XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, or.politics, alt.politics.trump   
   XPost: talk.politics.guns, alt.atheism   
   From: X@Y.com   
      
   The Bankrupt Catholicism of JD Vance   
   Through a lifetime of reinvention, the vice presidential nominee came to   
   embrace the meanest and most historically destructive aspects of his chosen   
   faith.   
   JD Vance arrives to speak at the Dayton International Airport in Vandalia,   
   Ohio.   
   Drew Angerer/Getty Images   
   JD Vance arrives to speak at the Dayton International Airport in Vandalia,   
   Ohio.   
      
   Of many weird things that JD Vance said during the vice presidential   
   debate, the weirdest came after Tim Walz revealed that his son had   
   witnessed a shooting at a rec center.   
      
   “Christ, have mercy,” the newly Catholic Vance responded.   
      
   It was something that Catholic priests say during Mass, in their position   
   as a proxy for Jesus. Everyone then repeats. Here was Vance,   
   misappropriating a core element of Catholic ritual either to establish   
   spiritual authority over Walz or to dodge the reality of his party’s   
   acceptance of slayings—Trump’s running mate, you may recall, called such   
   shootings a “fact of life” that is curiously only prevalent in the United   
   States. Or perhaps he meant to do both.   
      
   “Peace be with you,” is what Catholics say to one another at Mass, a   
   sentiment taken from Saint Francis of Assisi, who like Vance was a   
   soldier—albeit one who actually fought (Vance was a Marine Corps   
   journalist). Francis, after being brutalized as a prisoner, used the word   
   peace as a radical rejection of the violence of battles fought for glory   
   among medieval warlords, and also of the kind of indiscriminate slaughter   
   Walz’s son witnessed. And yet these words, from Vance, would have been   
   stranger still—not only because they were uttered at a debate, and not   
   church, but because the kind of peace that Francis meant is something JD   
   Vance doesn’t seem to value very highly.   
      
   Much has been said about the fact of Vance’s conversion to Catholicism, but   
   less about its, well, weirdness—the way that he is, by his own account,   
   drawn to the angry, dogmatic, and often violent stuff that the rest of us   
   longtime and hereditary practicing Catholics had to learn to overlook, or   
   flee outright: For every one convert, six people have left the Church of   
   Rome.   
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
   JD Vance joined up on an August morning in 2019.   
      
   Here was a man of twists and turns who’d already changed his name five   
   times. Born James Donald Bowman, he changed his middle name to David when   
   his parents divorced, and later took the surname of a stepfather, becoming   
   James Donald Hamel. When he enlisted in the Marines, he started going by   
   J.D. Hamel, and in 2013 he changed his last name to Vance in honor of his   
   grandmother. When he became a senator, he dropped the periods, going as JD.   
   He ran through selves pretty fast, journeying from the Rust Belt to Yale   
   Law by way of plundered Baghdad. This, however, was his greatest twist of   
   all.   
      
   Here, in the presence of the unmoved mover, maker of heaven and earth, all   
   that is seen and unseen, Vance was joining a faith whose finest poets   
   include Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote, “The world is charged with the   
   grandeur of God,” and the aforementioned Francis who assures us, still,   
   that “all the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single   
   candle.” These are words that didn’t come close to Vance’s mind that   
   morning.   
      
   Instead he heard the voice of his grandmother echoing from his earliest   
   years, way down beneath his pile of selves. What she said to him, as he   
   seemingly fretted right down to the wire, was: “Better shit or get off the   
   pot.”   
      
   All faith contains mystery, but this is something else.   
      
   In a 6,000-word essay titled “How I Joined the Resistance,” published in   
   The Lamp in 2020, Vance offers conversion as a radical act, and describes   
   the path that led him there.   
      
   He was raised on Protestant televangelists before joining the Marine Corps   
   after 9/11. In his own words, he was “a young idealist committed to   
   spreading democracy and liberalism to the backward nations of the world.”   
   He returned “skeptical of the war” and embraced Hitchensian atheism, then   
   found his way to the high altar of secular striving, Yale Law School, where   
   he experienced a personal crisis, a psychic split between his past and his   
   present: “I had immersed myself in the logic of the meritocracy and found   
   it deeply unsatisfying. And I began to wonder: were all these worldly   
   markers of success actually making me a better person? I had traded virtue   
   for achievement and found the latter wanting.”   
      
   Enter Peter Thiel, who made his fortune in semi-illegal banking   
   transactions (PayPal) and surveillance capitalism (Facebook) before turning   
   (why not?) to Christian moralism. Thiel (“possibly the smartest person I’d   
   ever met”) explains to young JD that his unhappiness is natural, because   
   the Ivy League doesn’t really create people. According to Thiel’s self-   
   adopted mentor, the French Catholic philosopher René Girard, it is all   
   “mimetic rivalry,” status-driven emulation all the way down. In other   
   words, Vance isn’t barren and broken; everyone else is.   
      
   Thus consoled, he begins reading City of God, published just after the sack   
   of Rome in 410 C.E., by Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis, a.k.a. Saint   
   Augustine. “The words of Saint Augustine,” he writes, “echoed from a   
   millennium and a half earlier articulating a truth I had felt for a long   
   time but hadn’t spoken …”   
      
   It’s a laundry list of human suckiness:   
      
       This is our concern, that every man be able to increase his wealth so   
   as to supply his daily prodigalities, and so that the powerful may subject   
   the weak for their own purposes. Let the poor court the rich for a living,   
   and that under their protection they may enjoy a sluggish tranquillity; and   
   let the rich abuse the poor as their dependants.   
      
   Just when it might lead Vance toward compassion, the passage shifts to its   
   real targets, people who seem like they’d be fun to know:   
      
       Let there be everywhere heard the rustling of dancers, the loud,   
   immodest laughter of the theatre, let a succession of the most cruel and   
   the most voluptuous pleasures maintain a perpetual excitement.   
      
   This will not be a class war but cultural conflict; sure as what ails Vance   
   is cultural alienation, as he writes in his Lamp essay, “for an upwardly   
   mobile poor kid from a rough family, atheism leads to an undeniable   
   familial and cultural rupture. To be an atheist is to be no longer of the   
   community that made you who you were.”   
      
   The man of many names knows pains so great that where a better mind would   
   sense something fishy in Augustine’s shift from power to culture, he goes   
   weak-kneed:   
      
   “It was,” he writes, “the best criticism of our modern age I’d ever read.”   
      
   Vance is on his way toward becoming Catholic under yet another new name,   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)