Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
In Augustine’s Confessions, the saint speaks of his turn to God in language so potent that it has reverberated through centuries. He is “gnawed within,” in Garry Wills’ translation, “stalled in a terrible regret.” He tells God that he “lashed” his soul, “trying to force it along with me in my quest for you,” but his soul would not comply. Instead, “it could only tremble in silence, holding it death to escape the stream of habits that were draining it to death.” When he goes into a garden to consider his torment, he tears his hair and pounds his head and weeps. Only Scripture gives him any respite, and he discovers, having resolved at last to follow Christ, that “light was flooding my heart with assurance, and all my shadowy reluctance evanesced.” Thus illuminated, he leaves his profession as a teacher of rhetoric and commits himself to a deeper truth. Catholic converts often take Augustine as their patron today, and the vice president of the United States, J.D. Vance, is one of them.
Vance’s new memoir, Communion, owes its form to Confessions, though not its substance. For 304 pages, Vance travels away from Christianity through the wilderness before returning, Bilbo-like. Communion is a tale of conversion and of spiritual renewal, as Vance finds in Catholicism the meaning that eluded him at Yale.
Like Augustine, Vance consumes himself with worldly success but is lost when he obtains it. There, the similarities end. Vance does not tremble. If he feels awe, he does not say. The “adversarial faith” he picks up from his father, a “Holy Roller” awash in culture war and Bible prophecies, gives way to atheism, which gives way to the magisterium of the Catholic church. Throughout Communion, Vance’s spiritual journey runs parallel to his public ascendancy. But while Augustine renounced his worldly pursuits, Vance parlays them into power.
By now, we know all about Vance’s rise, from a working-class childhood to the bestselling Hillbilly Elegy, to the heights of punditry, the Senate, and now the vice presidency. There’s no other reason to read Communion. Certainly not for the prose, which is a step below workmanlike; or the aw-shucks tone, which he continues from Elegy. There is the inevitable Mamaw, who loves Jesus and the f-word and her collection of firearms. Vance’s mother recedes into the background, and so does her fight with addiction, while his wife, Usha, keeps leading our hero into the light. My native Appalachia takes a fresh hit in the back third of the book, where Vance muscles it down to cliche. “When people ask me what I most admire about Appalachian people and culture, a few things come to mind,” he writes. “I often say that my family cared far less about credentials and job accomplishments than about people and kin.” When I read this, I imagined him laughing at the hicks and their animal instincts, at the liberals for buying his snake oil, at MAGA itself, for giving him everything he wanted. Well, almost.
More than a mother’s care or the love of God, Vance craves respect. Elegy was a testament to need and resentment, a map of the maw in his soul. He tears down his mother, hillbilly culture, and Yale elites so he can float above them, enlightened, a talking head for the ages. In Communion, he looks back at this period with feigned ambivalence. “All of a sudden, I found myself going on TV to talk about politics and the 2016 election,” he says, as if CNN plucked him out of the ether. “People invited me to fancy conferences with wealthy people to talk about American culture, the ‘urban-rural’ divide, and any number of other topics.” He notes, slyly, that “being a public intellectual pays incredibly well,” though mostly he appreciated the “flexibility.” Finally he says, in Augustinian fashion, that “if I was being honest with myself, much of what drew me to this life was its prestige.”
Augustine rues his old work, “teaching the arts which claim to be liberal,” chasing “after the bauble fame.” When he writes, later, that his “impulse was for intellectual challenge, I itched for argument,” he is confessing a sin before God, and surrenders the pursuit of acclaim to seek absolution. Vance says he “didn’t care about God’s will,” only his own, but he never gives up his ambitions, and not once does he question his merit. He addresses Communion to us, not the Creator, and finds us wanting. When he tweets to his “significant social media following” that most Trump supporters are good people, his new friends “could not abide” his message, and the failure is theirs, not his. He appears on primetime TV after Trump’s victory in 2016, and feels contempt at “the sense of grief in the newsroom” and the sight of “multiple people crying.” Paragraphs earlier he’d praised his father’s faith for its understanding of grace, but he shows none for the distressed. “For much of my young adult life, I had thought that my father was an irrational religious man, as much as I loved him, and that these newsroom criers were sensible, logical people,” he writes. “I clearly had missed something.”
Vance wants us to know he is better than everyone. Better than the newsroom criers. Better than Mamaw, that virtuous pagan. Better than his father, who refuses chemo for esophageal cancer, and dies believing God will cure him. (As Vance tells us, “God did not heal him. He died a few days later.”) Better than Usha, the unbeliever, whose loyalty and lack of professional drive make her useful. (As Vance tells her, admiringly, “You have the biggest mismatch between ambition and ability of any person I’ve ever met. You could be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and you have no interest in it.”) Although the title of his memoir evokes the presence of others – we can only be in communion with someone else, or with God – he never affords anyone but himself an interior life. We are glimpsing God through him, and him alone.
Communion does resolve the apparent contradiction between Vance’s Christianity and his politics. From it, we learn that he adopts a faith that affirms him. Many people do, but Vance is the vice president, a possible successor to Trump, and his doctrine warps our reality. The anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann argues that believers make God real to themselves through work, like ritual or prayer. “The idea that there is an invisible other who takes an active, loving interest in your life is in many ways preposterous and takes effort to maintain, even in a community that has never been secular,” she writes in How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others. What God is Vance wrestling into life?
