Joe Biden will leave the White House in January as the second Catholic to occupy it. But several Catholics are soon expected to fill the ranks of Donald Trump’s administration.
Trump, who was raised a Presbyterian but now considers himself non-denominationalHe has nominated at least a dozen Catholics for senior positions in his administration, including his own Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services. Their faith could play a direct role in shaping public policy, from pro-union policies and new tariffs to expanding the child tax credit and tighter regulation of the food and pharmaceutical industries, and would also help forge a new path for the Republican Party.
In interviews, several practicing conservative Catholic leaders said they see a close alignment between many of Trump’s second-term policy priorities and a conservative reading of Catholic social teaching, which goes far beyond abortion. It also focuses on promoting marriage and having children, giving parents broad discretion in everything from school content to health care and empowering non-governmental institutions such as churches and nonprofits for social support.
“No one is coming into the administration willing to mount a crusade or anything like that,” said Rachel Bovard, vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank. But “there is a very specific type of Catholic paradigm that you may begin to see.”
It comes after decades of influence from a more individualistic evangelical Protestantism in the Republican Party that, among other things, firmly embraced individual liberty and free-market capitalism.
“The market is not an end in itself. The market has a purpose: to create a free and flourishing society. If the family is not doing well, society is not doing well. We need to make sure that our public policy helps the family function,” Bovard added.
A spokesperson for the Trump transition did not respond to a request for comment.
In his nearly decade of political prominence, Trump has already dramatically reshaped the Republican Party, and it is clear that the future of the GOP will likely not lie on the three-legged stool of Ronald Reagan’s conservatism, which was fiscally conservative, socially conservative, and hard line.
While Republicans have long been skeptical of government intervention, some members of the party increasingly see government as a tool to reshape social policy. Republicans who long embraced “pro-life” policies, such as restricting access to abortion and supporting crisis pregnancy centers, are now leaning toward a broader set of what they call pro-family policies that range from tax policies that encourage people to marry and have children to Restrictions on children accessing online pornography. They are also starting to look skeptically at big companies, including Big Pharma, Big Ag, and Big Tech.
“I think President Trump has put together a very pro-family platform that wants to put the family back at the center of public policy. Obviously, I think that’s very Catholic. I don’t think he’s trying to be too Catholic,” said Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project. “It just so happens to coincide with Catholic principles and Catholic teaching.”
This is not, of course, the progressive-leaning Catholicism of Biden, Nancy Pelosi and other prominent Democrats, which has focused on social justice, climate change and access to health care among its main causes. Your definition of Catholicism would bristle at the thought of turning away immigrants or restricting access to Medicaid.
Catholics are the largest group of Christians worldwide, and Catholics of both parties have long held prominent positions not only in the White House but throughout Washington. Six of them are part of the United States Supreme Court, made up of nine members; they make up a quarter of Congress, where they are overrepresented compared to the American population; and Biden named an equally sizable number of Catholics to his cabinet.
But conservative Catholic leaders see the Republican Party’s embrace of populism as a shift toward what they call a common good conservatism that is less focused on individual rights and more focused on families and community. Change a pro-business approach to a “pro-family” one. And it’s something they see non-Catholics leaning toward. Trump, in a recent interview with TIME magazine, declared that the Republican Party has “become the party of common sense.”
“What does Catholic social teaching say about these things? Well, it says the goal of politics is the common good,” said Brian Burch, president of the conservative Catholic Vote. “And right now we have a large portion of our population, especially families, that are not thriving.”
Trump’s performance among Catholics is improving, likely due in part to his dramatic improvement among Latino voters. This year, the won 59 percent of the Catholic vote, a group that won with 50 percent support in 2016 and that Biden won with 52 percent in 2020, according to CNN exit polls.
