(LifeSiteNews) – U.S. Vice President JD Vance defended the Trump administration as “very Christian” but not “perfect” Thursday in an interview with Catholic New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.

This week, Vance is promoting his second book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, which explores his path from atheism to Catholicism and faith’s intersection with his private life and public service.

Sitting down for an hour on Douthat’s “Interesting Times” podcast (full video, transcript), Vance discussed the book, the Trump administration’s controversial Iran “peace deal” that the vice president has taken the lead in selling to the public, and more. At one point, Douthat asked point-blank: “How does Christianity work in the Trump administration? What is Christian about the second Trump administration?”

Vance cited a “trade and economic policy” he claimed was “rebuilding the kind of dignity of middle-class work and the wages that come along with it,” plus “I think, the most pro-family policy in pretty much my entire lifetime.”

Douthat countered that the Trump administration “distanced itself in different ways from some other obvious expressions of Christian influence on politics, some of them more sort of liberal coded, some of them more conservative coded,” noting it “has been more hostile than any prior Republican administration, to say nothing of Democrats in the last 20 years, to the way we do humanitarian aid. It has kept religious conservatives, pro-life organizations, especially, at arm’s length in a way that has led to a lot of criticism. And then, let’s be honest, the tone of the administration is not consistently a Christian tone. There is a tone of aggressive uncharity to people who aren’t on board with the administration’s policies.”

The vice president responded by claiming objections to the tone of President Donald Trump and his top subordinates were “fundamentally unfalsifiable,” and that for every such clip critics cited, “I could show you another few clips of us doing something or saying something that is very Christian.” 

He added that “tonal arguments are ways of, frankly, policing working-class ways of communication and covering them in elite preferences,” citing the Biden administration speaking charitably about immigration yet pursuing an open-borders policy that was “not particularly charitable to the people who were living with the consequences of mass migration into our country (…) what I think matters much more than perceived tone is actual conduct.”

On foreign aid, Vance argued it was being used to bankroll left-wing parties in Latin American countries and so had to be “rebuil(t) from scratch,” and was plagued by “remarkable inefficiency.” So “we still distribute a lot of money in foreign aid, but two differences: It goes to the people who actually need it and not to administrators, and No. 2, it goes according to the policy preferences of the elected president.”

The conversation then turned to Vance’s public disagreements with Popes Francis and Leo on issues from immigration to the Iran War.

“What I say is the pope is the leader of the church. He is the leader of the institution that preaches the gospel. He’s an important moral voice, but he also does have a different role from the vice president of the United States,” Vance said. “My role is for the American people to try to apply moral principles in ways that get the best outcomes, that lead to the best things, and that balance competing interests. And his role, I think, is to preach the Gospel and to offer his opinions on how he thinks we’re doing. And, fundamentally, that will inevitably lead to some conflict.”

The conversation never returned to Douthat’s question about the administration’s relationship with pro-life organizations, and abortion was not discussed beyond a passing reference to his stepmother’s belief that “Republicans are the party of the rich, but at least they care about family, and at least they’re trying to protect the life of the unborn.”

On the campaign trail, Vance echoed Trump’s decision to support abortion pill access, and in his new book Vance suggests pro-lifers “start winning people over” by “reflecting Christian charity in the way we champion the unborn” by focusing on alleviating economic burdens imposed on pregnancy.

Vance is widely considered to be a frontrunner for the 2028 presidential nomination. Whether or not the Iran agreement holds is expected to be a major factor in whether he reaches it, given his lead role in both defending it in the media and the negotiating team that brokered it.