Transcript

Welcome back to Jim's Potpourri.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer, and I want to begin today a series of episodes that are loosely about the relationship between Christianity, and more specifically Catholicism, and politics.

Now, before I say anything else, let me be really clear.

My goal in these is not to do the kind of standard things where I tell you how to vote, or what to think about a particular bill, or whether the president is doing a good job.

I'm not gonna do any of those things.

Plenty of other people are more than happy to offer their opinions about all of those things ad nauseum.

I want to do something completely different.

I want to look at three issues that have come up that are sort of related to politics, which I think are actually being under-covered, and explore them, not from the perspective of what they mean for the political arena, but rather what they mean about issues of the faith, and what maybe they mean to you and me.

So today, I want to explore the faith journey of Vice President J.D. Vance, the journey of going from evangelical Protestantism, to atheism, to Roman Catholicism, and explore why those moves happened.

On Tuesday, I'm gonna turn to another topic, the surprising death of liberal Catholicism.

I'll explain what I mean then.

And on Thursday, I wanna turn to exploring the rise and spiritual dangers of conspiracy theories.

So, let's start with today's topic, J.D. Vance.

Vice President James David Vance, better known as J.D. Vance.

I know, again, there's plenty of things you could say about him in the political arena, positively or negatively, including from a Catholic perspective.

I'm aware he's sparring right now with the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops on immigration policy.

Uh, I know he's said things about abortion, some of them really good, like at the March for Life, some of them a lot more troubling.

And already, you've got Catholics calling him out for allegedly putting his politics above his faith.

I am not meaning to wade into any of that today.

I want, instead, to just explore this more basic question.

How does someone go from being an evangelical Protestant to being an atheist, to being a Catholic?

And why?

Because this is maybe the most prominent person in terms of political life to have made this journey, and it's a pretty fascinating journey.

I know, uh, that people like Richard Dawkins played an important role in him losing his faith originally.

I know that people like Saint Augustine of Hippo, who he takes as con- his, his confirmation sponsor, makes a really important appearance in his journey into becoming Catholic.

And I don't hear a lot of people talking about this very important spiritual journey of a person squarely in public life right now.

So let's talk about that.

I'm gonna first kind of trace his journey biographically, and then suggest a couple of things that we can take from that.

So let's begin with part one, him growing up Protestant.

Now, if you've ever read his extremely popular, uh, New York Times best-selling autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy, then you already know that he is blunt, even scathingly honest about the dysfunctional, broken home in which he grew up.

His parents divorced when he was a toddler.

Um, there were issues with alcoholism and drug abuse, and even seemingly some domestic violence as his mother kind of went from one man to another, and went down further in kind of this cycle of addiction.

And there were some healthy relationships and a lot of complicated and unhealthy ones throughout that.

And this is kind of his, uh, grappling with a lot of those things.

But along that way, there were two people in particular who played an important role for him spiritually, that they represented two different forms of evangelical Protestantism that were quite unlike one another.

One of those was his grandma.

He calls her his mamaw, uh, Bonnie Blanton Vance.

And it's so important of an influence is she on him that he actually legally changes his name.

He was not originally J.D. Vance.

He was originally J.D. Bowman, and he takes his grandmother's name, uh, as a way of honoring her, actually, after he becomes married.

Theirs was a decidedly unchurched variety of evangelical Protestantism.

As Vance would describe it in the book, We never went to church except on rare occasions in Kentucky, or when Mom decided that we needed in our That what we needed in our lives was religion.

Nevertheless, Mamaw, again, Grandma, was a deeply personal, albeit quirky faith.

She couldn't say organized religion without contempt.

She saw churches as breeding grounds for perverts and money changers.

So, you kind of get the colorful character of the book.

And despite all this, uh, Mamaw continues to be financially supportive of a preacher back in Kentucky whom she respected.

So she was not uncritical, uh, in terms of her assessment, but she had a pretty negative view of any kind of organized religion.

But nevertheless, considered her relationship with Jesus, uh, incredibly inf- like, important to her life.

The other person who makes an important spiritual appearance in Vance's childhood is his biological father, uh, James Donald Bowman.

And he had divorced, uh, Vance's mother, uh, again, when he was a toddler, and then became involved with another woman, and cleaned up his act.

He, I think, also struggled with alcoholism and other issues, but he becomes a Pentecostal Christian.

And so he's still kind of broadly in the evangelical camp, but he's going to church and he's taking all of this very seriously in a very different way than his mother-in-law, Mamaw.

So, Vance uses the kind of conversion of his dad to tell a pretty interesting story, uh, basically highlighting two things.

Uh, that his father's conversion, James' conversion was this incredibly important thing for him personally, we can say more broadly.

Number one, religious people are happier, and there's actually really good evidence that church attendance actually makes us happier.

That it's not just that happier people happen to go to church, it's that people who start going to church end up being happier with their lives.

But the second observation Vance makes at this point is that most Protestants in Appalachia, and actually this is true across the country but he's looking particularly at the Appalachian region, don't bother going to church even though, uh, both spiritually and sociologically, it seems to be an obvious boon.

He recounts that, uh, you know, throughout this region the rates of church attendance are actually comparable to o- uh, places like San Francisco, they're lower than places like the Midwest.

And he observes that the only conservative Protestants that he knew who regularly attended church were his dad and family.

