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