When JD Vance hasn’t been failing in peace talks to end the Iran war, he’s been spending his time going on talk shows to promote his book, “Communion,” all about his conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism.
How he has time to write a book as vice president—and how appropriate that is, considering vice presidents have rarely done so—is another story. This is a book that, like all aspiring presidential candidates, is about setting Vance up to win the highest office in the land, a pretty scary prospect.
On the book itself, I leave it to the scholar Anthea Butler, a professor of religious studies and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, who teaches about religion and theology and notes, “Vance’s new book ranks among the worst things I’ve read.”
As has been reported, there’s a United Methodist Church on the cover of this book about converting to Catholicism, and that choice of illustration serves as a metaphor for the ignorance and inauthenticity found within…
Vance appears to be bringing some of his evangelical upbringing and theology to his Catholic faith…That’s why, despite his conversion to Catholicism, Vance still comes across like an evangelical. His willingness to argue Catholic theology, despite his limited knowledge, speaks to his Protestant upbringing..
What I’m going to address more specifically is Vance’s discussion about the book with Ross Douthat, the right-wing New York Times opinion columnist. Douthat, like Vance, converted to Catholicism from Protestantism and has similarly criticized the pope and Vatican teaching. So these are two odd peas in a precarious pod.
Douthat, to his credit, does sometimes ask Vance about contradictions in his writing and thinking when it comes to his conversion to Catholicism. But he too easily lets Vance off the hook when the vice president offers a completely unacceptable answer.
Vance claims in the book, and to Douthat in the interview, for example, that the seeds of his conversion to Catholicism began as he saw conservative Christians focused on the Terri Schiavo case, the woman who, in 1990, was in a vegetative state after cardiac arrest and whose parents battled her husband against taking his wife off of a feeding tube. It was a non-stop media story and a battle between Christian nationalists (including evangelicals and conservative Catholics) and the rest of us.
Vance said this overblown “culture war” issue, like others that are often used by religious fundamentalists to gin up the base and raise money, didn’t speak to him and his life experience as a young man who enlisted in the Marines straight out of high school and was a combat correspondent, a military journalist:
I was about to leave for Iraq. My entire family was terrified that something bad was going to happen to me. My mom was struggling with the worst throes of her addiction problem. My grandmother had just died.
Our economic situation in our family had been bad for a long time. Now it seemed to somehow get worse. And I’m sending money back home to my family and thinking to myself: This Christianity has nothing to say about the struggles in my life.
Vance goes on to say that “it’s important for Christian churches to recognize that there are a lot of kids—whether they’re at college or they’re in the workforce—they’re living the normal struggles of life,” adding that they’re “dealing with heartbreak, they’re dealing with addiction in their family, maybe they’re struggling to find a job.”
Where to begin with this?
First off, why didn’t Douthat ask him why, then, do he and Trump and the religious conservatives of the MAGA base focus obsessively on transgender issues, for example, another “culture war” issue that is completely divorced from the experience of most Americans—including young men struggling with addiction or going into the military—who really couldn’t give a damn about the issue that gins up the religious right base and raised funds for it?