One politician often described as a liberal Catholic is leaving the White House, and another politician, a convert who describes himself as a conservative Catholic, is moving in (at least to the West Wing). What might J. D. Vance’s ascendency to the vice presidency tell us about American Catholicism, and how should Catholics understand this shift in the likely public perception of the faith? How do liberal and conservative Catholics reconcile their faith and their politics?
President Joe Biden, who carries a rosary in his pocket, is a regular churchgoer and communicant. He’s also a defender of abortion rights, although notably uncomfortable discussing the issue. Like almost all Catholic Democrats, he has been pushed gradually toward the party’s absolutist position on abortion. That is to be lamented—and criticized—but it isn’t necessarily any more disqualifying than Catholic Republicans’ embrace of mass deportations, a clear violation of Church teaching. Unlike President-elect Trump, Biden is also a staunch defender of constitutional democracy, a cause the Church has championed with notable success since the Second Vatican Council, especially in its resistance to Soviet totalitarianism. How to square prudential political judgments with Church teaching is often a difficult question, especially when it comes to issues involving war. Catholics will be found on both sides of many contentious public debates, which is usually as it should be. No one expects most Catholic politicians to pursue an agenda that lines up perfectly with Catholic moral teaching; the Church is not in the position of dictating public policy for a religiously pluralistic society. It is, however, in the business of urging us to respond to the better angels of our nature.
I have not read Hillbilly Elegy (2016), Vance’s acclaimed memoir of his hardscrabble upbringing in Ohio. Years ago a colleague of mine who had read the book told me that he was certain Vance would one day run for political office. He thought the book had political ambition written all over it. That turned out to be a shrewd prediction. Peter Quinn’s review of Hillbilly Elegy for Commonweal confirms that judgment. Tellingly, the memoir was written before Vance’s 2019 conversion. In subsequent interviews Vance has walked back some of the book’s more politically inconvenient judgments. For example, he has softened the book’s criticism of the moral failings of working-class Americans and shifted much of the blame to our economic system. He is now happy to place culpability for the “epidemic of despair” gripping so-called fly-over America on big business, financial institutions, and, of course, Democrats.
Vance explained the reasons for his conversion in a 2020 essay for the Lamp, a magazine that describes itself as the voice of “consistent, undiluted Catholic orthodoxy.” The magazine claims that such orthodoxy is “otherwise unavailable in the English-speaking world,” a boast the National Catholic Register and a host of other journals would dispute.
Vance’s conversion story is actually the story of many youthful conversions. There is a disarming candor—or perhaps a candor designed to disarm—in his essay. He grew up poor in a dysfunctional family of mostly unchurched, culturally conservative Protestants. For most of his childhood and youth, his sensibility and moral convictions were vaguely Christian, but not theological. In the wake of 9/11, he joined the Marines in a show of patriotism and was eventually sent to Iraq. This proved disillusioning. He went to war as an “idealist committed to spreading democracy and liberalism,” but returned a skeptic about such moral crusades. Thus a pattern was established.
Leaving the Marines, Vance enrolled at the Ohio State University, where he lost what little faith he still had and declared himself a Christopher Hitchens–reading atheist. At one level, this was never a good fit, since it put him at odds with his hillbilly origins. This tension was exacerbated by a brief conversion to libertarianism, which again clashed with his background, where folks had little interest in tax policy. An introduction to evolutionary theory also “made it easier to discard my faith,” he writes. But social pressures were perhaps more telling. “My new atheism came down to a desire for social acceptance among American elites,” he writes. “Secularism may not have been a prerequisite to join the elites, but it sure made things easier.” At this point, one detects that a latently populist aversion to “elites”—a term never clearly defined—will be doing a lot of work in getting Vance across the Tiber.
As in most conversion stories, Vance takes pains to confess his shortcomings. “There was an arrogance at the heart of my worldview, emotionally and intellectually.” Intellectual arrogance is hard to suppress, especially when one moves among the “elites.” It seems to have resurfaced in Vance’s recent refusal to disavow his observation that the nation’s problems can be attributed to “childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives and the choices that they’ve made,” and “want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
Of course, many college students embrace atheism, at least for a time. Vance’s atheism was chastened in a philosophy class, where he had to read a debate between the philosophers Antony Flew and R. M. Hare and the theologian Basil Mitchell. He was brought up short by Mitchell’s subtle explanation of the role trust inevitably plays in religious faith. In other words, he came to understand that one needs to believe in order to understand. St. Augustine’s writings on Genesis offer a way forward in urging Christians to be firm in their faith while remaining respectful of secular knowledge, which, if true, is no threat to Catholicism. At the same time, Vance was torn between his overweening ambition to climb the “ladder of meritocracy” and “a voice in my head that demanded better of me” in his personal relationships. Unresolved anger about his upbringing haunted him.
At this point in the story, the billionaire venture capitalist and libertarian Peter Thiel enters the picture, and Vance again undergoes a striking change of perspective. Vance was by then a student at Yale Law School, where Thiel gave a talk denouncing “cutthroat professional competitions” and “work whose prestige would fail to make up for its meaninglessness.” A telling definition of a prestigious law school, perhaps. Thiel’s talk turned Vance’s head and completely realigned his ambitions. He admits that he “hated [his] limited exposure to legal practice,” and decided that his future would lie elsewhere. As indeed it would.
