Review by J.D. Vance – A strange and poignant book about faith and the modern world | religion

AThe core of this strange, and perhaps somewhat poignant, book is the biblical question: “What must I do to be saved?” Not in the simple sense of how to secure a place in heaven, but as an urgent challenge to the whole stock of destructive assumptions and customs sanctioned by the majority culture. In his famous first book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance chronicled, among other things, the impact of drug abuse on generations of the rural poor. It is not an exaggeration to view this book as a vision of the modern West through the lens of addiction and its effects on generations. Except this time, it’s the norms and expectations of elite modernity that are as lethal to aspiring young professionals as fentanyl is to the less fortunate.

Vance offers a diagnosis that is not particularly original, but one that derives its force from the intensity of the personal questioning he undertook to arrive at. The Vice President of the United States vividly describes the prevailing mechanisms, in education, the professional and political worlds, that lead us to want what others want – not what we consider inherently desirable. Most of us instinctively desire emotional security, meaningful work, and perhaps above all, the hope and joy of nurturing the next generation, introducing them to a world of value and promise. One of the book’s most telling moments is the painful bewilderment experienced by the amazingly successful young Vance when faced with the challenge of becoming a father: “I knew exactly how to help my child get into a good college but I was woefully unprepared to make him a good man.”

The desire to have what others want enslaves us to inhumanly hectic work patterns that wreak havoc on family life. It also corrupts our intellectual life, producing an overly anxious conformity to moral opinion. Vance points to his experience at Yale Law School, where he says progressive beliefs exercised an iron fist. To express doubts about the absolute moral clarity of the pro-choice position was to invite immediate excommunication from the inner circle of the elect. This kind of ostracism was practiced by both the left and the right: for both, the ultimate goal was simply to assimilate as fully as possible into the administrative aristocracy that allowed maximum personal freedom – which could be conceived as maximum personal income and status.

Vance’s return to the Christian faith was shaped by two basic insights. The first he expresses provocatively in his statement: “I have found liberation in guilt.” To be honest and compassionate, we need a language (and rituals) of repentance and renewal. What draws Vance toward a Catholic identity specifically is the need to see grace as being absorbed and assimilated over and over again in a long history of learning and growth—in contrast to the quick spiritual fixes he sees in the evangelical world of his childhood. The beginning of Christian wisdom can only be achieved through honesty about your own failures and the resulting ability to respond to the failures of others, not with complicit tolerance, but with compassion and hope.

The Catholic perspective is also compelling because of its history of social analysis that transcends the narrow polarities of modern politics. The social vision classically expressed by Pope Leo Vance gives a poignant account of a conversation with a critic of the administration’s immigration policy who argues that the abundance of immigrant labor exempts employers from paying higher wages to American citizens and thus ensures better profits. We have been returned to the emptiness and toxicity of the addictive cycle of profit- and status-driven activity that Vance already described.

Despite the very loose structure of the book, this seems to be the theme of the argument. In some ways it rehearses a view of modernity – especially American modernity – that has been presented in more detail in the work of a series of American scholars and commentators, from Robert Bellah to David Brooks. This is a perspective that focuses on the anxiety and isolation resulting from individual hopes and desires, expresses a renewed interest in “personhood,” and urges the rediscovery of the resources that enable us to raise the next generation to a life well lived. This is not very far from what was brought to the fore on this side of the Atlantic by “Blue Labour” and “Red Tories.” The importance of the Christian vision here lies not so much in a system of specific moral absolutes—although they undoubtedly exist—as in the attitude that allows us to acknowledge failure without despair, to approach each other with generosity, and ultimately to know that our deepest desires point to being at home with what is most real: the unconditional love that made us.

So, to the looming question the book leaves us with: What does all of this have to do with the administration of which J.D. Vance is a prominent member? And perhaps the sub-question of who his audience is: This is not a book designed to appeal to MAGA audiences; Nor will it win favor from the tech-savvy billionaires who dominate the digital world, about whom Vance has a hard time saying things (despite Elon Musk being lauded as the innovator of American jobs), or from traditional free-market capitalists. At the same time, he is unlikely to win any friends on the left. Although his treatment of the abortion issue is more nuanced and sensitive than much conservative writing on the subject, this alone would put him beyond the pale as far as most progressives are concerned.

What he doesn’t tell us (despite indicating at several points that he would) is why he’s willing to hitch his wagon to the Trump cause. He dismisses much of the early criticism of Trump as merely an elitist sensitivity about the president’s “style,” and insists on the “success” of the first Trump administration, without doing much to connect it to the values ​​implicit in these pages. But how can we take seriously a book that ignores the rampant corruption of the Trump ruling class, the disgraceful verbal bullying that has become the norm in the president’s online and offline sermons, the recklessly arbitrary foreign policies (Vance’s carefully expressed reservations here about financing military support for Ukraine would apply far more forcefully to the failure of the Iran war), and the murderous brutality of the implementation of new immigration controls?

The book was actually dated because of its author, not its content. This content is in fact by no means as empty or vicious as some have assumed – although there are some bad moments of shaky arguments about traditional gender roles, or about how “rising racial conflict and gender division” are a direct result of the abolition of Christianity (a claim that is difficult to reconcile with the record of Christian nationalism in America’s past and present). But it does nothing to solve the mystery of what makes the Vice President so angry. At one point, he approvingly quotes a priest telling an addict in prison, “Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future.” Well, yes: back to the opening question about what you must do to be saved. “Look at the company you keep” might be a start.