So this point, like do you know, this is part of this broader kind of set of data that we have, that despite the kind of myth of great church-going in rural areas or in Red states or in across the board, we actually have a widespread crisis, Catholic and Protestant, urban and rural, of people just feeling like church is unnecessary.

The important thing is just that you have some kind of spirituality, you're spiritual but not religious, or that you have a personal relationship with Jesus, and so the idea of actually needing to attend church is secondary, tertiary, or just it's there if you want it.

Right?

And so that's what he kind of grows up with.

And we're gonna see the weakness of that form of Christianity, and so you have, you know, that sort of Mamaw's form of Christianity where it means a lot to her, it matters to her, but it's not something that you can pass on very easily.

What then about James, you know, the father of J.D.? He gets really involved in his church, and this leads to this kind of fascinating relationship where J.D. Vance is trying to form a relationship with his biological dad, and this involves them going to Pentecostal church together as, eh, you know, as he's a young boy.

And he says on balance, he loved his dad and, and his church.

He says, I'm not sure if I liked the structure or if I just wanted to share, eh, something that was important to him, both I suppose, but I became a devoted convert.

I devoured books about Young Earth Creationism and joined online chat rooms to challenge scientists on the theory of evolution.

I learned about Millennialist prophecy and convinced myself the world would end in 2007.

I even threw away my Black Sabbath CDs.

Dad's church encouraged all of this because it doubted the wisdom of secular science and the morality of secular music.

So you can kind of get a feel for the type of religious body that he's in.

If you've grown up in or near, uh, this kind of Protestantism, you're probably familiar with what he's painting.

I, I remember in sixth grade, uh, carpooling to a homeschool co-op with a kid whose family wouldn't let them sing all the unedited lyrics to, and I'm not making this up, Row, Row, Row Your Boat because they insisted life is not like a dream.

And so they replaced those lyrics with the strangely Pelagian lyrics, Jesus Needs A Team.

It's like, well, no.

But that kind of attitude of being suspicious of and even hostile to the world is the other.

So you've got these two, again, very different approaches, uh, to Protestant Christianity.

And so, especially for those of you watching who aren't from a Protestant background or aren't deeply acquainted with Protestantism or aren't Protestant yourself, it can be good to realize that even when we use these kind of umbrella labels, Protestant, Evangelical, et cetera, that they can include a multitude of different forms.

In the same way that, you know, calling Joe Biden and J.D. Vance Catholic tells you something but not as much as you might imagine from just the label.

Vance goes on in talking about his, his dad's Pentecostalism, that he was, you know, also himself experiencing at the time, and says, These were quirks, and at first I understood them as little more than strict rules that I could either comply with or get around.

Yet, I was a curious kid, and the deeper I immersed myself in Evangelical theology, the more I felt compelled to mistrust many sectors of society.

So as he's trying to supplement his faith, he's reading more and more books from an Evangelical perspective, and it's making him more and more distrustful of everything outside of the world of Evangelicalism.

And again, I've talked to many people, uh, current and former Protestants, who've described a similar sort of journey, especially in adolescence.

Evolution and the Big Bang became ideologies to confront, not theories to understand.

Many of the sermons I heard spent as much time criticizing other Christians as anything else.

Theological battle lines were drawn, and those on the other side weren't just wrong about Biblical interpretation, they were somehow un-Christian.

So you can imagine, this is a pretty different form of Christianity than one he was used to, and I think many people who are in this aren't aware that the rest of Christianity doesn't look very much like that, and many people who aren't in this are maybe not aware that this kind of Christianity exists.

I mean, just to give one example as a Catholic, like, I do a lot of debating Catholic/Protestant issues through this channel, and I'm happy to do so, and I, I think it's a good, constructive engaging conversation.

But I've never, in all of my years as a Catholic, gone to mass and heard the priest just get up and just bash Protestants and say, Oh, here's my sermon series on why Protestantism is false.

On the other hand , I've come across numerous YouTube channels where there'll be a church service and a Protestant minister will get up and begin a series just attacking these often ludicrously false visions of Roman Catholicism.

And it's a really striking thing when you're like, What?

Why are you telling people here who aren't Catholic how much you hate Catholic theology?

They're not pract- Like, what, what is the point?

What is, h- how is that spiritually benefiting these people at all?

But what it does is it creates this kind of bunker mentality JD Vance is talking about, where you get convinced, like, We're the good guys.

Everybody out there is the bad guys.

And he talks about the damage this does in terms of relationships in his own life.

He says, I admired my Uncle Dan above all other men, but when he spoke of his Catholic acceptance of evolutionary theory, my admiration became tinged with suspicion.

So Dan is an in-law, uh, one of his Protestant aunts had married a Catholic, and so he had had this complicated picture of Catholicism.

That'll be relevant, as you might imagine, later in the story.

But he talks about how his new Pentecostal faith made him on the lookout for heretics.

Good friends who interpreted parts of the Bible differently were bad influences.

Even Mamaw, remember, his beloved grandma, fell from favor in his eyes because she liked Bill Clinton, and so that made her a suspect as a Christian.

But then he said something really striking.

He said, In my new church, I heard more about the gay lobby and the war on Christmas than about any particular character trait that a Christian should aspire to have.

Morality was defined by not participating in this or that particular social malady, the gay agenda, evolutionary theory, Clintonian liberalism, or extramarital sex.

So notice, everything becomes extremely political in a very time-specific sort of way.

Like, you could hear those sermon series and probably guess what year they're from.

