JD Vance: Satan wants Christians to separate faith from politics

Vice President JD Vance says the devil has a favorite trick: convincing Christians that faith and politics belong in separate rooms.

In a wide-ranging new interview with Bishop Robert Barron of the Minnesota-based Roman Catholic Diocese of Winona-Rochester for an episode of his eponymously named podcast, held at the vice president's residence, Vance called for "a more fully Christian politics," one that refuses to treat "economic growth" as an idol, or to dismiss Catholic social teaching as merely "spiritual stuff" with no input on how a nation should be run.

The discussion, which was tied to the release of Vance's new memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, explores his 2019 conversion to Catholicism.

In addition to discussing Vance's own religious journey and the philosophies of Catholic thinkers including St. Augustine, Vance and Barron addressed the relationship between Catholic social teaching and U.S. politics, along with points of friction between the Trump administration and some Catholic Church leaders. Vance reflected on the legacy of the late Pope Francis, who died in April 2025, as part of that discussion.

“I always kind of liked that Pope Francis would just throw these bombs out there in the media because it would force a conversation,” he said. “It forced a dialogue, and he was kind of a genius at that.” 

After Barron praised Francis' encyclical Dignitas Infinita as "one of the best summaries of Catholic social teaching in its breadth and its variety," he noted the late pontiff "was being criticized by a lot of right-wing Catholics as a Marxist." Barron rejected that characterization: "I hate Marxism, but I wrote frequently saying, 'No, that's not Marx, that's Thomas Aquinas.'"

Vance described the "Marxist" label applied to Francis' teaching as an example of "the devil being a deceiver," arguing, "One way to try to turn people's minds off of very traditional and I think ultimately true Christian teaching is to name it as something else."

He then defended Francis' beliefs as consistent with "extremely Christian" ideas about "the universal destination of goods," specifically, the need for balance between "promoting economic growth" and ensuring everyone has "a good opportunity to get their piece of the pie."

Vance also endorsed the “idea that Jesus Christ does not confine Himself to little spheres of your life.”

When Barron identified Jesus Christ as “the Lord of your life,” Vance agreed: “Jesus really cares about how you treat your wife, and He really cares about how you treat your kids, but He also cares about everything else too.”

Recalling his youth, Vance said, "It sometimes felt like whenever Christians engaged in politics, we were very comfortable engaging with this or that social or cultural issue but ... not anything else." He described current trends as "an opportunity for us to rediscover a more fully Christian politics that says that actually Jesus has opinions about all these things."

"If you don't get all of it right, you risk getting the most important parts wrong," Vance insisted. "You can't just confine your faith to these narrow little slices of society or of culture or of your own life. It's got to be true for the whole thing."

Barron invoked C.S. Lewis' image of inviting Jesus "to the front parlor of the house for an hour a week" before asking Him to "please go away." Instead, Barron said, "He wants to be lord of the living room and the dining room and the bedroom and the kitchen and the basement and the pool house," and that includes "our economic and political lives."

Barron insisted that “We can’t bracket those” by saying “That’s not spiritual stuff.”

Vance also pushed back on the belief that “churches should be about churches” and “leave the politics to the politicians.” He countered, “If you really believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and you believe all the truths that flow from that, to your point, He actually has a lot to say about all parts of your life.”

Vance also said he was troubled that "we had made an idol out of the American corporation" and out of "economic growth" itself, which he called "a deeply anti-Christian idea." He said, "We have become so obsessed with the economic measurements that that's how we judge ourselves, that's how we judge our success as policymakers."

As examples of this distortion, Vance pointed to pressure on women to return to work immediately after childbirth and to arguments that frame abortion access as a way to keep women in the workforce: "If you obsess purely on what you're measuring economically, then you can come to all these very distorted conclusions." He said his own view is that "the economy exists to serve the human person," adding, "We don't order our society so that we have a line on a chart go up."