Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) trekked to Georgia this week to give the keynote speech at a dinner hosted by the Faith & Freedom Coalition, an organization founded by longtime conservative activist Ralph Reed. Reed introduced Vance, praising the senator and encouraging the audience to work for his election.
“Can we agree that it’s time for the Christians to be the head and not the tail of our political system,” Reed said to cheers, “and turn out the biggest vote of people of faith in the history of this state?”
When it was his turn to speak, Vance lamented that so many people accused Christians of trying to impose their beliefs on others.
“While we’re disparaged by the media and disparaged by the Democrats as people who want to force our faith on other people,” Vance said, “I think I speak for every single person in this room, saying, we don’t want to force our faith on anybody.” Instead, he said, “what we want is to recognize and to have motivate us the faith that is, I think, the source of all great truth in human history, and especially in this country.”
After offering praise for the family as an institution, he explained the motivation behind his politics.
“We are motivated, in other words, by living our faith and ensuring that our public policy promotes the common good,” Vance said. “And I think that in this moment in time, in 2024, with all the violence and all the negative political rhetoric, we need to remember above and beyond that we must love our neighbors, that we must treat other people as we hope to be treated, and that we must love our God and let Him motivate us in how we enact public policy, and how we live our faith and how we can govern our nation.”
You, dear reader, may evaluate the extent to which a public policy motivated by the Christian faith is an effort to force that faith upon the country. Pew Research Center data, though, shows why this probably appeals to a gathering of Christian conservatives. Relatively few of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 were not religious; about a third were White evangelical Protestants. By contrast, about a third of those who voted for Joe Biden were not religious or not members of an organized religion.
There are about twice as many unaffiliated Americans as evangelicals, but they don’t vote as heavily.
It is obviously also ironic for Trump’s running mate to espouse a philosophy of loving one’s neighbor. Trump’s rhetoric has, since he began running for president nine years ago, been almost uniquely toxic, embracing and elevating hostility in ways that were previously rare in national politics. But this was in part why Trump was successful: He converted the latent power of partisan hostility manifested in the fringe-right media into votes.
He took advantage of a political system that has grown increasingly toxic and divided. It is not the case that only his party has grown contemptuous of its opponents, certainly, but polling — like the American National Election Study’s “thermometer” of feelings about political ideologies — shows a sharper downward turn among Republicans considering the term “liberal” than Democrats considering “conservative.”
Particularly over the past 20 years, the most loyal partisans have grown increasingly hostile to the other party’s presidential candidate.
One of the most recent striking measures of partisan hostility came after the death of O.J. Simpson this year. Partisans viewed Simpson — defendant in the most famous murder case in modern history — more favorably than the other party’s presidential candidate.
Into this context walks Vance with his love-thy-neighbor mantra. But, then, perhaps he’s only talking about literal neighbors, those who live near and interact with his audience. Before the 2020 election, Pew found that 6 in 10 Trump supporters and 5 in 10 Biden supporters knew a lot of people supporting the same candidate. Four in 10 in each group knew no one who supported the other candidate.
This is in part because of what’s been called “the big sort,” people moving into areas where others share their politics, either intentionally or as a function of other factors (like seeking jobs or attending college). The result is a significant increase in the number of counties where margins in presidential contests are lopsided — particularly in favor of Republican candidates.
We must, of course, also note the hypocrisy in Vance’s comments that was apparent to you at the outset. Vance is calling for a love-thy-neighbor approach after having spent a week disparaging legal Haitian immigrants to Ohio as disruptive, dangerous people who steal and eat their neighbors’ pets. His unsubstantiated claims have earned a broad rebuke, including from Republican officials in the state he represents, and after he embraced and elevated these toxic rumors, the town of Springfield faced a number of threats of violence.
New analysis from Bloomberg published Monday notes that recent immigrants to the United States have largely settled in more populous counties that voted for Biden in 2020. This isn’t surprising; immigrant have long settled overwhelmingly in cities with communities of other immigrants from their home countries, for obvious reasons. The analysis, though, reinforces that increases in immigrants in rural parts of the country are more unusual, potentially making scapegoating like that embraced by Vance easier and arguments about an erosion of “traditional America” more potent.
It is hard to reconcile Vance’s indifferent insults about Haitian immigrants with his insistence to the Georgia audience that “we must love our neighbors, that we must treat other people as we hope to be treated.” But the audience to whom he was speaking, a gathering of conservative Christians, didn’t seem particularly fazed by that inconsistency either.
Vance did at one point seek the audience’s forgiveness — should he use naughty words while running for vice president.
“I’d ask you to forgive me if you ever see me make a misstep on the campaign trail with my language,” he said, “but I came by it honestly.”
The audience tittered, recognizing that he meant things like the f-word, not his allegations that immigrants were stealing and eating pets or spreading disease. That’s just neighbor-loving.