Aaron Renn notes correctly that evangelicals “have focused on getting a seat at the table, but they lack a vision for implementing big projects.” (See: The Problem with the Evangelical Elite, First Things, December 15, 2025.)

Renn cites the loss of JD Vance to Roman Catholicism as Exhibit A:

“This is why the evangelical presence in spaces such as the Ivy League makes so little impact. It certainly made no impression on JD Vance at Yale Law, as he mentions only Catholics and Mormons (and Peter Thiel) in his conversion narratives.”

As Renn has averred before, evangelicalism presents as low status, especially in elite environments.

“Evangelicalism appeals to the middle class, but much less so to the striver class. And the elites of our society are either people from the upper classes, or strivers like Vance… With the loss of the mainline churches and the de-Protestantization of elite American institutions, there’s no longer a high status Protestantism in America for those people.”

On top of that, Catholics are more assertive in their recruitment of elites.

As a graduate of Yale College (1995) and an active alumnus living in New Haven from 2006 to 2009, I think I know why the evangelical presence there never captured Vance’s imagination: it offered him no rite of passage, no ritual of initiation.

Evangelicals don’t lack ambition or a theology of vocation. They lack compelling rites that make elite power feel inherited, dignified, and compatible with their faith.

Elites Require a Uniform

In the late spring of my senior year at prep school, the college guidance counselor was keen to show me the J. Press catalog he just received. This was on the heels of a dinner discussion about proposed changes to the school’s dress code. (Dinner in those days was served family style in the dining hall four nights a week, with table “heads” and table “foots” to serve and clear, coats and ties required.) 

He pointed to the quote next to a picture of a three-button sack-suit (no models back then) that said, “The Three-Button Suit: For Correct Businesswear.”

I can still hear him reading those words out loud to me, “for correct businesswear.” Over the summer, I ditched my two-button jackets from Nordstrom and made a point to get fitted for a new three-button navy-blue blazer from J. Press, my first week on Yale’s Old Campus.

My initiation had begun.

Elites Require a Diet

Afew weeks later, I was invited to dinner at Mory’s, the undergraduate club made famous by cups and song. It was Parents’ Weekend, my parents were in town, but I accepted the invitation to Mory’s instead of dining with them. They understood. The invitation had been a casual, “If you’re free this evening…” but I knew the invitation was meant to be accepted, and would not be made again if declined.

I wore my new blazer and college tie. I wasn’t allowed to pay for dinner. I was a guest. Besides, I couldn’t if I had tried. The chit was signed by the member. At some point someone whispered in my ear that once I was eligible to join (membership was only open to upperclassmen) I should treat my sponsor to lunch. That was the rule. And so my initiation continued.

Back then, clubs each had some distinctive “club fare” on offer. At Mory’s, it was pickled watermelon rinds, corn relish, cottage cheese, and oyster crackers. The table was pre-set with these for dinner. I had never seen pickled watermelon rind before (and haven’t seen it since). The menu was limited to three varieties of Welsh rarebit, a house specialty called Baker’s Soup (rumored to cure hangovers), vichyssoise, lamb chops, shad roe, prime rib, and calves’ liver. (By the 1990s, a vegetarian option had been added, but no one ordered it.) The prix fixe included an appetizer and a dessert.

Outsiders complained that the food was terrible (it wasn’t), and typical of club food, while undergraduates complained of the price and the dress code. In the early 1990s, political correctness was rampant, and I suspect these early signalers of their own virtue thought the place was too “elite” — or, more accurately — too “Old Yale,” which meant too white, too Protestant, too masculine.

After dinner, we drank port, smoked, passed cups, and sang college songs.

Elites Require a Church

It was not unusual to see men in three-button blue blazers (or gray suits) and clerical collars eating lunch at Mory’s. I had lunch there more times than I can count with the rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church, a low-church, “British” evangelical parish (think: John Stott) bordering the Yale Campus. But you would also see the rector of Christ Church (Episcopal), the Anglo-Catholic parish, and Trinity on the Green (also Episcopal), the broad-church parish with the boy choir to sing Morning Prayer.

I don’t recall seeing representatives of the old Congregationalist establishment there very much, though the University Chaplain was still, in those days, also the pastor of the University Church, a United Church of Christ congregation. He was also the master of one of the residential colleges, as I recall.

If you saw a clerical collar and a blue blazer (or gray suit) at Mory’s, you knew you were dealing with a Protestant Episcopalian. (It annoyed the rector of Christ Church if you called him a Protestant Episcopalian, so I made sure to do just that.) But if you saw a clerical collar and a black suit, you knew you were face-to-face with a Roman Catholic. I recall seeing the Roman Catholic chaplain entertaining a group of donors one night for dinner at the Whiffenpoof table.

A few years later, he broke ground for an impressive new Catholic center at Yale. (The Jews had built their own a decade earlier.) I am sure that made an impact on the future Vice President, but in my day, the Episcopal Church still sat atop the pile.

Loss of the Protestant Episcopal Church

This is why the loss of the Protestant Episcopal Church — especially in its most Protestant Episcopalian form — was a great loss for Protestant America.

Elite Catholicism — both in its Roman and Anglo-Catholic varieties — is a hothouse plant, but Protestant Episcopalians, particularly evangelicals, were a much-needed bridge to Everywhere, U.S.A.

Early in the Republic’s history, Protestant Episcopalians saw themselves as churchmen, and high churchmen at that. (They also knew they did not need the smells and bells of the Oxford Movement, which came much later, to achieve this.)

Evangelicals may be good at initiating people into Christ (revivals, personal witness, altar calls), but only the old Catholic order, as adapted and maintained by Protestant Episcopalians (and to a lesser extent, by Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and America’s other denominations) proved adept at initiating Americans into the Church.

(I suspect this is why many young, aspiring elites join Rome or Orthodoxy today. They have no idea there was once a truly American Church.)

The Church is composed of those called out to be separate (2 Corinthians 6:17). In other words, she necessarily forms an elite.

Patrimony and Initiation

Elites have a sense of patrimony — of something they want to pass on, to initiate others into.

During my undergraduate years, I took pleasure in identifying potential “taps” — those who seemed to have the right stuff. Renn calls this “talent, aspiration, and grit,” but the Yale Admissions Office had already selected for that. What I was looking for was someone who shared my sense of vocation. Even then, I felt called to recapture these old institutions.

Those who shared this vocation gained access to the same patronage system that tapped me late in the spring of my senior year of high school, when I learned that three-button suits were correct, and that everything else was not.

There existed at Yale in the early 1990s an undergraduate patronage system of rewards and punishments that might begin with a dinner invitation to Mory’s early in one’s freshman year, wind and wend through one’s sophomore and junior years into networks like the Political Union and the Elizabethan Club, and end up, as it did for me, in the April of my junior year, standing on a street corner, invitation in hand (inscribed in Latin and sealed with wax), waiting to be picked up in a limousine, and initiated into one of Yale’s top senior societies.

An offer to join one of these societies — called a tap — came through “tap lines.” These lines were well-established: through family legacies, the Yale Daily News, Yale Football, the Yale Political Union, etc. My tap line was through the Yale Political Union. A friend of mine in the senior class put my name forward. We shared a mainline Protestant faith. He was a Methodist from the Midwest. I introduced him to my church — to the evangelical Episcopal parish whose rector I often had lunch with at Mory’s — and he became an Episcopalian. We enjoyed a sweet and rich fellowship in Christ.

Read it all in American Reformer