On Feb. 20, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), moderator Mercedes Schlapp, during her 30-minute conversation with Vice President JD Vance, asked him: “Your faith — why is it so important to you?"

To his credit, Vance gave a courageous enunciation of "the fundamental tenet of the Christian faith" that was likely far better than anything Harris or Walz could come up with (if even they believe any of it) or perhaps also Trump. In Vance's words, "The Son of God became man, he died, and then he raised himself from the dead."
Every Christian believer ...  should be able to enunciate the crucial significance of Christ's amends-making death.
Now, to hear this from a Vice President is extraordinary and worth celebrating (one thinks also of former vice president Mike Pence and former president Jimmy Carter). Yet, what he stated remains deficient as a description of "the fundamental tenet of the Christian faith," which also points to a deficiency in both the Apostles' Creed (so-called) and the Nicene Creed.
The deficiency is not that Vance spoke of Christ raising himself from the dead. Yes, "was raised" by God or God's Spirit or Power is the usual formulation, but a Johannine formulation of Jesus being the agent of his own resurrection is also acceptable in the NT witness (John 2:19; 10:18; 11:25).
No, I'm referring to the most central element of the gospel, which is not just that Jesus "died" (we all eventually do that) but that he "died for our sins" (1 Cor 15:3), that is, to make amends for our sins. Nobody else does that. It is what makes the indwelling of the Spirit and subsequent resurrection possible, and it is what makes Jesus the indispensable medium of salvation for the life of the world, "the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29).
I would have expected from a convert to Catholicism (he converted in August 2019) something about Christ dying for our sins. In Vance's defense, he probably does believe that Jesus died for his ...