Just, you know, hearing the kind of things people were worried about in those days, and then talking about those things, in many ways, to the exclusion of anything more perennial, or shall we say eternal?

And so Vance points out that even though this may sound, you know, we got this bunker mentality, it's us against the world, that may sound kind of intense.

It actually is super easy.

He said, Dad's church required so little of me.

It was easy to be a Christian.

The only affirmative teachings I remember drawing from church were that I shouldn't cheat on my wife and that I shouldn't be afraid to preach the Gospel to others.

So, planned a life of monogamy and tried to convert others, even my seventh grade science teacher who was Muslim.

So, I point this out to say this is something to watch out for.

Like, I think it's clear the danger of a sort of spiritual but not religious or a Christianity without Church, that you can't separate Christ, the head, from the Church's body.

And so I think many people watching this are gonna be probably aware of why Mamaw's version of Christianity was lacking something important.

But JD's dad's version of Christianity is lacking something as well, and, and JD is intuiting it.

He's seeing, There's nothing calling me here to radical discipleship.

Like, there's nothing saying, 'Be better than you were yesterday' through the help of God, through divine grace.

Like, all of that, if it's there, it's there in such a secondary sort of place that he doesn't even see it.

That's a problem.

And as he points out, this is not, uh, it's not a healthy spirituality.

He says it like this.

He says, The world lurched toward moral corruption, slouching toward Gomorrah.

The Rapture was coming, we thought.

Apocalyptic imagery filled the weekly sermons and the Left Behind books, and he explains, it's a best-selling fiction series.

Folks would discuss whether the Antichrist was already alive, and if so, which world leader it might be.

Someone told me that he expected I'd marry a very pretty girl, if the Lord hadn't come by the time I reached marrying age.

The end times were the natural finish for a culture sliding so quickly toward the abyss.

What he's doing here is pointing out something else, that when a church becomes obsessed with the culture and the culture wars and the political, and is reading everything through that lens, it naturally starts to corrupt, in technical terms, the eschatology.

You start to say, Everything is just so bad out there.

Surely this must be the sign that it's the end times.

And that turns out over and over again.

In Protestant history, there's, like, this whole series of these false predictions, particularly in the American Protestant context in the 19th, 20th, and 21st century, where you just have one false prediction after another, but they're often borne out of people feeling life is just going too crazy.

Sometimes it's because they're getting older.

Often, it's because there's social upheaval, and they're like, Aha, this must be the sign that Jesus is coming back in my lifetime.

And then repeatedly they're wrong.

That does real damage.

So, you've got all these things going on.

You have a- an actual low call to discipleship.

You have high suspicion on other people in your network of friends and family.

You have a real kind of bunker mentality.

You have, uh, an obsession with politics.

I'm not, no, no, not discounting.

Obviously, I'm doing a three-part series on, you know, the relationship with politics, but you could overdo it, and that leads to this bad eschatology.

He concludes by saying, Other authors have noted the terrible retention rates of Evangelical churches and blamed precisely that sort of theology for their decline.

I didn't appreciate it as a kid, nor did I realize that the religious views I developed during my early years with Dad were sowing the seeds for an outright rejection of the Christian faith.

So, there you go.

That's part one.

That leads very naturally into part two.How does he lose his faith?

How does he go from Protestant to atheist?

And he's already teed up several of these ideas, that the things he's obsessed with, like young Earth creationism and the imminent return of Jesus in his lifetime, these are not going to prepare him well for the world that he's going to face.

So here I'm gonna turn from his book, Hillbilly Elegy, to an article that he wrote for the Easter 2020 edition of the Catholic magazine, The Lamp, called How I Joined the Resistance.

The resistance is not a political term there.

It makes sense in context.

We'll get to it.

But there, he describes how he had been in the Marines and, after high school, and then, uh, after he comes back, he is kind of disillusioned.

Disillusioned with a lot of the reasons we went into Iraq, and then just more broadly.

So this is now 2006.

At this point, his grandmother is dead and he doesn't have a church or anything anchoring him to his childhood faith, and so he begins this kind of spiritual drift.

He goes from being a devout Protestant to a nominal one, meaning, like, Protestant in name, and then to something very much less.

This is a very short process.

2006 is when he comes back.

By 2007, uh, he begins college at Ohio State University and he's reading Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and calling himself an atheist.

So you can see, like, something is missing that leads to this rapid of an unraveling.

He says, I'm not gonna belabor this story, but he gives a few of the high points, low points, whatever you want to call them.

He said part of it is, a lot of it, is this feeling of irrelevance.

Increasingly, the religious leaders I turned to tended to argue that if you prayed hard enough and believed hard enough, God would reward your faith with Earthly riches.

But I knew many people who believed and prayed a lot without any riches to show for it.

So that's one part of it, you know, a kind of prosperity gospel and there's plenty of overlapping, uh, kind of trends between Pentecostalism and prosperity gospel preaching.

It's a Venn diagram, so you get plenty of people who are one and not the other.

But it's not surprising that he ran across this kind of Christianity within, uh, kind of the Pentecostal space, if you will, and also saw the shallowness of it.

It's a promise of get-rich-quick and it doesn't pan out, over and over again.

I mean, he's often among desperately poor people who are giving a lot of their money to preachers who are promising them, that if they're just generous enough, they'll get rich and then it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen.

And it's easy to see why that would lead to a sort of cynicism about Christianity and open one up for atheism.

