Quotes from J. D. Vance

Trump talks like a guy at a bar in West Virginia. Trump talks like my dad sitting around the dinner table.

It's very hard to be a practicing Christian in the 21st-century world if you set things up as, 'Everyone is against us. You can't believe modern science, modern media or modern political institutions because they're all conspiring against Christians.'

Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.

Mr. Trump, like too much of the church, offers little more than an excuse to project complex problems onto simple villains. Yet the white working class needs neither more finger-pointing nor more fiery sermons.

If you're graduating from high school, and you come from a lower income family, you're effectively given two options. One is get a four-year college degree; two is work at a low-wage job, potentially for the rest of your life. We've got to do better on that front. We have to provide more options.

For complicated historical and political reasons, we associate 'poor' in our public consciousness with 'black.' Terms such as 'welfare queen' and 'culture of poverty' became associated uniquely with the social maladies of African Americans in urban ghettos, despite the fact that poor whites outnumbered poor blacks.

My grandma would say if someone else calls you a hillbilly, you might need to punch them in the nose. But if we call ourselves hillbillies, it's a sort of a term of endearment, something that we have co-opted.

When people read 'Breitbart' every single day and convince themselves that Barack Obama is a foreign terrorist, that is not a problem of government. That is a problem of community failure, and we have to recognize that.

One of the things that concerns me is that so few people who go and get an education elsewhere... feel any real... pull for returning home.

Church gives people a sense of community, a sense of how to behave... social support when times get tough. In a world where white working class folks are going to church less and less, they're losing that when they might really need it.

Anger about the wars isn't the only reason voters support Mr. Trump. But his willingness to say what other G.O.P. candidates won't reflects what people like most about him: his complete break with the party elite.

At a pivotal time in my life, Barack Obama gave me hope that a boy who grew up like me could still achieve the most important of my dreams. For that, I'll miss him and the example he set.

We need to ask questions about how we're going to give low-income kids who come from a broken home access to a loving home.

My military service is the thing I'm most proud of, but when I think of everything happening in the Middle East, I can't help but tell myself I wish we would have achieved some sort of lasting victory. No one touched that subject before Trump, especially not in the Republican Party.

It's amazing to think how powerful of a force optimism and hope can be. It's the thing that saves me. I believed that I lived in the greatest country in the world. I still believe that, and consequently, I believed that I had a chance, even though things around me were absolutely crazy and difficult.

Church attendance rates among white Americans without a college education have dropped pretty significantly. People with college degrees are more likely to go to church than people without college degrees among the white working class.

When I started law school in 2010, I would have called myself an atheist. When I graduated law school in 2013, I was exploring my faith again. A lot changed in those three years.

My grandma - we called her Mamaw - loved her country.

People have lost their faith that if they work hard, if they try to get ahead, if they play by the rules, then that will ultimately result in positive outcomes.

The evangelical Christian faith I'd grown up with sustained me. It demanded that I refuse the drugs and alcohol on offer in our southwestern Ohio town, that I treat my friends and family kindly, and that I work hard in school. Most of all, when times were toughest, it gave me reason to hope.

The most depressing part of the 2016 election is that the candidates often failed to show any cultural leadership: any recognition that the world of public policy was important but hardly the only good and necessary part of our shared society.

My family has existed in eastern Kentucky for as long as there are records. If you're familiar with the famous Hatfield-McCoy family feud back in the 1860s, '70s and '80s in the United States, my family was an integral part of that.

I believe that I'm a hillbilly in my values and in my attitudes, and I don't want to lose that. I think it's possible to maintain a big chunk of that identity so long as you're self-reflective and meaningful about it.

There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.