JD Vance used to think the world would end in 2007. Enchanted by his father’s conservative Protestant church in Ohio, the teenage Vance took to reading millennialist prophecy, threw away his Black Sabbath CDs and logged on to chatrooms to debate evolution with scientists.
Vance tells the story of how his beliefs have changed by reference to other people. After serving for four years in the US Marine Corps, in 2007, with the world not yet ended, he went to Ohio State University. He read the New Atheist thinkers Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and declared himself one of their number. He rejected his faith, he explained in a 2020 essay in Catholic journal the Lamp, to fit in with the “social elite” he was now surrounded by. “I began to think and then eventually to say things like: ‘The Christian cosmos is more like North Korea than America, and I know where I’d like to live.’”
Peter Thiel changed Vance’s mind. At Yale Law School in 2011, Vance went to talk by the right-wing venture capitalist billionaire, who was “possibly the smartest person I’d ever met”—and yet, a Christian. Inspired by Thiel, Vance read St Augustine and the French Christian philosopher René Girard, questioned his beliefs once again and, in 2019, was baptised as a Catholic.
In the Lamp essay, Vance explains his journey back to faith in that period, during which he wrote his bestselling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy. He liked the idea, as advocated by Girard, that Jesus was a “scapegoat” for society’s sins. It made him think about the way people pick on society’s “chosen victims”—the targets of online mobs, say. He took to heart the Biblical dictum, “For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged”, meaning that people should examine their own faults before finding them in others.
Vance is uneasy about his character. When he was a teenager, his mother made him see a therapist about his anger issues. He admits that as an adult he behaved cruelly to his girlfriend Usha, now his wife—shouting at her and repeatedly breaking up with her. “I had lost the language of virtue,” he writes. Returning to his faith made him question his values as well as his behaviour. “I felt more shame over failing in a law school exam than I did about losing my temper with my girlfriend.”
But Vance is much harder on other people’s faults than his own. (That other dictum, “Judge not, that ye be not judged”, seems to have escaped him.) He despairs over the way that family members and neighbours fail at easy jobs and spend beyond their means, writing in Hillbilly Elegy: “You can walk through a town where 30 per cent of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.” For Vance, who slept four hours a night at university while working two jobs, it’s inexplicable.
Hillbilly Elegy does not offer comprehensive policies for fixing Appalachia. But Vance is clear that the solution is not just economic—it’s moral. “Are we tough enough to look ourselves in the mirror and admit that our conduct harms our children? Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us.” He’s sure that state handouts won’t save the American poor. Although his family struggled financially, his greatest barrier to opportunity was not his “subpar” school or living in poverty but his addict mother’s constant fighting, and the “seemingly endless carousel” of boyfriends and husbands that passed through his young life.
Catholicism appealed to him as an adult because it was the creed closest to the beliefs of his beloved grandmother, “Mamaw”: “obsessed with virtue, but cognisant 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 centred around a Christ who demands perfection of us even as He loves unconditionally and forgives easily.”
If Vance ever did aim for that kind of empathy, he has now given up trying. As a politician, he performs a theatrical cruelty. He calls women who have not given birth “childless cat ladies” uninvested in America’s future. Vance would like to ban pretty much all abortions, even if the pregnant woman is a victim of rape or incest. He opposes a law that would protect IVF, and he supports allowing police to track women who have crossed state lines seeking abortions. He’s suggested women shouldn’t leave violent marriages and opposed a bill offering legal protection for married same-sex and interracial couples.
JD Vance wanted to be “obsessed with virtue”. Now, he is showily dishonest. He backs the fiction that the 2020 US election was stolen. He’s joined the presidential ticket of a man he once called “America’s Hitler”, “morally reprehensible” and a “demagogue”. (That ire is now directed elsewhere.) He chose a religion that “loves unconditionally and forgives easily”. But can he ever forgive himself?