But he also has a, a different kind of challenge, an intellectual challenge related to young Earth creationism.

And he said, I've never been a classical Darwinist.

And he kind of explains why, but nevertheless, he found young Earth creationism, uh, difficult to square with what he knew of biology.

He said, I was never so committed to young Earth creationism that I felt I had to choose between biology and Genesis, but the tension between a scientific account of our origin and the Biblical account I'd absorbed made it easier to discard my faith.

So you'll notice, it's not that either of these was just a knock-out, drag-out blow, but rather, both of these are just these things that wound the faith, if you will.

You've got here preachers promising something that's not coming true and then you've got this fight with young Earth creationism that is, seems to be a weak Christian case, or a weak young Earth creationist case.

But then there's another factor, one that he's not proud of, which is just that he wanted to fit in with the group.

He said, A lot of my new atheism came down to a desire for social acceptance among American elites.

'Cause he goes from the Ohio State University to Yale Law School and as he's going through this, you know, coming from pretty humble upbringing, entering the kind of halls of the elite, he's uncomfortable being just unabashedly low church Pentecostal Christian, knowing how people look at that.

So he doesn't say, you know, Oh, I just reject this 'cause it's not popular with my peers, but that's another factor that's kind of weighing down on him.

So pretty quickly, he finds himself echoing people like Christopher Hitchens in saying things like, The Christian cosmos is more like North Korea than America and I know where I'd like to live.

But he says in all this, he was really just kind of fitting into his new caste, both in deed and in emotion.

And he remarks, I'm embarrassed to admit this, but the truth often reflects poorly on its subject.

So you have several different things going on.

You have the intellectual currents and objections.

You also just have these personal issues.

We're gonna get back to that and, because this is gonna be kind of a recurring theme.

We've already seen it in his upbringing.

We're seeing it now in his atheism.

I'll explain why it matters that who you surround your with- yourself with matters quite a bit.

And he is very clear.

You know, he's not doing this on purpose.

He says, I'm not saying to myself at this time, 'I'm not going to be a Christian because Christians are rubes and I want to plant myself firmly in the meritocratic master class.' Rather, he says, socialization operates in more subtle but more powerful ways.

So at this point, I'm just gonna quote Saint Paul and then we're gonna put a pin in this idea and get back to it.

Saint Paul says, Do not be deceived.

Bad company ruins good morals.

Come to your right mind and send no more, for some have no knowledge of God.

I say this to your shame.

This has already been So you'll notice, Mama wasn't surrounding herself with good company by not attending church .

JD's dad was surrounding himself with a church that had such a strong vision of this, that it created this kind of bunker mentality to keep everyone with suspect morals out completely.

And then JD finds himself navigating, just because of school, into these spaces that are outside the bunker, and suddenly finding himself unprepared for the people he surrounds himself with.

And I say this because I think a lot of people watching this, or a lot of people listening to this, may have experienced that or may be experiencing that, either in your own upbringing, or maybe if you're raising kids now, you're asking that question, Okay, the- the world around me is sometimes hostile, maybe often hostile.

How do I raise kids in that?

What does it look like to raise kids effectively in that environment where they're ready to take on the world when the time comes, but they're also not just so exposed to the world that they're completely overwhelmed by it, or so isolated from the world that they've been in such a bubble that the moment they get a disease, they just die of it, right, because their body hasn't built up any antibodies?

The spiritual version of that is really dangerous as well.

So, how do we prepare, if you will, a good spiritual immune systems?

Again, we're gonna get back to all that topic because we have to take the next step in his journey.

Part three, how does he go from atheism to Catholicism?

One of the people who played an important role in terms of intellectual influences was someone I wasn't actually familiar with, um, Basil Mitchell.

He was involved in a somewhat famous debate Anthony Flew had.

Anthony Flew was, at the time, an atheist, who ended up actually renouncing his atheism.

But he was a pretty convincing atheist for a while in the 20th century, and one of the people who responded to him, and this was re- again, a response I hadn't been familiar with until I read J.D. Vance's essay, was this guy by the name of Basil Mitchell, who was apparently brilliant English professor, Christian apologist, et cetera.

And they're arguing about the notion of the coexistence with something called the problem of evil.

Like, how is it that there is a loving God, and there's all this pain and suffering in the world?

And Flew argued that a proposition like God is love is effectively meaningless because no amount of evidence is ever going to disprove that.

You know, if the Holocaust isn't enough evidence against God is love, then how much evidence?

That's, that's kind of the argument, and it's a strong argument, and it's an argument that Vance recognized as a strong argument when he was an atheist.

But then he read Mitchell's response, and it struck him.

Now, to give you some context, Mitchell is using an example of from war time.

He doesn't specify the war, but you have to imagine the time that he's writing this, these were all Englishmen who'd lived through the Second World War.

So, that gives you kind of a maybe a better mental image of, of the picture that he's painting, and he's going to use this to address the evidentiary problem, like, how can we believe in God's goodness and existence in the face of evil?

In a time of war in an occupied country, a member of the resistance meets one night a stranger who deeply impresses him.

They spend that night together in conversation.

The stranger tells the partisan that he himself is on the side of the resistance indeed, that he is in command of it, and urges the partisan to have faith in him, no matter what happens.

The partisan is utterly convinced at that meeting of the stranger's sincerity and constancy and undertakes to trust him.

Okay, so, this incredible meeting with the stranger who he's come to believe is the leader of the partisans, of the resistance.

