The president and his top advisers have tended to selectively invoke traditional U.S. values like democracy and human rights as a cudgel against adversaries such as China, Cuba, and Iran, and to otherwise downplay them in carrying out their “America first” agenda. But Pence, along with outgoing Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley , has emerged as a minority voice in the administration for a values-driven approach to foreign policy. It’s a conviction that seems to arise at least in part from Pence’s evangelical Christian faith. And it doesn’t include values that many Christian conservatives oppose, like gay or reproductive rights.

If Trump consistently champions any value, it’s that of adhering exclusively to national interests. The vice president, by contrast, often describes his country’s overriding interest in the world as defending and advancing its values, which he has associated with Christian teachings about serving as a beacon to a troubled world, embracing God-given religious liberty, and recognizing persecution as a central component of faith.

Pence subscribes to the notion, which the Puritans borrowed from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, of the United States as a divinely favored “ shining city on a hill .” As an Indiana congressman and governor , he stressed the country’s unique role in the world as a “beacon of freedom.”

Long before he was getting ahead of other Trump-administration officials in condemning the apparent murder of a journalist by the Saudi state as an affront to the “free world,” Pence was co-founding a congressional caucus to promote press freedom around the world. (Prior to entering Congress in 2001, he worked for years as a conservative talk-radio host.)

Well before he was denouncing the repressive rule of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, then-Congressman Pence was lambasting Barack Obama for “warmly greeting” the “virulent anti-American socialist dictator” of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez. (Imagine what Congressman Pence might say about his current boss falling “in love” with the virulently anti-American dictator of North Korea.)

Whereas Trump stopped talking about Kim Jong Un’s brutality when he started talks with the North Korean leader about giving up his nuclear weapons, Pence has persisted in calling out the Kim regime for persecuting Christians and subjecting the North Korean people to “unparalleled privation and cruelty.”