Some conservative Catholics are particularly intrigued by Kennedy, whose uncle, John F. Kennedy, was the country’s first Catholic president. While Kennedy comes from a historic Democratic family, and was himself a registered Democrat until 2023, some see his concern that food and drug companies are profiting from sick people as aligning with social teaching concerns. Catholic about human dignity and respect, even as some Many of them are concerned about their changing views on abortion.
“Bobby has talked about the commodification of the human person, whether it is their illness or their health; It’s just another vaccine further from being manageable. Or big food, big government and big pharma have colluded to manage people like commodities, and they are sort of cogs in a globalist machine that we just need to manage with medicine, technology and science,” said Burch, who en Near Kennedy. “And to Catholics we say, well, wait, no, there’s something much richer and deeper about what it means to be human that we need to reclaim.”
Other Catholics Trump has nominated for his Cabinet include Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, Lori Chavez-DeRemer as Secretary of Labor, Sean Duffy as Secretary of Transportation, Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education, Elise Stefanik as United Nations Ambassador, Kelly Loeffler as SBA Administrator and John Ratcliffe as CIA Director.
The party’s tilt toward these parts of Catholicism comes as the country grapples with high rates of income inequality and two generations face the reality that middle-class goals like buying a home and having children are increasingly felt. out of reach. It also comes amid a growing social discussion about gender roles, stagnant birth rates and the ubiquity of technology, social media and artificial intelligence in the daily lives of people, and particularly children. .
Leading the charge is Vance, whose conversion as an adult to a post-liberal strain of Catholicism underpins his approach to policymaking. While the George W. Bush era saw an attempt to marry conservatism with certain types of Catholic social teaching (government intervention to meet the needs of the poor and support for human rights abroad), it fell by the wayside when the Tea Party wave took control. the Party.
Now, “in Vance, we have a figure who is trying to apply Catholic social teaching in a deeper and different way than we have seen before,” said Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s just a general attempt to reorient the Republican economy toward families and a little less toward businesses.”
This conservative view of Catholic social teaching aligns in many ways with the party’s changing views on a number of issues, such as unions and trade policy. Vance, who joined a United Auto Workers picket last year, has expressed familiarity with Pope Leo Rubio has previously referred to the text in his own argument in support of unions, as did Robert Lighthizer, who was Trump’s trade chief during the first administration, in his arguments against “The orthodoxies of the religion of free trade.” (Lighthizer is unlikely to return to the Trump administration, but his close aide was elected U.S. trade representative.)
It also speaks to a growing interest within the Republican Party in using the government to encourage the creation of families, as countries in Europe, such as Italy, Greece, Hungary and Russia, have tried to do, although so far with little success. Trump has said he wants a “significant” expansion of the child tax credit (Vance has suggested increasing it to $5,000 per child) and has also promised to make in vitro fertilization available to Americans for free. (That policy, however, conflicts with the Catholic Church’s official position against IVF, which opposes it.)
It’s a push that also comes as there is a growing movement within the anti-abortion movement to focus on these and other “pro-family” policies rather than new restrictions on abortion, as much of the country continues to broadly support some level of abortion access.
“We’re going to talk about (IVF),” Trump said recently. he told NBC News’ Kristen Welker. “We will present to Congress, either in the first or second package, the extension of the tax cuts. So it’s very possible that that will be there, or it will come at some point later.”
Still, progressive Catholics remain skeptical about the extent to which the GOP will actually prioritize these policies, when Trump has promised in his first 100 days to focus on expanding tax cuts, taking action on the border and tackling crime at home. the cities. And big business, long allied with the Republican Party, is unlikely to collapse easily.
“When you look at what Republicans are talking about, they’re talking a lot more about cutting social provision than expanding it,” said EJ Dionne, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who has focused on Catholic engagement in the political arena. “The mainstream in the party is still much more pro-business, anti-government and libertarian.”
And progressive Catholics and some conservatives agree that the administration’s hardline approach to immigration is likely to upset American bishops, who are already distrustful of Trump’s “mass deportation” proposal.
“When you look at their first priority,” Dionne added, “it’s not a family policy.”