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, that   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)