It's in the Code Ep 108: “No Stake in the Country”
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In the run-up to the 2024 election, Republican Vice President nominee JD Vance made waves for claiming that people without biological children have “no stake” in America’s future. What does that mean? What is the religious and political rationale behind such a statement? Decoding this idea further, what does it tell us about American Christian nationalist’s and their vision for America? Dan hit all these issues in this week’s episode.
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As always, welcome to It's in the Code, a podcast series that is part of Straight White American Jesus.
I, as always, am your host.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, pleased as always to be with you.
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Want to dive in?
We're going to talk again today, we're coming into the election cycle, about J.D.
Vance.
I know some folks are tired of hearing about J.D.
Vance and, you know, when the crazy Christian nationalists in this country stop, like, putting people like J.D.
Vance on national tickets, we'll stop talking about people like J.D.
Vance.
The reason we're going to talk about him, though, it's not just that he's offensive.
He is.
Or that he is, as his former friend and, I believe, roommate, you know, has said in some recent context, called him a kind of a chameleon, has said that his views have completely changed and he's taken on a different perspective and so forth.
The reason we're talking about him is that his views, as outrageous as they seem, as crazy as they seem, as angry as they make people, as extreme as they may appear, are completely consistent with what we find within contemporary American Christian nationalism.
He is typical of that movement.
He is not atypical.
He's not an outlier.
He's not something strange.
He's completely typical.
So what I want to do is I want to take a dive into the logic behind his now-famous Cat Ladies comments.
You've heard about these by now.
If you haven't, pause this for a minute, go to Google, and just Google, like, JD Vance Cat Ladies.
It'll all come up.
Everybody's heard about this.
I want to dive into the logic of that and some things that he said that are related to that.
And I want to take a look at what he said and the issue behind what his supporters have said.
This was hyperbolic.
This is humor.
This is nothing more.
I want to look at what he said, but I also want to decode the sentiment behind it.
And look at what that really tells us about the mindset of American Christian nationalists and the perspective of American Christian nationalism, okay?
So, as we know, Vance, in 2021, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, again, this wasn't a hot mic moment, we talked about this in the Weekly Roundup, this was something he said in a national interview, He said that the U.S.
is being run by, quote, a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable with their own lives and the choices that they've made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.
Okay?
And if you're listening to that, and you're not within a certain kind of religious subculture, maybe you're not as up on that discourse, you might be like, So what?
So, like, some people don't have kids.
Like, so what?
Like, who cares?
In the best possible way, so what?
No big deal.
What's wrong with not having kids?
Well, if you're a Christian nationalist, several things are wrong with not having kids, okay?
And so one is from the traditionalist Christian perspective that feeds Vance's nationalism, and we've talked about this.
He's a kind of radical, traditional Catholic person, but this also fits a lot of conservative evangelical ideology and so forth.
From that perspective, having kids is a religious imperative.
Let's just take a few examples of this, a few examples from the Bible.
This is what they will do, is they'll cite Bible verses.
At the beginning of the Bible, they will tell us Genesis 128 says that God tells the first humans to be fruitful and multiply.
Psalm 127 says that children are a blessing or a heritage from the Lord.
That's the same psalm, if people have heard me talk about the so-called quiverful movement, That talks about children as a kind of quiver that God has filled and so forth, and so there are conservative Christians who have said that, you know, we're called by God to have lots of kids, to have a quiver full of children so that we can, you know, sort of build a Christian nation and so forth.
Okay?
Same passage.
In the New Testament, in the book of 1 Timothy chapter 2 verse 15, after sort of talking about how women basically caused sin in the world, Eve was the representative of women and brought sin into the world, and so women have this like legacy of Eve, Paul basically says, but don't worry, I should say that the author of 1 Timothy, because it's traditionally attributed to Paul, but there's I doubt about that.
Whatever.
The author of 1 Timothy says that women will be redeemed through childbearing.
They will be saved through childbearing.
So, having children is actually assigned a role in Christian salvation for women there.
Okay?
So, if conservative Christians want to argue that people, and particularly women, are commanded to have children, they can find Bible verses to do that.
And so there are specifically Christian reasons why somebody like Vance would suggest that there's something morally wrong with people who don't have kids, and certainly with those who don't choose to have kids, who choose not to, who could have kids and don't.
So there's a religious dimension to this, okay?
But it doesn't stop there, because somebody like Vance is going to say that he's not arguing this on religious grounds.
If somebody says, well, why should you force your religious views on me?
You can believe whatever you want religiously, but I don't share your religion, so what's the point?
I say, no, no, no, no.
This isn't just about religion.
I'm not trying to force my religious views on anybody.
That's what Uncle Ron will tell you.
That's what the Christian nationalists will tell you.
We're not trying to force anything on anybody.