Thiel introduced Vance to the esoteric thought of the philosopher René Girard, whose theory of the role of scapegoats in human societies shows how Christ’s sacrifice “forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims.” Vance’s careerism had resulted in the loss of “the language of virtue,” and this endangered his relationship with his future wife and others dear to him. He declined to pursue a Supreme Court clerkship, while his wife secured one.
Catholicism, presumably, would help restore the language of virtue. But here Vance’s essay takes a brief political detour as it discusses the writing and reception of Hillbilly Elegy. Vance claims that writing the book convinced him that you “can’t actually ‘solve’ our social problems. The best you can hope for is to reduce them or blunt their effects.” That sounds reasonable. On this score, those on the political Right “seemed a little heartless” in their analysis of the causes and remedies of the problems, while those on the Left were more compassionate, but their compassion was “devoid of expectation” and “reeked of giving up.” It was like “sympathy for a zoo animal.”
Where could a better answer to social problems be found? Who could express “moral outrage” over the plague of divorce and addiction besetting his family and neighbors? Who has the intellectual courage and honesty to recognize “sin” when it is staring us in the face? Evidently, only the Church does. When we honestly confront “the ‘deaths of despair’ in the richest country on earth,” Vance writes somewhat cryptically, it is evident that the sins of the parents have been visited on their children, as Scripture foretells.
As Vance begins to pull together the many threads of his story, he turns to a critique of American policy makers by his friend Oren Cass. The emphasis on economic consumption rather than productivity is the root cause of the nation’s malaise, Cass argues. Vance agrees. “If people die sooner in the midst of historic levels of consumption, then perhaps our focus on consumption is misguided,” Vance writes. Duty and virtue, not consumption and pleasure, should be our political and economic goals.
There is of course much to be said for duty and virtue, but it is somewhat surprising—in light of subsequent events—that it was the condemnation of consumption that “ultimately” led Vance to Catholicism. Consumption is not something the Trump/Vance brand of populism seems eager to restrain. Quite the opposite. Drill baby drill. Once again, Vance’s religious journey appears primarily fueled by career dissatisfaction and cultural resentment and political ambition. “What is striking in [the works of Catholic postliberals] is that they almost never speak about the power of the Gospel to transform a society and culture from below by first transforming the inner lives of its members,” the historian Mark Lilla recently wrote about conservative Catholic intellectuals. “Saving souls is, after all, a retail business, not a wholesale one, and has nothing to do with jockeying for political power in a fallen world. It means meeting individual people where they are and persuading them that another, better way of living is possible. This is the kind of ministering the postliberals should be engaged in if they are serious about wanting to see Americans abandon their hollow, hedonistic individualism—not hatching plans to infiltrate the Department of Education.”
In clinching his argument against America’s hedonistic individualism and his own former meritocratic ambitions, Vance quotes Augustine’s famous denunciation of Roman debauchery in the City of God. “It is the best criticism of our modern age I’d ever read,” Vance writes. It is also, ironically, one of the best criticisms of Donald Trump’s gold-plated persona ever written. Augustine lampooned the Roman desire 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 tranquility…. Let the people applaud not those who protect their interests, but those who provide them with pleasure…. Let kings estimate their prosperity, not by the righteousness, but by the servility of their subjects….. Let there be erected houses of the largest and most ornate description; in these let there be provided the most sumptuous banquets, where everyone who pleases may, by day or night, play, drink, vomit, dissipate. Let there be everywhere heard the rustling of dancers, the loud, immodest laughter of the theater; let a succession of the most cruel and the most voluptuous pleasures maintain a perpetual excitement.”
Indeed, with Vance’s blessings, let there be endless Trump rallies, more Trump Towers and Mar-a-Lagos, let there be a dictator on Day One willing to subject the weak to his own purposes. For, if nothing else, a second Trump presidency promises “perpetual excitement” and plenty of the immodest laughter of reality TV. It is not necessary to doubt the sincerity of Vance’s Catholicism to question just how much of his former careerism has been tamed by his conversion. You don’t become a senator and then vice president of the United States by shunning ambition. Vance claims to have welcomed Catholicism’s focus on virtue, a focus few politicians can afford, and one that Vance himself can now dismiss with a shameless casuistry. In telling baseless lies about innocent Haitian immigrants—society’s chosen victims, in Girard’s terms—he endangered their lives. He had his reasons, of course, and they were neither religious nor virtuous. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance explained. Perhaps it is best to think of that declaration as representing yet another kind of conversion.
In an interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Vance dismissed the January 6 riot as nothing to get worked up about. Americans were frustrated, and therefore justified in storming the Capitol and threatening legislators. Trump is the best, not the worst, expression of that frustration, Vance contends. “Don’t you think that doing the right thing sometimes enhances your power?” Douthat plaintively asks. Vance answers with an equivocation, turning a deaf ear to the better angels of his own nature. Elsewhere in the interview, he says, “I’m very self-aware, Ross. Many flaws, that’s not one of them.” If he is self-aware, then he must be troubled by the ironies of his current political success. How did this Catholic convert, who claims to be motivated by a moral vision, end up hitching his wagon to one of the most brazenly immoral political figures in American history? How did this disciple of René Girard end up scapegoating immigrants for political advantage? His favorite Church father, St. Augustine, might say it comes down to two words: libido dominandi.
