The following story is co-published with Luke Savage’s Substack .
There’s a viral clip of Russell Brand that’s recently been making the rounds on social media. If you haven’t seen it, Brand — who is facing multiple charges of sexual assault — was asked by Piers Morgan about a Bible he seemed to have brought with him to the set. Suggesting it’s a Bible he’s also been bringing with him as a talisman to court, Brand then spent a full 90 seconds trying and failing to locate the “relevant passages” he’s been consulting amidst his legal troubles. It’s pretty hilarious, and I think most people who saw the clip will have drawn the obvious conclusion that the reason Brand couldn’t find the passage was because his newfound Christian identity (he converted and was “reborn” about two years ago) is totally fake. So fake, it seems, that he hasn’t even bothered to do the reading. We’ve seen versions of this all over the place, and they’re not always conservatively coded (remember Kevin Spacey coming out as gay the moment he was accused of sexual misconduct?). But religious conversions have occupied a particularly special place on the right during the Trump era, and conversions to Catholicism especially. Why Catholicism specifically? There’s probably no single answer here, but it’s likely some combination of the following.
First, Protestants are more numerous in America than Catholics, and among right-wing Christians the proportion is probably even more lopsided. So there’s a whiff of hipsterism about people who suddenly come out as trad Catholics in that they get to feel they’re part of a special niche that is smaller and consequently has greater cultural cachet. Catholicism also lends itself to the kinds of intricate theological and doctrinal debates that allow recent converts to become nerds about it if they want to. The reactionary right is fundamentally concerned with preserving and defending hierarchy. Second, and more importantly, the reactionary right is fundamentally concerned with preserving and defending hierarchy, and a certain breed of conservative is liable to find Protestantism a bit too democratic. Which isn’t to say, of course, that right-wing evangelicals are opposed to hierarchy (just look at the personality cults built around figures like Jerry Falwell). But the Catholic Church is an ancient and unified institution with a single, infallible representative of God at the top and I think the trad Cath identity — a version of Catholicism that reaches back before the liberal universalist turn of Vatican II — holds distinct appeal on the modern right for other reasons I’ll detail in a moment.
Finally, there’s a storied history of syncretic conservative regimes that have successfully married various forms of authoritarianism with reactionary interpretations of Catholic teachings. This was Francisco Franco’s model in Spain and Antonio Salazar’s in Portugal. In Quebec, before the Quiet Revolution began in the early 1960s, it was how the right-wing government of Maurice Duplessis maintained power as well. 1 These regimes have all been rejected by history, but they continue to hold profound political significance on the most illiberal and authoritarian parts of the right.
This at last brings us to U.S. Vice President JD Vance , who was raised in a Protestant milieu but converted to Catholicism in 2019. Vance and the Catholic Church have been featured together in the news of late thanks to the former’s cartoonishly absurd spat with Pope Leo XIV. Leo, by way of some more context, delivered a pretty striking homily on April 11 that can only be read as a condemnation of the Trump administration’s war-making. Invoking John Paul II’s critical remarks about the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the first pope to have been born in the United States then said this:
Prayer teaches us how to act. In prayer, our limited human possibilities are joined to the infinite possibilities of God. Thoughts, words and deeds then break the demonic cycle of evil and are placed at the service of the kingdom of God — a kingdom in which there is no sword, no drone, no vengeance, no trivialization of evil, no unjust profit; but only dignity, understanding and forgiveness. It is here that we find a bulwark against that delusion of omnipotence that surrounds us and is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive. The balance within the human family has been severely destabilized. Even the holy name of God, the God of life, is being dragged into discourses of death. … Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!
Vance’s response , appropriately delivered in a Fox News interview several days later, was simply incredible — not just because he’s a Catholic convert but because it also sounded indistinguishable from something you can imagine him saying about a member of the Democratic leadership in a slightly generous mood: “We can respect the pope, we certainly have a good relationship with the Vatican, but we’re also going to disagree on substantive questions from time to time. I think it’s a totally reasonable thing and isn’t particularly newsworthy.” Still more incredible, and for our purposes noteworthy, was Vance’s addendum that “in some cases it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality, to stick to matters of what’s going on in the Catholic Church, and let the president of the United States stick to dictating public policy.” This was, of course, the same week Donald Trump posted (then deleted) the below image on his TruthSocial account — which self-proclaimed traditionalist Catholic JD Vance defended as well. A since-deleted image posted to Donald Trump’s Truth Social account. Where does one even begin with all this?
