For decades, Catholic politicians faced deep suspicion from evangelical Christians, a voting bloc that would eventually become the backbone of the Republican Party.
Now, if either Vice President JD Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio wins the 2028 nomination, they would become the first Catholic to lead a Republican presidential ticket. And hardly anyone seems to care about their religion.
The theological differences that once divided Catholics and evangelicals have given way to a political alliance built around opposition to abortion, LGBTQ+ rights and what both groups see as threats to religious freedom.
For Vance and Rubio, that means their faith is less of an obstacle to winning the Republican nomination than it would have been a generation ago.
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“I don’t think, ‘Oh, he’s a Catholic,’ plays like it did 20, 30 years, 40 years ago,” Chad Connelly, the founder of Faith Wins, a pastor mobilization group, told The Washington Sun. “It’s policies.”
The change reflects a broader realignment in American politics, one where religious conservatives have found common ground across denominational lines.
“The ultimate divide today, sadly, is really between those who believe there is a God and choose to follow him and those who believe there isn’t one,” said Eric Teetsel, the CEO and publisher of Chronicles magazine who served as the director of faith outreach for Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Even though conservative evangelicals may not care that Rubio or Vance are Catholic, they are deeply motivated by the social issues that the two men have spent their political careers espousing.
Their overt religiosity could also help distinguish them from President Donald Trump, who has maintained strong support among white evangelicals despite rarely engaging on the specifics of his own beliefs.
Trump’s particular lack of piety and his administration’s inaction on evangelical priorities has led operatives and activists to have concerns that Republicans overlooked evangelical voters while campaigning for the midterms. But Teetsel predicted that either Vance or Rubio would achieve greater enthusiasm among religious conservatives in 2028 than Trump has.
Spokespeople for Vance and Rubio did not respond to requests for comment.
It helps that Vance and Rubio tend to speak in a vocabulary that resonates with evangelical Christians. Vance was raised in a loosely evangelical environment, which often comes across in the way he talks about religion and how he cites the Bible. During a speech at the GOP midterm convention, he quoted the Book of Romans — the New Testament book that anchored much of the Protestant Reformation.
On a recent podcast with a popular Christian media personality, the vice president tackled questions commonly discussed in evangelical circles: Why do some lose faith? How can Christians reach the younger generation? What to do about hypocrisy in the church?
He used a salvation maxim heard most Sundays in both megachurches and wooden pews, of how “Jesus comes into your heart.”
Vance referred to sanctification — the process for a Christian to become more like Christ. It’s common throughout the faith but emphasized among evangelicals.
“For some people that’s very quick, but for most people that’s a process,” Vance said. “Grace is constantly working on people.”
Rubio’s own spiritual wandering — a Roman Catholic upbringing, a dalliance with Mormonism, a gaze at evangelicalism and an ultimate return to his childhood faith — helped his familiarity with the converging religious terms that have cross-pollinated among conservatives.
“Marco Rubio perfectly encapsulates what I think of as the sort of evange-Catholic nature of a lot of Americans, and that includes a lot of American political leaders,” Teetsel said. “They may align with something like the Catholic Church at the end of the day, but they’re very fluent and comfortable in evangelical Protestant circles too.”
But if Vance faces resistance from evangelical voters, it may spring from an unexpected issue: Israel.
Connelly said that in his conversations with evangelical pastors, concerns about the vice president have little to do with his Catholicism and much more to do with his foreign policy views.
“I’m not hearing about Catholic faith,” Connelly said. “I’m hearing, ‘I think he’s kind of squishy on Israel.’”
Support for Israel is deeply rooted in the theology of many evangelical Christians, particularly those who believe the modern state of Israel plays a role in biblical prophecy. For those voters, American support for Israel is not just a policy preference but a religious conviction.
Concerns around Vance’s commitment to Israel, and anti-interventionist tendencies, have also been compounded by his friendship with Tucker Carlson, the conservative media personality whose rhetoric around Israel and antisemitism has alienated many evangelicals.
“Most of them think Tucker Carlson’s taken a hard-left turn or been demon possessed, for goodness sakes,” Connelly said.
Vance has defended his relationship with Carlson, arguing that political disagreements shouldn’t require people to sever personal ties. He has also sought to reassure Jewish Republicans about his commitment to Israel, including in a recent appearance before the Republican Jewish Coalition.
For some evangelical voters, differences on foreign policy, especially between Vance and Rubio, could become a meaningful issue in a 2028 primary. But the fact that the concerns center on Israel rather than Catholic doctrine illustrates just how much the politics of religion have changed.
