Welcome back to Thomas Pope, I'm Joe Heschmire, and I want to begin today a series of episodes that are loosely about the relationship between Christianity and more specifically Catholicism and politics.

Now, before I say anything else, let me be really clear.

My goal on these is not to do the kind of standard things where I tell you how to vote, what to think about a particular bill, or whether the president is doing a good job.

I'm not going to do any of those things.

Plenty of other people are more than happy to offer their opinions about all of those

things ad nauseum.

I want to do something completely different.

I want to look at three issues that have come up that are sort of related to politics,

which I think are actually being undercovered

and explore them not from the perspective of what they mean for the political arena,

but rather what they mean about issues of the faith and what maybe they mean to you and me.

So today I want to explore the faith journey of Vice President J.D. Vance,

the journey of going from evangelical Protestantism

to atheism to Roman Catholicism and explore why those moves happened. On Tuesday, I'm going to

turn to another topic, the surprising death of liberal Catholicism. I'll explain what I mean

then. And on Thursday, I want to turn to exploring the

rise and spiritual dangers of conspiracy theories. So let's start with today's topic. J.D. Vance.

Vice President James David Vance, better known as J.D. Vance. I know, again, there's plenty of things you can say about him in the political arena, positively or negatively, including from a Catholic perspective. I'm aware he's sparring right now with the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops on immigration policy. I know he's said things about abortion.

Some of them really good, like at the March for Life,

some of them a lot more troubling.

And already you've got Catholics calling him out

for allegedly putting his politics above his faith.

...