Vice President J.D. Vance made that point in a recent interview with Daily Wire host Michael Knowles, in a clip posted Tuesday on X. His argument was not simply that modern secular progressivism has its own beliefs. It was that many of its rituals and public declarations borrow heavily from Christianity while stripping out God, grace and salvation.
“One of the really interesting things about the secular, hyper-progressive, hyper-liberal age that we live in,” Vance said, “is you realize how many of the rituals and institutions and practices of Catholicism show up in the modern world completely divorced from the God part and the grace part of it.”
That was the heart of his point. Secular progressives, in Vance’s view, have not abandoned religious behavior so much as redirected it. The objects of devotion have changed, but the impulse remains.
He pointed to the familiar yard signs that became common in many neighborhoods over the last several years, the ones beginning with “In This House We Believe,” followed by slogans such as “love is love,” “science is science,” and “no person is illegal.”
Vance credited President Donald Trump with helping move the country past the peak of that trend, at least among the people he sees. But the signs themselves, he argued, revealed something deeper.
“That sign,” Vance said, “is like, such a disgusting butchering of the Nicene Creed.”
The Nicene Creed, first adopted at the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325, begins with a declaration of Christian belief: “We believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.”
It then continues with statements of belief in Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit and the Church, forming one of the central summaries of Christian doctrine. For centuries, Christians have recited it as a public profession of faith.
Vance’s argument is that the progressive yard-sign version imitates the structure and cadence of a creed while replacing Christian doctrine with political slogans. It still has a public profession. It still has a list of beliefs. It still signals membership in a moral community. What it lacks is God.
That observation is useful because it gets at something people often miss. Secular politics does not always eliminate religious instincts. Often, it redirects them into politics, ideology, identity or self-expression.
That is why public moral signaling can feel so intense. It is not merely a statement of opinion. For many people, it functions more like a confession of faith.
History offers plenty of examples of this pattern. Karl Marx, in his younger writings, placed enormous confidence in human self-assertion. Anthony Fauci, during the COVID era, came to represent for many critics a kind of institutional faith in “science” that often seemed to blur the line between scientific authority and personal authority. Even the slogan “My Body, My Choice” has been criticized by Christians as a dark inversion of Christ’s words at the Last Supper: “This is my body.”
Vance’s broader point is that human beings do not stop worshiping simply because they reject formal religion. They find new creeds, new rituals and new authorities. They still want to declare what they believe. They still want to belong. They still want to be justified.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has put Vance forward as a public voice on major foreign policy questions, including its peace deal with Iran. He has also been promoting his new book, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” which has placed him in conversations about religion, politics and culture.
His comments about the Nicene Creed show why those conversations matter. They suggest that beneath many modern political slogans lies a spiritual hunger that politics cannot satisfy.
For that reason, Vance should keep making the case. Even those who reject Christianity might benefit from seeing how often their own habits of belief still borrow from it.
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