“We’ve moved past the fear that a Catholic politician is going to do the Vatican’s bidding from the Oval Office,” said Greg Scott, a conservative Protestant operative.
It wasn’t too long ago that the relationship was decidedly more toxic, resembling hostile allies rather than aligned minds.
One Catholic Republican operative recalled it being common on the campaign trail in the early 2010s to hear remarks that dismissed Catholics as being non-Christians — phrases like: Catholics aren’t Christians or You’re Catholic, I’m Christian.
With the increase in Catholics holding high political offices came moments that exemplified the acceptance of Catholicism in American politics, particularly within conservative circles. Foremost was Pope Francis’ 2015 visit to the U.S. Capitol, organized by House Speaker John Boehner.
It wasn’t that one moment marked the breakthrough — aspects of the pope’s visit were roundly criticized by some conservative publications at the time. But eventually the sheer number of Catholics contributing to the conservative movement reached critical mass. Even for hesitant evangelicals, it was no longer tenable to hold a reflexively antagonistic position, the Catholic operative said.
“If you are an evangelical, you cannot really dispute the fact that the American Catholics have been reliable allies to you,” the Catholic operative said. “Maybe prejudice that you had, or maybe your parents or grandparents would have had, is not only unfounded but is also unproductive for your political aims.”
Although most experts agree that the beef between the groups is a nonfactor — “completely dead” is how Andrew T. Walker, dean of the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, described it — some said vestiges of old conflicts remain.
One evangelical political operative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly, told The Sun that the impact of any feud is muted, but it still has an effect on the margins. The operative said they knew of instances where some Republican Hill offices will occasionally filter out Catholics when hiring, while other offices filter out Protestants.
The gradual migration of Roman Catholics to conservatism coincided with their mass exodus from the Democratic Party, despite Democrats’ track record of elevating Catholic leaders. The only presidents to hold the faith — John F. Kennedy and Joe Biden — were Democrats. So was the first Catholic speaker of the House, John W. McCormack. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been outspoken about her Catholicism but faced backlash for pushing abortion-rights legislation, including an edict from the archbishop of San Francisco that she would be denied Communion for her abortion position.
Catholics have increasingly swung toward the GOP in recent elections: Trump won 55% of the Catholic vote to Kamala Harris’ 43%. That gulf widens when looking at voters who, like Vance himself, converted to Catholicism.
Among converted Catholics, 59% identified as Republicans compared to 33% as Democrats, according to a report from the Tufts Public Opinion Lab. Republicans also had a larger share among those who grew up Catholic, but by a significantly lower margin — 48% to 44%.
“The most highly contested political issues basically boil down to Genesis 1,” Teetsel said. “There’s either God’s created order, the nature of male and female, the meaning of marriage, the dignity of life, or there isn’t. And what we see is the political parties have broken down on opposite lines of those most fundamental questions.”
A recent poll hinted at another twist, however: a drop in support for Vance among Catholics. Following spats with Pope Leo XIV, a Navigator Research survey found Vance’s net favorability almost 70 percentage points lower than the pope’s.
It’s another indication that Vance, specifically, could be a unique test case for the mood of religion on the right.
In the early weeks of the Iran war, Pope Leo asserted that God doesn’t bless conflict. The comment caused Trump, predictably, to lash out at him. Vance sided with Trump, saying the pope should stick with what’s happening in the Catholic Church.
Vance suggested later that the pope should “be careful” when he speaks of theology to make sure “it’s anchored in the truth”; a bold complaint from a devout Catholic who had met Pope Leo and had defended him from some on the right after the pope’s election.
Last Wednesday, Vance shared his continued prayers for the pope to recover from his cancer diagnosis. The back-and-forth exemplifies the tension of Vance’s position: trying to be a political attack dog one day and give a Gospel discourse the next.
Rubio and other potential candidates, like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), have used their religion to bring people into the party, the evangelical operative said. But Vance can use his religion to attack his opponents — even when his criticism is directed at the actual pope.
One trait of that attack-dog mentality has troubled some Republican Christians: Vance likes to say “shit.” Literally, he says “shit.” A lot.
The vice president has often ascribed his salty tongue to his Appalachian upbringing, as a quirk of social class. But it continues to bother those less inclined to pardon his French.
Politicians cussing is a trend. Most of the people employing it, however, don’t do book tours about their journeys into Christendom. To see Vance as their guy, some need him to stop spewing the foul language.
“It might not come down to these religious things,” the evangelical operative said. But if it does, “even something so much as how much he swears is going to matter on the margins.”
“Every time he curses,” they added, “I just think it looks unpresidential.”
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