JD Vance’s new book, communion, describes his journey from atheism to Catholicism, college nerd. Once a ruthlessly competitive young lawyer, he is now a church-going family man. He has also progressed from comparing Donald Trump to Hitler to become his boss, though he fails to mention this. However, he readily admits what a jerk he was in his godless days, fascinated as he was by wealth, power and prestige. But that’s because he wants to show that atheism does bad things to your soul, while people of faith look beyond money and status to such higher goals as beating abortionists and blowing Palestinians to pieces. The memoir is designed to portray its author as a man honest about his past sins, rather than the evil deed whose best friend was the racist Charlie Kirk. Kirk called George Floyd a coke, and one wonders if his friend would agree. When a group of New Republicans circulated racist and anti-Semitic messages, Vance called them “terrible jokes.”
In fact, the vice president is still a jerk devoted to wealth, power and prestige. It’s just that now he has something called spiritual value added to his property portfolio. He sees a revival of Western Christian civilization, which means an illiberal, anti-immigrant, anti-Islamic social order. Muslims, he tells us, may be motivated by their belief in the most horrific violence, which certainly has not been true of Christians. Racial and gender conflicts are the fruit of alienation from God, not white supremacism or patriarchal power. He doesn’t talk much about current politics, since it’s hard to sound spiritual while talking about people being shot to death in Minneapolis or booted to the head on the Mexican border. It is wiser to talk about “falling in love with God’s wonderful creation” than to comment on CIA torture centers. Nor is there much mention of Vance’s political mastermind, a man with the spiritual depth of a punchline. However, he insists that “there is not a single square inch in the whole sphere of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine'”. Perhaps the “Christ” here is a typo for “Trump.”
Christianity was founded on the torture and killing of an itinerant preacher by Roman occupying forces in Palestine around 30 CE. Vance knows something about such imperial adventures. In between visits to mass, he has been complicit in the massacre of civilians in Gaza and the burning of the flesh of Iranian schoolchildren. After agreeing to a savage cut in US aid to the global poor, he tells us it is a Christian duty to protect those less fortunate. The Jesus presented by the New Testament is homeless, unemployed, without property and without family. If he wandered anywhere near the White House today, Vance and his cronies would surely turn on him and send him back to the evil place he came from.
The New Testament does not believe in spiritual values. Instead, he sees salvation as a matter of visiting the sick and feeding the hungry. Spirituality is a daily material matter. It also inherits from Jewish culture a venerable tradition of welcoming the stranger. Love in her view is first of all love towards strangers and enemies. Anyone can love a friend. Angels are also fiercely hostile to fat cats and big cats. When Mary is pregnant with Jesus, she breaks out into a song of triumph, singing about how God “knocked down the mighty from their thrones and raised up the poor, filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” Some New Testament scholars suggest that these stirring words may be borrowed from the Zealots, the anti-imperialist guerrilla force of the time memorably satirized in Monty Python. Life of Brian. The child in Mary’s womb will grow up to be killed by the state.
The Epistle of St. James exhorts the rich to weep and mourn for the misery that awaits them. Jesus himself denounces wealth and power because they bind you to the present and in doing so blind you to the prospect of a transformed future. He also surprisingly announces that highway and byway traffic will take precedence over law-abiding thieves in his future kingdom. In terms of wealth, Vance was recently made Czar of Fraud by the Lord of Orange, but he doesn’t seem particularly bothered by the fact that the Trump family is known to have made $6.5 billion from deals that some consider questionable.
The term “justice” is almost absent from the lexicon of this book. However, it was because Jesus spoke of justice and fellowship that the ruling class of the time set out to silence him. He warns his friends that if they do the same, they too will be eliminated. Or, as one theologian has said: if you don’t love it, you’re dead, and if you love it, you’ll be killed. The decision to execute Jesus was made by a group of extremely respected and highly religious people with whom Vance would have found much in common. Crucifixion was the form of death reserved by the Roman empire for political rebels and runaway slaves. Granted, this all happened in a bad place long before the Alamo, when they didn’t have air conditioning or vaginal eggs, but it might still be worth thinking about.
Most of it sacramental it concerns Vance’s wife, Usha, an almost supernatural figure whose moral superiority overshadows the Virgin Mary. According to the book’s epigraph, she is the guardian of all that is fair, pure and beautiful. He even compliments her on her height. In this bleak male fantasy, women are unblemished figures, while men get their hands dirty by shaving the heads of immigrants and usurping the seats of others.
Like so many Americans, Vance can’t stop praising his family. Mamaw (his grandmother) was a good Christian, except for a disturbing habit of saying “sky”, who owned 19 loaded pistols. The guns come in handy when the precocious young Vance questions him about the relationship between body and soul: “So the soul is like the bullet and the body is like the case? And God shoots the bullet into the sky, but the case gets stuck here on Earth?” Cartesian-minded Mamaw confirms that this is indeed the case. In a touching step of the dialogue, the vice president tells how the old woman trained him:
“JD, today we are going to pee and poop in the potty.”
“No, Mamaw.”
“JD, today we are going to pee and poop in the potty.”
“No, Mamaw.”
“JD, you’re going to go to that bathroom today and stop arguing with me.”
“Yes, Mamaw.”
You can always tell a conservative by his stars.
Right-wing Americans make a fetish of the family, but the New Testament takes a different view. Jesus’ attitude towards the domestic hearth is consistently hostile. As a child, he scolds his parents for not understanding his mission, and later rudely informs a group of relatives who want to see him wait while he goes about his public business. He responds to a woman who praises the womb that gave birth to him with a withering lewdness and declares that he has come to strangle the members of the family. Faith, in a word, is thicker than blood. Families are an obstacle to joining the movement he has started, in which his brother is eventually killed. To the chagrin of right-wing Roman Catholics, his mother is largely absent from the Gospels and his (step)father only has a walking part. He himself is single so that he is available to more people beyond providing a partner and a few children. This form of abstinence, like that of a guerrilla fighter, is not at all anti-sexual. In fact, the New Testament is remarkably quiet about sexuality, unlike many of its believers. There is very little to say on this topic, so it had to be rewritten as The Da Vinci Code in a sex-obsessed age.
sacramental is also theologically illiterate on the subject of suffering. Predictably, Vance subscribes to the late Duke of Edinburgh’s school of human development, saying that pain is good for your soul. “For most of my life,” he points out, “suffering has been my path to God.” Perhaps he means to do it to other people, which in recent years has attracted a lot of his attention. Here, however, he is out of line with the Gospels, which regard physical and mental illness as an evil to be overcome. Jesus spends most of his time healing the sick and at one point suggests that such afflictions are the work of Satan. If you can get something positive out of your ordeal, well and good, but it would be better not to be tortured in the first place. Jesus himself appears panicked at the prospect of his crucifixion. He goes to his death not because he wants to, but because in a world run by people like Vance, that’s what tends to happen to people like him.
Not that the vice president isn’t a little worried about all the heartbreak around the country. Bertolt Brecht once wrote a fable about a king who asked wise men to investigate this sorrow and discover its source. After putting their heads together, the wise men inform the king that he is the source of all the trouble in the world.
Terry Eagleton’s A death of its own will be published by Yale University Press in September
(Further reading: Britain cannot talk about religion)