They never meet again in such conditions of intimacy, but sometimes the stranger is seen helping members of the resistance, and the partisan is grateful and says to his friends, He's on our side.

Sometimes, he is seen in the uniform of the police, handing over patriots to the occupying power.

On these occasions, his friends murmur against him, but the partisan still says, He is on our side.

He still believes that in spite of appearances, the stranger did not deceive him.

Sometimes, he asks the stranger for help and receives it.

He's thankful.

Sometimes, he asks and does not receive it.

Then he says, The stranger knows best.

Sometimes, his friends, in exasperation, say, Well, what would he have to do for you to admit that you were wrong and that he is not on our side?

But the partisan refuses to answer.

He will not consent to put the stranger to the test.

And sometimes his friends complain, Well, if that's what you mean by his being on our side, the sooner he goes over to the other side, the better.

So, I really like this kind of thought experiment because maybe it's 'cause I've watched a lot of film noir, you know, those kind of 40s spy films and everything else.

There's something eminently believable about this thought experiment, where you can say, Yes, that is exactly the situation real-life people often found themselves in, where they had to trust someone in spite of evidence that was sometimes confusing about their goodness and their intentions.

And it's not irrational in those circumstances to trust, even when some amount of evidence seems to point in the opposite direction.

That's what Mitchell's getting at.

That, yes, we can take seriously that the problem of evil is a problem for Christians.

Like, how do we make sense of this?

We can say, Yes, it- it kind of makes sense that God would allow it, but we don't have a perfect understanding by any stretch.

Likewise, you know, you can imagine if you're the partisan, you can say, Well, I can kind of imagine uh, why the leader of the resistance is pretending that he's on the side of the occupying forces.

But you can also see why that would look like evidence against his goodness, and evidence against his really being the leader of the resistance.

So, you have to evaluate that evidence and say, It's not as simple as saying, well if I see anything I can't immediately account for, or if I see anything that looks like he's not part of the resistance, I'm going to throw him off.

That would be too rash of a judgment.

And so the partisan is thoroughly convinced by that first encounter to the extent that everything else is viewed through this kind of hermeneutic of trusting.

And so too, the Christian who's had an encounter with God, can take even the- the difficult things, like the problem of pain, through this hermeneutic, through this lens of, Okay, but everything else I know about God makes me think that this can be explained, even if I can't explain it.

Even if I don't have an easy answer for it, I trust that an answer exists, that it's out there.

Vance was struck by this as well.

He said, I had thought that the proper response to a trial of faith was to suppress it and pretend it never happened.

And you saw how badly that worked out for him, right?

He became an atheist.

But here was Mitchell conceding that the brokenness of our world and our individual tribulations did in fact count against the existence of God, but not definitively.

I would eventually conclude that Mitchell had won the philosophical debate years before I realized how much his humility in the face of doubt affected my own faith.

So, even before he's like, Okay, well Mitchell's right, therefore I'm going to become Christian, he What's happened here is a door has been opened, a door showing that Christianity is plausible, that it's reasonable, that it's acceptable.

And at this point, you might be wondering, well, why Catholicism in particular?

And he's gonna give different answers to that, and it kind of makes the most sense intellectually, but he addresses some of the things you might be thinking.

You know, this is someone who grew up in an Appalachian sort of household, coming from, uh, not being surrounded by Catholics.

Having, you know, one Catholic in his life and having a lot of stereotypes about Catholics.

So, how did he kind of work through that?

He said, you know, his first real exposure to an institutional church was later in his life, you know, as he's, uh, I guess a teenager, I don't know exactly what year, uh, what age he is, through his father's large Pentecostal congregation in Southwestern Ohio.

But he knew, and this is heavy quotations around knew, a few things about Catholicism well before that.

I 'knew' the Catholics worshipped Mary, I 'knew' they rejected the legitimacy of scripture, and I 'knew' that the Antichrist, or at least the Antichrist's spiritual advisor, would be a Catholic.

Or the town, I would have said, is a Catholic, as I felt pretty confident that the Antichrist walked among us.

Now, later in this essay, he'll talk about how he didn't find any of these objections ultimately very strong once he began to actually look closely at Catholicism.

He says, Catholics didn't, it turned out, worship Mary.

Their acceptance of both scriptural and traditional authority slowly appeared to me as wisdom, as I watched too many of my friends struggle with what a given passage of scripture could possibly mean.

All right, so he sees on the face, Catholics look faithless because they don't practice Sola Scriptura.

But in practice, Catholics are able to keep their heads around how to understand scripture when many Sola Scriptura Protestants are- are tying themselves in knots on interpretive issues without any other guidance.

And he said, I even began to acquire a sense that Catholicism possessed a historical continuity with the church fathers, indeed, with Christ Himself, the unchurched religion of my upbringing couldn't match.

So, you can start to see why Catholicism makes sense.

Like, once you see, okay, the case for atheism is not as strong as it looks and there really is something going on, Jesus Christ may actually be who he says he is, and you have to take that seriously, it makes sense once you're grappling with that in an intellectual sort of way.

Catholicism, once you get all the prejudices and biases out of the way, starts to make a lot of sense.

Now, here I want to turn to two takeaways.

And I Look, I would encourage you to read his essay, How I Joined the Resistance.

He goes into more depth than I've been able to get into here, but let me focus on two things.

Number one, the role of Saint Augustine.

