Today Joe Heschmeyer looks at JD Vance’s journey from Evangelical Christian, to atheism via Richard Dawkins, and finally coming home to Catholicism.

Transcript:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. 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, lemme be really clear. My goal on these is not to do the kind of standard things where I tell you how to vote or what. Just think about a particular bill or whether the president is doing a good job. I’m not going to do any of those things. Plenty of other people are more than happy to offer their opinions about all of those things ad nauseam. 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 undercovered 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 JD Vance, the journey of going from evangelical Protestantism to atheism to Roman Catholicism and explore why those moves happened on Tuesday. I’m going to turn to another topic, the surprising death of Liberal Catholicism. I’ll explain what I mean then. And on Thursday, I want to turn to exploring the rise and spiritual dangers of conspiracy theories. So let’s start with today’s topic. JD Vance, vice President James David Vance, better known as JD Vance. I know again, there’s plenty of things you can 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. 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’m 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 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 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 going to 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 New York Times bestselling 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. There were issues with alcoholism and drug abuse and even seemingly some domestic violence as his mother went from one man to another and went down further in the 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 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 mam, Bonnie Blanton Vance, and is so important of an influence is she on him that he actually legally changes his name. He was not originally JD Vance. He was originally JD Bowman, and he takes his grandmother’s name as a way of honoring her actually after he becomes married. There’s was a decidedly unchurched variety of evangelical Protestantism as vans would describe it in the book. We never went to church except on rare occasions in Kentucky or when mom decided that what we needed in our lives was religion. Nevertheless, MAMs again, the 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, mamaw continues to be financially supportive of a preacher back in Kentucky whom she respected.

So she was not uncritical in terms of her assessment, but she had a pretty negative view of any kind of organized religion, but nevertheless considered a relationship with Jesus, incredibly important to her life. The other person who makes an important spiritual appearance in Vance’s childhood is his biological father, James Donald Bowman. And he had divorced Vance’s mother 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 ma. So Vance uses the conversion of his dad to tell a pretty interesting story, basically highlighting two things that his father’s conversion. James’s conversion was this incredibly important thing for him personally, but 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 both spiritually and sociologically, it seems to be an obvious boon. He recounts that throughout this region, the rates of church attendance are actually comparable to 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 his family. So 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 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 or 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. And so that’s what he kind of grows up with, and we’re going to see the weakness of that form of Christianity. And so you have that sort of mamma’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, the father of jd, he gets really involved in his church, and this leads to this kind of fascinating relationship where JD Vance is trying to form a relationship with his biological dad. And this involves him going to Pentecostal church together as he’s a young boy, and he says on balance, he loved his dad and his church.

He says, I’m not sure if I like the structure or if I just wanted to share something that was important to him both, I suppose. But I became a devoted convert. I devoured books about young earth creationism and joined 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 this kind of Protestantism, you’re probably familiar with what he’s painting. I remember in sixth grade 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 these strangely pian 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 to Protestant Christianity. And so essentially, 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 calling Joe Biden and JD Vance Catholic tells you something, but not as much as you might imagine from just the label.

Vance goes on in talking about his dad’s Pentecostalism that he was 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 talked to many people, current and former Protestants who’ve described a similar sort of journey, especially in adolescence. Evolution in 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 what 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, I do a lot of debating Catholic Protestant issues through this channel, and I’m happy to do so, and 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 priestess 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 it’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, why are you telling people here who aren’t Catholic how much you hate Catholic theology? They’re not practic. What is the point? 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 we are the good guys, everybody out there, it’s 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 tinge with suspicion.

So Dan is an in-law. One of his Protestant aunts had married a Catholic, and so he 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 had made him on the lookout for heretics. Good friends who interpreted parts of the Bible differently were bad influences. Even Mammaw, 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 says, 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, c, clintonian liberalism or extramarital sex.

So notice everything becomes extremely political in a very time specific sort of way. You could hear those sermon series and probably guess what year they’re from, just 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, we’ve 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 I planned a life of monogamy and tried to convert others, even my seventh grade science teacher who was Muslim. So I played this out to say this is something to watch out for. 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 ahead from the church’s body. And so I think many people watching this are going to be probably aware of why mama’s version of Christianity was lacking something important.

But J D’s dad’s version of Christianity is lacking something as well, and JD is intuiting it. He’s seeing there’s nothing calling me here to radical discipleship, but there’s nothing saying be better than you were yesterday through the help of God through divine grace, 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, 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 bestselling 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 Marian age, the end times were the natural finish for a culture sliding so quickly toward the abyss. What he is 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 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 born 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 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 an obsession with politics. I’m not discounting, obviously I’m doing a three part series on the relationship with politics, but you could overdo it and that leads to this bad eschatology. He concludes by saying other losers have noted the terrible retention rates of evangelical churches and blame 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 going to 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 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 spiritual drift. He goes from being a devout Protestant to a nominal one, meaning like Protestant to name and then to something very much less. This is a very short process. 2006 is when he comes back. By 2007, 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 something is missing that leads to this rapid of an unraveling.

He says, I’m not going to belabor the 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 turn 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 that any riches to show for. So that’s one part of it, a kind of prosperity gospel. And there’s plenty of overlapping 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 the Pentecostal space, if you will, and also saw the shallowness of it.

It’s the 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 different kind of challenge, 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 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 knockout 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 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 because he goes from the Ohio State University to Yale Law School, and as he’s going through this coming from pretty humble upbringing, entering the 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, oh, I just reject this. It’s not popular with my peers. But that’s another factor that’s kind of weighing down on it. 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 cast 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 occurrence and objections. You also just have these personal issues. We’re going to get back to that. And because this is going to 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 yourself with matters quite a bit and is very clear. 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 masterclass. Rather, he says, socialization operates in more subtle but more powerful ways at this point. I’m just going to quote St. Paul and then we’re going to put a pen in this idea and get back to it. St. 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. ... Read more on Catholic.com