pro-life movement is going to focus not just on the cultural pressure to have an abortion, the legal right to have an abortion, but also on the economic pressures that will make that more likely to happen in the first place. To the American pro-life movement’s credit, I think we have tended to fight on all those fronts.”
“We have not always been respected by our coalition partners on the Right, but the pro-life movement has always been incredibly compassionate about the economic circumstances that lead women to have abortions,” Vance added. “If I had to make a prediction, I think that very pro-life viewpoint is going to find greater expression in the whole conservative movement in the coming years.” Back in 2022, Vance noted on Twitter (now X): “If you’re not willing to stand up to the left on abortion, you can’t be trusted on anything else. The pro-life position is the pro-people position and I’m proud to be 100% pro-life.” As the pro-life movement finds itself once again in a position where we are facing profound disrespect from the “coalition partners on the Right,” we will need Vance to remember those words.
Vance is a brawler and has a thorough understanding of the cultural forces at play. “There are so many fronts in the culture war, in part because the Left plays to win,” he told me. “Let’s take a moment to respect the evil genius of many on the Left—they are constantly choosing new battles; they are constantly on the offensive.” Social conservatives, he said, must be constantly pushing back and articulating our own perspectives—and again, that has never been truer than now, when social conservatives are facing disenfranchisement not only from the Left, but also from the institutional GOP.
When I asked him about the dangers of our historical moment, Vance was clear-eyed and pragmatic. “I’m a devout Christian, and the history of both the West and of the Christian faith is of some very dark periods that are punctuated by unexpected moments where the tide turns in the other direction,” he reflected. “We are in a civilizational-level crisis in this country right now. But is the crisis in the West worse than when the hordes were marching on Europe and Charles Martel was pushing back against them? Is it worse than in the mid-20th century when it seemed like Nazism and Communism would roll over in the face of what was then the advanced world?”
“I tend to think, in part because I’m a person of faith, that these crises are not as hopeless as [we often think] they are,” Vance continued. “I think the lesson of history is that sometimes, very unexpectedly, things go in the right direction. Our role, as people who care about these issues, is to fight where we can, win where we can, and prepare ourselves for a moment when we can move things in our direction.”
I have no doubt that J.D. Vance is a social conservative. As Donald Trump’s running mate and possibly the next vice president of the United States, I hope he has the courage and the intellectual fortitude to resist the cultural currents we saw at work in the Republican Party over the past month—and that he will use his role to fight where he can, win where he can, and prepare for the moment when we can move things in our direction once again. J.D. Vance is now close to the highest pinnacle of power in America, where the air is thin, and it is easy to get disoriented. I hope he will prove to be a leader not merely of consensus, but one with the courage of his convictions.
