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Less than a week after becoming vice president, JD Vance, only the second Catholic to hold the office, had a very public break with the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church in America. Without evidence, the second-in-command accused the US Conference of Catholic Bishops of settling “illegal immigrants” in order to access federal funds. Though largely used as fodder for internet “gotchas,” the scuffle pointed to a wider trend — one that could remake the country’s religious landscape and the fundamental way Americans think about how they believe and where they belong.

Vance is not just a Catholic. He’s a very specific type of Catholic, part of a group of young white men who, over the past decade, have found their way (often online) into both increasingly conservative politics and traditional religion — primarily Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, rather than the Protestantism that has been a common cultural feature in America. (For the uninitiated, Eastern Orthodoxy, sometimes called “Greek Orthodox” or “Russian Orthodoxy,” is essentially the Eastern equivalent of the Catholic Church, though significant differences have arisen).

One recent study from the Orthodox Studies Institute suggests that conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy has increased 24 percent since 2021. These recent converts tend to be under 40 and single, and the majority are men. There is not a similarly comprehensive study of Catholic conversions, but dioceses are reporting increases in the number of converts anywhere between 30 percent to 70 percent since 2020.

The absolute number of converts isn’t large, but as Vance shows, they can be influential. These people are entering religious communities that have not had many converts in the United States and have historically been associated with specific immigrant ethnic groups, the Irish in the case of Catholicism and the Greeks in the case of Orthodoxy. In fact, American anti-Catholicism has historically been buoyed not only by the centuries-old prejudice of a Protestant society, but also by a bias against foreignness.

And — in part because of this “foreignness” and the ways it has insulated these groups — these ethnic and religious communities have remained politically moderate, or, more accurately, largely defiant of the usual political categorizations. For example, the majority of American Catholics now vote Republican, but a majority also support abortion rights in all or nearly all cases. Similarly, only a slight minority of American Orthodox Christians are Democrats, but a majority support marriage equality and access to legal abortions.

To understand this, consider that the conventional understanding of America’s contemporary religious and political landscape centers two other demographic groups for whom religion and politics are more neatly aligned. White evangelical Protestants are reliably conservative across a broad range of issues, both social and economic, and loyally Republican. Meanwhile, white secular atheists/agnostics are reliably progressive and loyally Democrats.

This alignment is (at least in part) because they are both the descendants (ideologically and in some cases quite literally) of America’s English, Dutch, and German Protestant founding stock. These........

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