It’s tempting to point out how ridiculous Vance’s implied separation between politics and morality is and the extent to which it basically ignores the entire history of the Catholic Church — which has long been involved in politics for better and for worse. Pope Leo incidentally chose his name as a reference to Pope Leo XIII, who is best known for delivering an 1891 encyclical called Rerum Novarum which backed the right of workers to join trade unions. 2 But what’s more incredible is that Vance’s posited separation between politics and morality almost had him sounding like a secularist liberal (i.e., morality is a private thing and the state’s job is to be neutral and guarantee as much private freedom to individuals as it can). As a traditionalist Catholic, moreover, he’s supposed to believe in the principle of papal infallibility. Is Vance implicitly suggesting that he has his own, personal relationship with God and thus no longer needs the intercession of his anointed representative here in this earthly realm? Because, if so, he seems to have trad-ed his way straight back to Protestantism. Hilariously, the cover of Vance’s forthcoming book about faith actually features a Methodist (which is to say, non-Catholic) church on its cover. Whoops. The cover to JD Vance’s new book on Catholicism… featuring a Methodist church on the cover. There’s obviously a lot of hypocrisy to go round here. But, perhaps more interestingly, I think it’s ultimately a pretty powerful case study in how what calls itself the traditionalist right isn’t really interested in tradition at all. A traditionalist, conservative Catholic would be utterly horrified by Trump’s self-aggrandizing Jesus slop and would simply never assert that the pope should keep his distance from issues of morality. In recent years, we’ve been treated to a steady stream of pieces like this recent one by David Brooks — incidentally a Christian convert — in The Atlantic (some further examples can be found here and here ) about the return of traditionalist Catholicism.
We’re often told this is roaring back because young people especially feel alienated by the chaotic relativism of liberal postmodernity and increasingly crave the kind of order and foundation only the traditionalist doctrines of an ancient institution can provide. There might even be something to this in certain contexts, but I don’t think it’s really what’s happening on parts of the reactionary right occupied by figures like Vance.
Here, it seems to me, the idioms of “tradition” mostly operate on a superficial or aesthetic level (think again of Vance’s book cover or Russell Brand’s viral moment of silence next to Piers Morgan) and, even there, are fundamentally irreconcilable with other ideological and aesthetic tendencies we find on the Trumpian right. In the passage below, written for Jacobin in 2017 , Angela Nagle was thinking of the alt-right, but I think her observation continues to be applicable:
[The] temporary alliance of very different factions [on the new right] — the most stark being between the traditionalist right and the libertinism of chan culture — has produced a schizophrenic incoherence. The alt-right mourns European culture’s decline but has itself created the most degraded and degenerate forms of culture the West has ever seen in its own fetid forums. It romanticizes the West but hates its Christian “slave morality” and the best of its intellectual traditions. The alt-right uses the now completely bankrupt language of counterculture and transgression when they talk about being “the new punk,” which should serve as a reminder of how empty those ideas have now become.
Indeed, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the harder the reactionary right cloaks itself in the idioms of tradition, the more hungrily it embraces and channels the most dizzying, decadent and profligate features of postmodern existence — from the president’s artificially generated Christ slop to Pete Hegseth inadvertently mistaking Tarantino dialogue for Holy Scripture. What’s really happening here, I think, is that the reactionary right’s favored language of traditionalism stands in clear conflict with its fundamentally neo-Nietzschean view of America and the world: the belief that all human relations, and indeed relations between states, are ultimately those of power and dominance. What is Trumpism, after all, if not the concerted political expression of that belief? As I wrote last year:
In its crude brutality and cold belligerence, Trumpism has no time for [high-minded liberal notions like international law or the public interest]. Its ethos, borrowed straight from the transactional worlds of reality television and market competition, is one of winners and losers; of pure acquisition, conquest and unrestrained id. These things, to someone like Trump, are the true realization of capitalist ethics and the final telos of American power. The exercise of trade and foreign policy is just the shaking down of small countries by larger ones. The state, by the same token, is a place where winners convene to extract value and profit however they can, not the institutional expression of “the nation” in abstract.
It is, of all things, under the aegis of religious traditionalism that people like Vance, Rod Dreher , R.R. Reno (editor of the ecumenical conservative religious journal First Things) and other intellectual leaders on the new right have justified their allegiance to Donald Trump: a sentient avatar of sin, vice and human depravity who would probably count among the least saintly people ever to walk the Earth.
The only reasonable conclusion to draw here is that the vital force driving self-described traditionalist conservatives is something other than tradition; less an alternative to the chaos of modernity than a symptom of its most degenerate elements — and fundamentally opposed to the universalistic aspirations of any form of Christianity worth defending.
- This example will be less well known among non-Canadian readers. But among the Duplessis regime’s most prominent opponents and critics were more liberally oriented Catholics like Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Charles Taylor, which is notable insofar as what we’re discussing here sometimes represents a conflict within Catholicism itself. ︎
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- I’d like to shout out Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell of the excellent “Know Your Enemy” podcast for a recent discussion which brought this to my attention. ︎
- The post Goodbye Traditionalism, Hello Jesus Slop appeared first on Truthdig .