The through line of the book is a conversion narrative: Vance tells a story of his abandonment of his maternal grandmother’s Christian faith and his return to Christianity by way of Catholicism. He makes this into a call to action, urging American society to reclaim its putative roots in Christianity and its mores. An emerging politician’s embrace of Christian faith has an obvious recent precedent in American politics: Barack Obama, who, at a climactic moment in “Dreams from My Father” (1995), finds himself in a church on Chicago’s South Side, moved to tears by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s sermon on “the audacity of hope”—a phrase that became the title of his Presidential campaign-trail book (though he later left Wright’s church, following some controversial remarks the Reverend made). The two men’s faith journeys are distinctly different, of course. Obama’s “search for a workable meaning for his life as a Black American” involved the Black Church, which gets scant attention in Vance’s sketch of America’s Christian roots. But Vance, like Obama, uses a personal embrace of faith to link his outsider narrative to a larger story of American purpose.
Although some pages of the book are devoted to the issues of sexual morality that Christian politicians typically address, Vance gives greater emphasis to philosophy and theology. The pages on these subjects are a collection of theo-conservative greatest hits—and an evocation of a world apart from Trumpism. The twin pillars of conservative Christian thought are here: C. S. Lewis (whose “collected works”—several dozen books—Vance says he has “re-read”) and G. K. Chesterton (whose account of the human person as both angel and beast, he explains, “seemed right to me and still does”). So are Job, Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal and his wager, as well as a nineteenth-century Catholic prayer to St. Michael the Archangel, asking him to “Defend us in battle, be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.” (The prayer can be found on Hallow, a Catholic prayer app popular among traditionalist Catholics, which Vance invested in, in 2020, through Narya Capital, a V.C. firm that he co-founded with funding from, among others, Peter Thiel.)
At a number of points, Vance’s conversion narrative is right on trend. He got his tutelage in Catholicism from some friars of the Dominican order—the same order that has lately attracted press for cultivating a thriving “theo-bro” culture in a Greenwich Village parish, centered on Sunday-evening Masses for eight hundred and fifty congregants, most of them stylish young social-media adepts, followed by a wine social, called In Vino Veritas, in the church basement. A revelation that Vance had about the enduring power of Christianity during his first visit to St. Peter’s Basilica, last April—“Here in Rome it was obvious: Caesar was dead. Christ still lived”—is recounted in terms akin to those used by Robert Barron, a Catholic bishop who has gained prominence through videos and social media, and who is a regular at the Trump White House. A section on the relationship between industrialized countries’ birth rates and their levels of religious affiliation is informed by the new Catholic natalists, who urge married couples in the West to have large families, in part to offset large families in the Global South. There’s also a shout-out to Rod Dreher, the conservative author of “The Benedict Option,” a widely discussed book proposing that Christians need to create distinctive subcultures away from the toxic mainstream of prosperous secular societies. Dreher was the first writer to publicize Vance’s conversion, through an online interview in 2019.
Surprisingly, Vance even tips his hat to “Rerum Novarum,” an 1891 encyclical by Pope Leo XIII. Written in response to the rapid changes brought on by industrial capitalism, the encyclical is claimed by both progressive and conservative Catholics as a charter for their approaches. Progressives cite its emphasis on the dignity of work and workers, and on the need for government to regulate working conditions that threaten this dignity. Vance indicates that he read the encyclical while still in a “Christian curious” phase. Unsurprisingly, he takes the conservative view of it, which emphasizes the role of “mediating institutions” that help people help one another and which the government should sponsor rather than regulate or replace. “This idea that we all exist within particular spheres of family, community, and on and on, building up to a nation, is called subsidiarity,” Vance writes. “And it recognizes that each sphere of life depends on the others. It is very hard to be a good family man unless you have a decent wage and have support from friends, community, and church.” After giving his summary of the encyclical, Vance declares that “it felt more right than any theory of human nature I’d ever read.”
Paul Elie
Source link