Uh, Saint Augustine of Hippo is his confirmation saint, and he plays this really important role as someone who shows what it looks like to take both faith and reason seriously.

And so this is going to be an important role, both broadly So, there's a lot going on here.

Uh, Augustine's famous work, City of God, is influential in terms of J.D. Vance's vision of political life and Catholicism and how should a Christian live and what should the state look like, and all of those things.

But there's another aspect that maybe we're under appreciating, where Saint Augustine has a really important commentary on the Book of Genesis, and this helps to solve some of the knots that J.D. Vance had found himself in on the issue of Young Earth Creationism.

Now, I should say here for a moment, you are not required to agree with me on Young Earth Creationism, and I don't want to impose my views on how to interpret it on you.

But I do want to stress, this is an area in which there is Christian liberty, and if you're insisting everyone has to read Genesis like you do, you're actually causing more spiritual damage than you maybe are aware of.

Because if you take a very literal reading, it has to be just this, and then somebody else is like, Okay, well, that's what I have to believe in to become Christian.

And then they open a science book and they say, I don't know how I can square what's really your interpretation of Genesis with science, they could lose their whole faith not because they disagree with Genesis, but because they disagree with you.

Now, I'm saying that, but this is also, as J.D. Vance is about to discover, what Saint Augustine had to say many years ago.

So this is, again, Saint Augustine in his literal commentary on Genesis.

He says, In matters that are obscure and far beyond our vision, even in such as we may find treated in Holy Scripture, different interpretations are sometimes possible without prejudice to the faith we have received.

In such a case, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that if further progress in the search of truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.

In other words, if something could be read in two different ways, or three different ways, or whatever, don't hold so tightly to your personal read that if your read is wrong, your faith is gone.

That, he said, would be to battle not for the teaching of Holy Scripture, but for our own, wishing its teaching to conform to ours, whereas we ought to wish ours to confirm, conform to that of Sacred Scripture.

So this often, I mean, I can't tell you how often this has come up where someone has a wrong and often overly literalistic, uh, take on some passage in Scripture.

Doesn't have to be Genesis, any number of other things.

And when you press them on it, they're like, Well, that's just what the Bible says.

And what they're doing there is saying, If you disagree with me, you can't have the Bible.

Like, you can't accept Scripture and not accept my authority to interpret Scripture.

That, Augustine is calling out, is arrogant, right?

'Cause then you're not battling for Scripture, you're battling for your own personal interpretation of Scripture in ways that are often wrong and kind of foolish.

And Augustine is going to give the example here of Genesis 1. So when God says, Let there be light, does He mean physical, material light, or does He mean spiritual light?

Because spiritual light is also spoken of in Scripture.

It doesn't say explicitly one way or the other.

You might very well assume it means one, you might very well assume it means the other.

And Augustine's point is, okay, well, there's nothing in that, that you could take one or the other view, and if some new evidence comes along to suggest it's one and not the other, then that's fine.

If that should happen, this teaching, meaning, like, if you thought it was, uh, material light, and then somehow we have a new scientific discovery that shows, nope, that wasn't when, you know, material light began, or something.

I don't, I don't think that science exists.

I don't even know how it would exist.

But if it did, hypothetically, Augustine's point is, that wouldn't disprove Scripture.

That would just narrow down the interpretive options.

That would just mean, okay, well, it must not mean that, then.

It must mean the other.

And all that would prove is that our earlier ignor- our, our earlier opinion was ignorant, not that Scripture was wrong.

Why does this matter?

Because as Saint Augustine's going to point out, non-Christians know how to do science as well, and they know things about the world.

So this is not just about science, it's about anything where it's a commentary on the world, the cosmos, whatever, uh, the Earth, the Heavens, the other elements of the world.

And they might know a lot more than you do.

And so when you're trying to use the Bible to prove a science fact, you can make yourself look quite ridiculous.

In Augustine's words, It is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian presumably giving the meaning of Scripture talking nonsense on these scientific topics.

And we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, which people show a vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

Like, if you think about the work of, you know, people like Bill Maher and Religulis, he's often just, like, looking for people who are Christian who believe silly things and don't have the ability to defend them, and then he's using that to mock Christianity.

And Augustine does not like that, but realizes that the Christian holds some of the blame for that, for insisting that their own philosophically or scientifically illiterate kind of views are what Scripture teaches rather than their own limited reading of it.

Like, not making that distinction does some real damage, and not just for, like, your personal ego.

He says, The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but the people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions.

Like, the problem isn't that you look stupid.

The problem is you're making the evangelist look stupid, or making God look stupid.

And so, uh, it becomes a lot harder for people to take us seriously when we talk to them about salvation.

That's what he, that's what he's making the case for.

I think it makes a lot of sense.

Last thing from Augustine here.

He says, If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well, and hear them maintaining this foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the Kingdom of Heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience in the light of reason?

This is something that not just Protestants but Catholics have to be very mindful of.

I've encountered Catholics who insist that geocentrism is, like, true, and not just true, but really important to profess and believe.

This is the kind of thing Saint Augustine is warning against.

When y- it's one thing to proclaim this radical Gospel of Jesus.

It's another thing to add to it these other things that are your own idiosyncratic views.

That was the kind of thing that Vance struggled with, with his childhood Pentecostalism.

And it's the kind of thing that we can struggle with when you say, Not only do you have to believe the Gospel, you also have to believe these scientific theories.