So, Vance has also explained, and he said this again in the interview with Tucker Carlson, but this is a point he's tried to clarify, so to speak, in subsequent weeks.
He said that there's a political rationale for this view.
So, discussing continuing, Carlson went on to say, quote, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.
And here's the key, here's the political part.
How does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a stake in it?
The idea is pretty straightforward.
People without children should not be participating in governing of the U.S.
and legislating and enforcing its laws and holding office and so forth because they don't have, as the saying goes, any skin in the game.
That's what he means when he says, you know, they don't have a stake in this country.
So the idea is that if somebody doesn't have kids, they aren't concerned about the well-being of future generations of Americans, so they'll enact policies and proposals that are not good for the future of America.
That's the argument, okay?
I think this is also the idea expressed when Vance talked about taxing people without kids in an interview with Charlie Kirk.
I think this was also in 2021.
He said there, he said that the government should, quote, punish things we think are bad.
and reward things we think are good.
And as a specific example of this, he said, "We should tax things that are bad and not tax things that are good.
If you're making $100,000, $400,000 a year and you've got three kids, you should pay a different, lower tax rate than if you were making the same amount of money and you don't have any kids.
It's that simple." Now, his campaign defended these statements, said this is just common sense, and they highlighted that we have a child tax credit system.
So, that's effectively what that is.
If you have kids, you get a tax break, and if you don't have kids, you don't.
I don't think this is the same idea that Vance is saying, though.
I don't think that anybody would argue that the child tax credit is intended to, quote-unquote, punish people without kids.
Nor do I think it is a reward for people with kids.
It's not that moral reward and punishment logic at all.
It is the logic that you incur more expenses, you're under more financial hardship if you have kids.
There is, don't get me wrong, benefit to having future generations of Americans.
And so that's taken into account.
Anybody who receives a child tax credit, anybody with kids, knows that the tax break you receive is not equivalent to the cost of raising children and so forth.
But I think the logic is different.
I think that the rhetoric matters.
I think it matters that Vance talks about punishing people through taxes and rewarding people through taxes, not Helping Americans who are in financial hardship or something like that.
I think the rhetoric matters.
I think it's telling.
He has also said that people with kids should have more votes than people without kids.
Why?
Because they have a higher stake in the future of the country than those who don't have kids.
So his argument is, his political argument is, that people without kids are bad Americans who should be punished because of this.
They're not just bad Christians, and that's going to be the logic.
This isn't about religion, this is politics.
This is just straightforward political reasoning.
They don't have a stake in the country, and they should be punished for this.
Okay.
And I think this logic also fits, you know, if you go and look at the Weekly Roundup from last week, it also fits this model that he has advanced and been a part of, of having a sort of new aristocracy that should be ruling America.
The idea behind that is it's a very old idea.
It goes way back.
It predates modern democracy and so forth.
The idea is that those who are fit to rule should govern everybody else who is fit to be ruled.
And this is not only the model that held within, say, monarchical society, but within early Republican societies as well, or even, you know, whether you're talking about the democracy of Athens, the Republic of Rome, what have you, except in the past, the issue was land and wealth.
Not children.
And the idea was that those who are landed, who are wealthy, have a stake.
They have an interest in the well-being of the body politic and the commonwealth that those who are without property and significant financial funds don't have.
They don't have the same stakes, so they shouldn't have the same rights.
This is exactly what Vance, as the mouthpiece of contemporary Christian nationalism, is arguing, only now it's about kids.
So if you're producing future generations of Americans, you have a greater stake than if you're not, okay?
So, all of that's wrapped up in Vance's politics and his statements, and again, it is just part of being a card-carrying Christian nationalist.
Okay?
Now, it's all nonsense.
I'm going to let that stand there.
I'm not going to get into the thing about, like, how it is that people who don't have kids can still have a stake in the country and whatever.
That's nonsense.
But that's not what I want to talk about.
We've got the religious rationale for what Vance says.
We've got the political rationale for what Vance says.
But I want to dive in a little bit deeper and I want to decode these sentiments further because they tell us more about what is really going on at the heart of Christian nationalism.
It's not about people not having a stake in America.
It's not about just, you know, some sort of, it just makes sense.
It's just common sense.
No, it's about a deep, visceral, Christian nationalist perception of who or what real Americans are.
What he is expressing, if we decode this just a little bit, is he's telling us who counts as real Americans and who doesn't.
And the first and most obvious of these points is that a certain kind of woman is not a real American.
Vance's views are the expression of what's called gender essentialism and gender complementarianism.
That is just the view that men and women are created by God with fundamentally different and fundamentally—fundamental differences and fundamentally different roles.
That 1 Timothy passage perfectly expresses this.
And what he is saying is that women's social—their proper social and religious value is in biological reproduction.
This is their purpose.