If Communion is a tale of conversion, it might have something to say about the metamorphosis that follows. Faith is a habit, cultivated over time. Augustine finds that God is “becoming ever dearer to me, bestowing more joy in my heart.” C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, says that only death can complete what the moment of salvation begins. “How far the change will have gone before death in any particular Christian is uncertain,” he adds. By their fruits ye shall know them, Jesus says. Vance knows the verse and wields it like a hammer in Communion. “The dominant ideas of American culture were bearing some very rotten fruit,” he intones. At the Munich Security Conference he recalls the words of Christ again. The “fruits of the rules-based international order, especially since the mid-1990s, were rotten,” he says before he complains of “thought policing,” which was far worse at the event than at Yale Law. Like he did in Elegy, he strikes out – at the Establishment in Munich, a “pearl-clutching” Bill Kristol, the media – but spares himself. There is no transformation in Communion. Vance is in a state of moral torpor. “Real grace comes through practice,” a priest says, but it’s not clear what this means to Vance, or to the priest, because the words change nothing.
Portions of an essay in The Lamp appear once more in Communion, so readers won’t find much about Vance and his faith that they can’t already Google. Everyone knows a talk by Peter Thiel, the anti-democratic billionaire and an early Vance patron, helped lead the future vice president to faith. Or that Vance, like Thiel, likes to spit out a little René Girard, flattening ideas out into bumper stickers. I was struck, though, by what Vance did change about his essay. In The Lamp, he includes a parenthetical: “My growing view is that too many American Catholics have failed to show proper deference to the papacy, treating the pope as a political figure to be criticized or praised according to their whims.” In Communion, he writes instead, “My basic view is that too many American Catholics treat the Pope as a political figure and should instead keep a more respectful distance from Vatican politics.” Deference has vanished.
This is convenient, of course. A lot has happened since Vance published that essay in The Lamp. He has become Trump’s vice president – and provoked the ire of the Vatican. Francis was a critic of Trump’s immigration policies and of Vance specifically, though Communion omits those details and a great deal else. No one would know that Vance falsely accused Haitian immigrants of eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, or that his comments touched off a whirlwind of hate and led to bomb threats. No one would know that migrant children in a Texas detention camp have found mold and worms in their food. No one would know that Border Patrol abandoned Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a blind Rohingya refugee, in front of a shuttered Tim Horton’s in the city of Buffalo, where he wandered for days until he died from a burst ulcer, alone and in unspeakable pain. Vance praises Elon Musk for bringing “hundreds of thousands of jobs” to the U.S., but is silent on DOGE and the destruction of USAID, and the mass death that followed. Maybe the book was in edits when ICE killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, or when Border Patrol gunned down Alex Pretti in the street.
It’s easy to call Vance a hypocrite, or a false Christian. He praises Catholic hierarchy in Communion, but is perpetually at odds with the Vatican. Still, the condition of hypocrisy requires some internal discord. Vance would have to say one thing and do another, or fail to meet a personal standard. There is no evidence of either in Communion. Over and over, he credits himself for his clarity. He moves the right way, toward the right goals, never mind the occasional detour. When he changes his mind about Trump, it’s because he “looked inside our elite institutions and found them intellectually and spiritually broken,” not because he wanted power. Only once does he “admit error,” and that is for blaming the decline of the United States on childless cat ladies. The comment was “boneheaded,” he says, and weakened “the actual point I wanted to make, which was that our society is becoming pathologically hostile to having kids.” Correct again, if unpolished. The great Vance cannot be wrong.
Vance is so transfixed by his own qualities that no one else can break through. If any great thought or power has touched him, there is no proof; God never had a chance. In Communion he mentions Lewis and Chesterton and Aquinas, along with “academic treatises on Christian doctrine.” Augustine’s “ideas swirled in my mind,” like water in a toilet bowl. Which ideas? Whose treatises? How did Aquinas inspire him? Vance rarely explains. When Augustine is in the garden, he despairs of “our cold learning,” which distracts him and his peers from God. Vance can’t let go of it. He knows he is the “standard-bearer” of the New Right, the most special boy, and we must not forget it either. Nothing moves him. He says he does not fear “my own physical death,” only the end of his civilization.
At this point I felt disgust shift into a sick kind of pity. There is no power on Earth like conviction, and Vance has never felt it. The poet Christian Wiman, in My Bright Abyss, writes,“There must be a shattering experience.” What a thing it is to be destroyed. During my time at an Evangelical college, George W. Bush ordered a military surge in Iraq. I had never supported the war, but the news shook me profoundly. If God made humanity in his image, if Christ died for everyone, if my faith meant anything at all, then killing was a calamity of such magnitude I could scarcely comprehend it. That is the closest I have felt to Paul, struck down on the road, and today, as an atheist, I judge each principle I form against that single point of revelation. There is before, and there is after. For Vance, there is only an unbroken line of ambition.
I don’t trust anyone who says they aren’t afraid of death. The crucifixion has no meaning if death is not a horror. Wiman, who has incurable cancer, says our task might be “to make death concrete, or to make concrete experience more fully alive with the hole of lifelessness that is part of one’s perception of it.” Vance seems to fear irrelevance instead. “I dread leaving my kids a world where people no longer visit the graves of their ancestors,” he says, and now I wonder if he fears dying more than he admits. What else could drive his grasping – for posterity and position and vengeance – but the knowledge of his own futility? Augustine should swirl harder. “Pitiable, is it not, this filth of self-promotion?” the saint cries to God. We cannot escape ourselves, but we can find relief in others and the shared work of grace. Vance does not know this, and refuses to learn, so he rips the world apart with his thrashing. To see him is to see his Lord. What looks back at us is the void.
Source link
