Questioning J.D. Vance's Catholicism

And: Hooray, Summer's Dead; The Value Of Nationalism; Latoya Ammons' Exorcism

J.D. Vance becomes Catholic in August 2019

Hello all, I am sending you Monday’s newsletter on Sunday, for two reasons: 1) I have to go to Berlin on business in the morning, and won’t be able to post, and 2) in the US, Monday is the Labor Day holiday, which means that most of my subscribers will likely be busy doing end-of-summer celebratory things. So, here we are.

On his latest podcast, Andrew Sullivan has James Carville on, and they talk for a bit about J.D. Vance. Go here, to the 51:00 mark, for the start of it. For some bizarre reason, Carville once again calls me out for having a “huge, huge effect on J.D. Vance.” I wish it were true, but it’s not. Carville recognizes that I’m Orthodox, but seems to think I converted Vance to “right-wing Catholicism.” As I’ve said before, when J.D. asked me what he should read and to whom he should talk if he wanted to be Catholic, and I came to understand that there was no chance of my winning him to Orthodoxy, I put him in touch with a great Dominican who began his instruction. And that was it: the introduction. If he had chosen Orthodoxy, then I might deserve some credit, but he didn’t.

Carville and Andrew talk about J.D. the convert as some sort of puritanical interloper into the Church. Andrew implies that J.D. took up Catholicism because he thought it would be a good way to restore social order, as opposed to because it’s the truth. What a remarkable thing for Andrew to say! He famously rejects the Catholic Church’s truth claims about sexuality, yet he faults J.D. Vance for becoming Catholic for some other reason besides the truth?!

Do these guys even know how J.D. came to faith, from atheism? Far as I know, the only place he has written about it at length was in this 2020 essay in The Lamp. If you only listened to Carville and Sullivan, you would think J.D. embraced Catholicism as a pathway to power. In fact, as he writes in the piece, in a time in his life when he was questioning the meaning of it all, and coming to doubt his atheism, he read St. Augustine, and discovered, via Peter Thiel, the Catholic thinker René Girard. Here he is writing about how an insight of Augustine’s about the corruption of his (the saint’s) age read to him like a description of our own:

It was the best criticism of our modern age I’d ever read. A society oriented entirely towards consumption and pleasure, spurning duty and virtue. Not long after I first read these words, my friend Oren Cass published a book arguing that American policy makers have focused far too much on promoting consumption as opposed to productivity, or some other measure of wellbeing. The reaction—criticizing Oren for daring to push policies that might lower consumption—almost proved the argument. “Yes,” I found myself saying, “Oren’s preferred policies might reduce per-capita consumption. But that’s precisely the point: our society is more than the sum of its economic statistics. If people die sooner in the midst of historic levels of consumption, then perhaps our focus on consumption is misguided.”

And indeed it was this insight, more than any other, that ultimately led not just to Christianity, but to Catholicism. Despite my Mamaw’s unfamiliarity with the liturgy, the Roman and Italian cultural influences, and the foreign pope, I slowly began to see Catholicism as the closest expression of her kind of Christanity: obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims; protective of children and families and with the things necessary to ensure they thrive. And above all: a faith centered around a Christ who demands perfection of us even as He loves unconditionally and forgives easily.

Whatever that is, it’s not remotely like the Catholicism that Carville and Sullivan ascribe to J.D. Vance.

“If you’re like us,” Carville tells Andrew, “you’re a cradle Catholic, by the time you reach your thirties, you kind of know the deal. You say okay, … I still like the framework, it provides, whatever.”

Ah ha! So it’s not about truth at all for James Carville. It’s about something that “works” to provide a framework, but it’s not true. (Carville rants briefly about being lied to in Catholic school about who wrote the Gospels, but he’s wrong about that.) Andrew doesn’t contradict him. These guys fault J.D. Vance for supposedly instrumentalizing the Catholic faith, but this is what they openly do. And they don’t see it.

Andrew calls J.D. a “fundamentalist.” Whenever I hear a liberal Christian calling someone more conservative than them, within their own tradition, a “fundamentalist,” I’m know I’m being played. “Fundamentalist” is a word from the Protestant world that arose historically to refer to a certain kind of Protestant. But it has become an all-purpose slur word that Christians use to refer to anyone more morally and theologically conservative than they are. True, there are people within the Catholic Church whom you could describe as “fundamentalist” in the way that Andrew uses the term; same is true of Orthodoxy. It might surprise Carville to learn this, but these “Catholic fundamentalists” want nothing to do with me, as someone who left Catholicism. How on earth I bear any responsibility for Vance becoming part of the conservative Catholic network of public intellectuals and politicians is a mystery.

What Carville and Sullivan seem to mean by criticizing Vance as a “fundamentalist” is that he is a Catholic who actually believes what the Church teaches. Well, golly. Heaven forfend! All religious life, and all political life, exists in the tension between the ideal and the actual. We will never achieve perfection on this earth, but if we don’t sincerely try to live up to our religious ideals, and to order our lives and societies around them, then what use are they? I rebelled against the Christianity of my youth because I concluded it was nothing more than psychological comfort, a kind of cultural wallpaper decorating the walls framing our habitus. That is to say, I thought it was what James Carville claims it is — and I could not take that seriously.

Some of the liberal Catholic complaining about Vance’s Catholicism that I’ve read mostly complains that Vance draws some social and political conclusions from his Catholic faith that contradict what liberalism believes in the year 2024. Funnily enough, I’ve never seen or read these same people griping about Devout Catholic™ Joe Biden bringing his faith convictions, such as they are, to bear on his politics. As long as Catholicism is compatible with liberalism, these folks are fine with it.

Andrew Sullivan, James Carville, and Rod Dreher are all part of the Final Christian Generation — that is, the final generation born in an America that understood itself as basically Christian. I think some form of Christianity will survive into the next century at least — but it’s not going to be the laissez-faire Christianity of Carville and Sullivan. Look at the statistics. The only people who are going to be left after a couple more generations will be those who really believe what the churches teach.

The Times had that story this past July about how all the younger Catholic priests in America are theologically conservative. There has been zero Francis Effect in the American clergy. It’s not that hard to figure out why. The Catholic priesthood is a sacrificial vocation. I’m not going to say liberal Catholics aren’t Christians — who would I be to make such a claim? — but I can say sociologically that liberal Catholics are generally disinclined to make sacrifices of the sort required to enter the priesthood. If Catholicism is a Latinized version of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, why should you? This same dynamic that has radically reshaped the Catholic priesthood in America since the liberal Baby Boomers entered seminaries in past decades will ultimately trickle down to the laity.

If you listen to the Carville podcast, the host and his guest seem baffled and slightly offended that J.D. Vance is a Catholic who takes his faith seriously enough to allow it to shape his thought and action in a non-liberal direction.