That is their social role.
Their role is to make babies and raise kids.
That's their role.
And any women on this logic who are not having children are not fulfilling that purpose.
And if they choose not to have kids, for whatever reason, it's even worse.
They are not only failing to fulfill their natural and God-ordained purpose, they are fundamentally selfish for doing so.
They are hurting the country.
And if you want to just really make it worse, those who support abortion access are not only selfish, but they're actively moving against the country.
They're trying to get rid of children, the pro-natalist movement, and so forth.
This is their rhetoric.
So this is the key, this is the depth of this.
On this logic, no women who don't fit into that traditionalist model of femininity and motherhood, if you are a woman who doesn't fit that model, and certainly if you advocate for anything different, if you advocate for working outside of the home or doing anything that would delay having a family or might preclude having a family, anybody who makes different life choices, for whatever reason, And I think even those who are unable to have biological children, none of those people are real Americans.
America doesn't really belong to them.
It's not about them having a stake in America.
It's about a sense that America is not really theirs.
Now, that's terrible, but it doesn't stop there.
In his interview with Carlson, Vance specifically names Kamala Harris and AOC.
Okay, cool.
Two quote-unquote childless women.
Two women who don't have biological children.
Kamala Harris famously, as everybody knows now, has adopted kids.
Has stepchildren through her marriage.
But he also lists Pete Buttigieg.
And on the surface, that might seem weird.
How can a guy be a cat lady?
Mr. Gender Essentialist J.D.
Vance.
But here's the key.
It highlights that what's at work here is not, really, of course it's not literally about cat ladies, it's not just about women either.
It illustrates that the Christian Nationalist vision of real America, it doesn't just exclude childless women, it excludes queer folk by definition.
The fact that most queer couples cannot biologically produce children with each other as partners, forget about artificial insemination and IVF and things like that, surrogacy, none of those are on the table because with gender essentialism, only the biologically produced children within a particular coupling pair is what counts.
Which means that the queer folk, by definition, cannot meaningfully contribute to society.
by having kids, and therefore they are not real Americans either.
And again, traditional Christian ethics, going back a couple thousand years, has long ascribed a divine purpose and reason to heterosexual sex as the purpose of sexuality, has long ascribed a divine purpose and reason to heterosexual sex as
Basically it has taken a random evolutionary fact that only particular kinds of human bodies can couple and produce offspring and turned that into a kind of divine purpose, the reason for sex, a justification for sex, Completely fallacious move.
One of the problems of so-called natural theology.
Again, that'd be a whole different episode or series of episodes.
But what it means is that the social body has no place for those whose sexuality or gender expression Precludes the production of biological offspring.
There simply is no place for them.
And we talk about the centrality of biology, that's why somebody like Pete Buttigieg, who has adopted children, that's why somebody like Kamala Harris, who has stepchildren, they still don't count as real Americans because they're not their biological children.
That's what's at work here.
So, Vance's statement is not simply hyperbole, as his defenders have said.
He's not just being humorless, or excuse me, humorous.
He's not just, you know, saying things and Democrats are latching on to this like they would anything, as some of his Republican defenders have said.
No.
It's more, it's also more than his personal views about family and child rearing and etc.
It's an expression of the Christian nationalist vision of who belongs in America.
Who has a stake in America and who doesn't.
The reason you can say they don't have a stake in it is they don't belong here.
This is not their country.
This is not their America.
They're not real Americans.
When somebody like Vance appeals to quote-unquote the American people, he doesn't mean all Americans.
The American people, for him, are only those who fit into his vision, into a Christian nationalist vision of real America.
And what makes him different from somebody who's just expressing their opinion is he is running to be the vice president.
He has eyes toward being president someday and putting these policies into practice.
And that's why the kind of rhetoric that he has reveals the real intentions and the danger of Christian nationalism.
And folks, don't let Uncle Ron gaslight you.
You come up to the Labor Day cookout and don't let him gaslight you and saying, oh, you know, Christians are just, people are just mad at Vance because he's a Christian.
He's stating his own personal convictions and everybody's attacking him.
They're limiting his right of freedom of speech or freedom of religion.
America's out to get the Christian.
No, this isn't about picking on Vance because he's a Christian.
I disagree with everything I have been describing of Vance's perspective today.
If somebody wants to think that, they can think that.
They want to advocate that, they can advocate that.
But when you start talking about putting it into policy, you start running for office on that, that's where it affects all of it.
That's where your personal views are not your personal views anymore.
You want to make them public policy and they have to be countered.
So I think it's important to not lose sight of that when people try to dismiss the rhetoric or Vance has said so many offensive things that it begins to numb us to it.
The same thing that's happened with Trump over years.
I think it's important.
I want to thank you all for listening.
I need to wrap this up, but just again, please reach out.
Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
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