The East German border guards who write about culture for the legacy media have read Vice President JD Vance’s new book about his journey back to religious faith. You’ll be shocked, and hold onto something to steady yourself, but they didn’t like it, and they don’t like him. Sample headlines:
The New Yorker says that JD Vance is very bad, and the New Republic says that JD Vance is very bad, and the New York Times says that JD Vance is very bad, and Newsweek says that JD Vance is very bad. Maybe you can identify a pattern, there. The commissariat has a single role, and they perform it like synchronized swimmers.
This is low-status product. Citizen, you must turn away from it!
At the New Yorker, Jessica Winter almost allows herself to see the point in her opening paragraph before wandering away into condescension and eyerolling: “His second memoir, released on June 16th, recounts the erratic Baptist and Pentecostal churchgoing of his boyhood, his wallow in atheism as a young man, and his eventual Catholic baptism, at the age of thirty-five, but it renders this years-long religious reckoning in impassive, even indifferent, terms.”
She actually says that his background in faith was erratic. Then she spends the rest of a long and dull essay denouncing his absence of doctrinal clarity and consistency, without noticing that she just told you that she’s recounting a journey that was explicitly framed as, note the actual word that was used, “erratic.”
- This person is describing a confusing and erratic journey through a subject he is trying to understand as a person who has newly returned to it
- He has failed, because he writes with an absence of theological precision and does not appear to possess properly credentialed subject matter expertise
Vance isn’t writing as a theologian, and he’s not claiming expertise. He’s explicitly describing a journey through years of confusion, as a man who was lost and then found his way to something that he now embraces as home. He’s trying to live there, and he says so.
So the critics aren’t trying to write about the thing Vance has written; they’re trying to maintain their cultural status by saying in ritual unison that a thing adjacent to Orange Man is tainted by its proximity to the bad orange thing. These are not interesting people, and they have no thoughts that are worth considering. They all do the thing about Vance claiming to be a supposed Christian while he actually supports deportation, by the way. If you’re not yet tired of the Talarico-style gambit in which true Christianity is precisely identical with far-left politics, there’s plenty of that to go around this week.
Now, let’s talk about what Vance actually wrote.
Rotating through a series of homes, raised by his grandmother but occasionally raised by a drug addict mother who disappears and reappears, and cycling between a long series of poorly chosen father figures as mom invites new men into her life, Vance encounters a bunch of incompatible things that people call Christianity. He goes to different churches, some with noticeably eccentric lay ministers, and hears radically different expressions of a faith that keeps going by the same name. The point is that he experienced confusion as a child.
If you have a copy of Vance’s book in hand, turn to page 22. That’s where you’ll find him wrapping up a discussion about the way he kept encountering different and apparently incompatible expressions of a faith that went by the same name, and here’s what he says about those conflicting representations: “I did not have the spiritual and intellectual tools to negotiate them.” Read that quoted sentence again, and compare it to what the New Yorker told you Vance was doing in this book.
Later, Vance says that “most of the knowledge in your head is mediated by the people and institutions you trust.” And he didn’t have that: “I had lost most of the Christians I trusted.”
This is the first thing he’s actually talking about. He needed someone to guide him to faith, but couldn’t hold on to trusted voices so he could make that journey. A few pages later, writing about being a very young man: “And I was so unrooted. I had no pastor I could turn to.”
This isn’t a confused story; rather, it’s a coherent story about being confused. This is a distinction that eludes the commissariat. Vance describes being lost, and a bunch of professional cultural critics say in unison look at this moron, he writes like he’s lost or something, does he not even understand?
Lacking guidance and mature community, Vance depicts himself, at length and with evident despair, as a proudly foolish young man, arrogant but mistaken about everything.
Into this depiction of a suffering man who doesn’t understand, Vance drops Job 38: “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?” He identifies precisely his condition and the significance of faith in the face of his pain and his sense of himself as a person who didn’t understand anything.
Arriving at the stage of adulthood that followed the military, school, and professional credentialing, Vance gets married and starts thinking about the life he intends to live. He wants to be a man, a father, and a husband. But he finds he doesn’t have a stable language for the virtue he wants to grow into. Since his difficult childhood, he writes, “I had promised myself, again and again, that I would be a good father to my kids and a good husband to my wife in the eyes of God. It was the only thing I ever really wanted.”
If you have patience for a book about a man who was lost, who perceived himself as being lost, and who struggled to stop being lost, this is one of those books. It probably won’t teach you new things about faith, and it doesn’t demonstrate startling new insight into Christianity. It’s about an unfinished journey, and it’s a narrative that declares its imperfection. Vance has written about his effort to live by faith, not about the perfection or clarity of his faith. The legacy media have no ability at all to tell you about that story without distorting it with their boring contempt.