You have to believe, you know, these interpretations that the church doesn't insist on, but I insist on.

And a good, you know, basic litmus test is does the Magisterium right now agree with you?

Like, if, if you really believe, okay, I'm gonna dispute with my brother, and we're gonna take this not just as like an online debate; we're gonna actually take this all the way to the Vatican and submit it for resolution before the Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith, before the Pope.

Is there gonna be a resolution in your favor?

And if you say No, because they're too soft, stop.

Right?

Like, just stop thinking that you understand scripture and the faith better than, like, the actual teaching authority.

This is an important principle.

I'm not saying that the Pope doesn't make mistakes or any of those things.

I'm not saying that at all.

But if you're arguing that you know better than the Magisterium and are imposing your own will as if it were the Magisterium, you're acting in this way that Augustine warned you against, in a way that is arrogant.

That doesn't mean you can't believe something that isn't explicitly taught.

You can.

I'm not going to impose that you can't, for the same reason I'm laying out here.

The basic principle is this.

We are bound where we're bound.

We are loosed where we're loosed.

And the twofold dangers are, one, watering down Christianity to loose things that are actually bound.

I'm gonna talk about that when we get into the episode on the surprising death of Liberal Catholicism.

But the other danger is to bind things that are actually loosed, to insist that people agree with you on things they don't actually have to agree with you.

We don't have to agree on Young Earth Creationism, to believe Genesis is true, to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, to believe in original sin.

We just have to take certain basic things, and the church has outlined what those are.

And if we take those things, we can disagree on other interpretive questions and still be brothers and sisters in Christ.

This is news to J.D. Vance.

When he reads Augustine's words in Genesis, or on Genesis, excuse me, he said, I couldn't stop thinking about how I would've reacted to this passage when I was a kid.

If someone had made the very same argument to me when I was 17, I would've called them a heretic.

This was an accommodation to science, the kind that someone like Bill Maher rightly mocked contemporary moderate Christians for indulging.

Yet here was a person telling us 1600 years ago that my own approach to Genesis was arrogance, the kind that might turn a person from his faith.

This, it turns out, was a little too on the nose and the first crack in my proverbial armor.

In reading that, I was reminded of the great richness of the Catholic vision of the relationship of faith and reason.

We're just not afraid of science.

There's a reason there have been a lot of Catholic scientists.

There's a reason entire fields of science have been founded by Catholic clerics.

In the words of Pope John Paul II, Faith and reason are like two wings in which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth, and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth, in a word, to know Himself, so that by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.

Like, God didn't create the world and the universe as a test or a trick.

It's a, a show of His abundant goodness.

It's evidence for Him, right?

Like, the Heavens are telling the glory of God, so we trust that the Heavens are telling the truth.

And so we do things like we have astronomy, not astrology, astronomy, right?

The Vatican Observatory.

We have a giant , like, church-sponsored telescope to just help us to understand the cosmos more.

Because we believe faith i- is always going to help us understand the world God created better and therefore come to a deeper knowledge both about who God is and about who we are, and that's good.

And so J.D. Vance coming to see this started to see what a healthy engagement with the world might look like, where it's not just oppositional, where it's us against science.

No, it's recognizing that even if some of the people involved in the sciences have an arrogant view where they think they're better than philosophy and theology, they might still be doing really good science.

And that can help us to have this greater understanding of the world, and that is good, and we should embrace that.

That's the first takeaway.

Augustine plays this really important role not just for City of God but also for his work on Genesis and helping to untie some knots that had been tied in J.D.'s youth.

The second takeaway is pretty different.

I'm calling it relational evangelism, 'cause that one's pretty intellectual, right?

And basically about not putting out heavy burdens.

Relational evangelism is reminding ourselves that there's more to it than that.

So in Hillbilly Elegy, he talks about this moment in his childhood where he asks his grandma if God loves us, but he reflected on it this way.

He said, The fallen world described by the Christian religion matched the world I saw around me, one where a happy car ride could quickly turn into misery, that's referring to an earlier event, one where individual misconduct rippled across a family's and a community's life.

When I asked Mamaw if God loved us, I asked her to reassure me this religion of ours could still make sense of the world we lived in.

I needed reassurance of some deeper justice, some cadence or rhythm that lurked beneath the heartache and chaos.

Right?

Like, he is dealing with the fact that a lot of what he's seen in the visible reality he has- Is sinful and corrupt and chaotic.

And so the idea of a God who is good and orderly behind that is what he needs reassurance about.

Now, we already saw a philosophical way of it kind of answering that.

But what he's needing here is just his grandma to show God's love to him.

And so I'm reminded here of 1 John 4:20, where John tells us, If anyone says I love God and hates his brother, he is a liar.

For he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.

It's a reminder that this visible set of relationships, my relationship with my neighbor, is a way of living out my relationship with my God whom I don't see.

And so if you're not showing your neighbor how much you love them, you're not in right relationship with God.

And conversely, if you are showing your neighbor that you love them, you help them to see what it's like to be loved by God.

Right?

Like, this is one of the ways in which in loving your neighbor you help to make the case for Christianity that much more plausible.

Because if you're living in chaos and confusion and neglect and a lack of love, being told, Oh, yeah, God is love, does not sound plausible.

But, on the other hand, if Christians are loving you and caring for you and then telling you God is love, and you've experienced that love, now it makes sense.

This is, uh, true in a special way in the family relationship.

