LAUREN FRAYER, HOST:
Donald Trump's running mate JD Vance is someone we associate with Appalachia. He grew up in southwest Ohio and wrote a best-selling memoir about it called "Hillbilly Elegy." But Vance's political influences stretch far beyond Appalachia, beyond Yale University, where he went to law school, beyond the San Francisco Bay area, where he worked in venture capital, even beyond Washington, where he served as a senator for nearly two years, all the way to England, where I live. One of Vance's mentors is a philosophy of religion scholar at Cambridge University, and I went to his house.
Is that a Bible quote on the - and the leaves of the trees were for the healing of the nations, Revelation 22:2.
His name is James Orr.
(SOUNDBITE OF KNOCKING)
JAMES ORR: Hello.
FRAYER: Hello. I'm Lauren.
ORR: Hi, beauty (ph).
FRAYER: Nice to meet you.
ORR: Nice to meet you too.
FRAYER: This is my colleague, Fatima (ph).
Thank you so much for having us here.
ORR: It's a pleasure to be with you.
FRAYER: So you are on the faculty of divinity at Cambridge University, alongside Old Testament scholars. I imagine you're an outlier having the ear of a vice presidential candidate in the U.S.
ORR: I think that wildly overstates my influence on Senator Vance. If anything, he has been a mentor to me. We've had wonderful conversations over the years about politics, political philosophy, faith, religion. Senator Vance and I have a sort of kind of camaraderie on trying to work out what the new right should look like in the 21st century.
FRAYER: How did you guys first meet?
ORR: We met through mutual friends, I think, probably about five, six years ago. And actually, an American friend of mine came to speak in Cambridge, and he was predicting a Trump victory. This is October 2016, and we all thought he was mad. And he was brandishing a book by a certain JD Vance called "Hillbilly Elegy." He said Trump is going to win, and this is why.
FRAYER: And so you'd read the book before you met JD Vance?
ORR: Yes, I had. I - clearly, I thought that book was an extremely impressive diagnosis of a part of America that I wasn't so familiar with, but that I recognized in the course of the Brexit debates that we were having roughly the same time in 2016. Of course, Britain is not America, but there were certain reverberations and echoes in our situation here.
FRAYER: Some people accused JD Vance of having sort of multiple personalities. He was very different in the vice presidential debate than he has been in some broadcast interviews. Who's the real JD Vance? Describe your friend.
ORR: When his candidacy, his nomination was announced, the press sort of swept in and started trying to find the least flattering soundbites and created this monster, this kind of monster collage. And so it's not as if he's got different personalities. I think what was shattered at the debate that night was this confected media picture of him.
FRAYER: He has changed his mind about Donald Trump, though. Have you watched that 180-degree turn? Did he talk to you about his changing views?
ORR: A lot of people have changed their mind about Donald Trump. No, I think what we've seen in Senator Vance's intellectual sort of evolution over the last eight years is - I think it's shown a great deal of courage and conviction on his part to be willing to stand alongside Trump at enormous cost, I mean, at the cost of effectively ostracism from the very elites that he managed to work his way up into.
FRAYER: You teach philosophy of religion. JD Vance converted religions to Catholicism. What are the conversations that you have about religion with him?
ORR: We've talked quite a bit about religion. But I think in Senator Vance's case, I think he flirted with a kind of pop atheism in his teenage years and early 20s and - but his faith came alive again. And I think he saw in Catholicism a sort of - an institutional vitality and an extraordinary intellectual hinterland.
FRAYER: And then this summer, JD Vance famously called the U.K. an Islamist country. Do you know why he said that? Like, the U.K. is in fact 60% Christian, only about 4- to 5% Muslim.
ORR: I think if you look at the direction of travel demographically in the United Kingdom, you have seen a very sharp uptick in the non-white, non-Christian parts of the population.
FRAYER: Islamist means something different though.
ORR: Well, the U.K. has suffered over the last 20 years from a number of Islamist-inspired attacks.
FRAYER: But he called it an Islamist country.
ORR: Well, it was said plainly playfully and jokingly, and I had mentioned to him that five MPs were elected in July here on a pro-Gaza ticket. That is an extraordinary development in history of - in British political history. That's very puzzling if we're trying to work out what to make of all of that.
FRAYER: Senator Vance has said he doesn't care what happens in Ukraine. A lot of British and European officials do. Is that a view you bring to your friend, a view from this side of the Atlantic?
ORR: My instincts are that the calculation of American interest on the question of Ukraine is going to be very different to the calculation of British or European interest, not least because we're 5,000 miles nearer the conflict. Senator Vance - he's often described as an isolationist, and I don't think that's fair at all. Like Trump, he is a realist in international relations, a realist of the old school. He believes that peace is won through a demonstration of strength. But demonstrations of strength needn't involve extremely expensive, costly wars in blood and treasure.
FRAYER: Last question, I just have to ask, childless cat ladies - what did you think?
ORR: I thought - I've mentioned earlier, this complete caricature, this really ham-fisted attempt to demonize him.
FRAYER: But he said it.
ORR: He said it. He said it, and it was wildly ripped out of context. And I mean, I think it's a shame because he's got very, very sophisticated and well-developed ideas and concerns about the crisis of fertility that's affecting the whole world right now.
FRAYER: James Orr, associate professor of philosophy of religion at Cambridge University, thank you so much for having us in your home.
ORR: Thank you. It's been a pleasure, Lauren.
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