Like, this is true of any kind of relationship with a neighbor, but this is something that those of us who are parents have a special duty to do towards our kids.

A passage I, I know I've quoted many times, I'm gonna keep quoting it many times 'cause it's so good, is Ephesians 3. Where St. Paul says, For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father, pator or patra, from whom every family, patria, in heaven and on earth is named.

In other words, family is derived, like the Greek word for family is derived from the word for God's fatherhood.

It's where we get words like, uh, patriotism, but also patriarchy.

It's all coming from the same, like, that sort of thing.

And so you want to live that well because you are, especially in talking to fathers here, you are a visible image of what fatherly love looks like.

And so a child who does not experience that has a much harder time believing in the good fatherhood of God.

Whereas Pope St. John Paul II puts it, he says, Original sin attempts to abolish fatherhood, destroying its rays which permeate the created world, placing in doubt the truth about God who is love, and leaving man only with a sense of the master-slave relationship.

As a result, the Lord appears jealous of his power over the world and over man, and consequently man feels goaded to do battle against God.

No differently than in any other epoch of history, the enslaved man is driven to take sides against the master who kept him enslaved.

Think about that vision, that once you lose sight of God as Father, you're only left with God as Lord or even slave master.

And so it becomes really appealing to take up arms against him.

And then remember J.D. Vance's line where he's quo- quoting Hitchens about how Christianity is just like North Korean dictatorship.

How much is that an evidence of lacking that image of loving fatherhood?

Like, that's the thing.

Like, the Christian vision is not God is like a slightly more powerful version of Kim Jong-un.

No.

It's the, he is the loving creator of everything.

And if you don't know the difference between that and a dictator, you're telling on yourself in some really heartbreaking sort of ways.

And Vance tells on himself quite openly about all of these relational, uh, dysfunctions that he experienced throughout his life that made it harder to believe in the goodness and love of God.

So in 2019, Rod Dreher, who went to Vance's baptism when he became Catholic, asked him about it.

Like, gave He did a little short interview with him.

And Vance said this.

He said, I became persuaded over time that Catholicism was true.

I was raised Christian but never had a super strong attachment to any denomination and was never baptized.

When I became more interested in faith, I started out with a clean slate and looked at the Church that appealed to me most intellectually.

Then he adds this.

But it's too easy to intellectualize this.

When I looked at the people who meant the most to me, they were Catholic.

My uncle by marriage is a Catholic.

Rene Girard is someone I only know by reading him, and he was Catholic.

I've been reading and studying about it for three years or even longer.

It was time.

So, I, I point this out to say, even for someone who's an intellectual, even for someone who was going to Yale Law School and clearly has a very bright mind, he's not a robot.

He needs love and acceptance, and he's looking for the same things every one of us is, whether we're acknowledging it or not, whether we're aware of it or not.

And so as a result, like, maybe you're really good at answering the intellectual objections.

Maybe you're not.

But you can certainly help to show the love of God to other people around you.

And you can help to make the case that much more plausible because of that.

So a year after that, after, uh, well, not even a year.

Like, six months after his conversion is when Vance writes his, his essay for The Lamp.

And he again returns to this scene.

He says, There were the words of St. Augustine and Gerard and the example of my Uncle Dan, married into our family but demonstrated Christian virtue more thoroughly than any person I'd met.

They were good friends who made me see that I didn't need to abandon my reason before I approached the altar.

I came eventually to believe that the teachings of the Catholic Church were true .

but it happens slowly and unevenly.

So that's the last thing I wanted to kind of hone in on.

If you're someone who is exploring Catholicism, it's okay if it takes a while.

It's okay if you don't have just a light bulb moment, and, you know, we're not gonna try to do a high-pressure situation where we call you up for an altar call and make you just announce right now, Are you all in or all out?

No, we're gonna work with you to make sure you can actually move forward in good faith, to make sure you don't have some lingering objection that makes you feel like you can't step forward.

We want you to feel like this is true before you make, take that next step.

On the other hand, if you are a Catholic and you're wondering like, Well, how do I share this?

The important thing here is no one person did it all in Vance's conversion, and no one person does it all in any conversion story I've ever read.

So maybe you're called to play a small little piece.

That's frustrating.

Like, I always want to be the person who gets someone over the finish line where they're like, I can't believe that you were so influential, you helped me become Catholic.

But that's ego, right?

Like, I don't need that.

God doesn't need that.

It's not helping me.

Like, I'm happy to play whatever role I can, and if that's step two of a 2,000-step process, fine, so be it.

The point is just simply this, play the role you've been given by God.

Intellectually, relationally, in all the other ways, help people to see they don't need to abandon reason before they can approach the altar.

Bring people to the wisdom and the love of the saints.

Give good books to people who might open them and read them.

Do all of those things, and see if you can't help create conditions that are a little more conducive to the person being able to say yes to Jesus Christ.

So, in short, -ish, that's the story of J.D. Vance.

Whatever else you may have going for him, whatever else you may have going against him, I find his spiritual journey telling and I find it eye-opening, and I think there's a lot of food for thought for all of us to spiritually reflect on.

I hope it's been good.

I, uh, look forward to seeing your comments and engagements below.

If you like this video, please share it broadly.

Feel free to join over on Patreon, ShamelessJoe.com, and I'll be back with two more episodes broadly speaking on the topic of Catholicism and politics next week.

For Shameless Potpourri, I'm Joe Heschmair.

God bless you.