Newt and I recently attended the Republican National Convention in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. On July 17, we listened as Ohio Senator J.D. Vance
accepted the Republican vice-presidential nomination and said, “My
friends, tonight is a night of hope. A celebration of what America once
was, and with God’s grace, what it will soon be again.”
During his acceptance speech, as thousands watched in Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum and millions more
from their homes, Vance told his story, articulated the values he lives
by, and affirmed that he will fight for Americans who have been
overlooked, forgotten, and ignored.
Vance spoke of being raised by his Christian grandmother, “Mamaw,” in
Middletown, Ohio, “a small town where people spoke their minds, built
with their hands, and loved their God, their family, their community and
their country with their whole hearts.”
Though Vance was surrounded by Christian faith and values in his
youth (and greatly admired his Catholic uncle), it wasn’t until his
teenage years that he joined an organized church.
As an adolescent, Vance attended a large Pentecostal church with his
biological father after the two reconnected. “I’m not sure if I liked
the structure or if I just wanted to share in something that was
important to him — both, I suppose — but I became a devoted convert,” Vance wrote in his best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
However, throughout his young adulthood, Vance’s faith lapsed, as he
described in a nearly 7,000-word essay for The Lamp titled “How I Joined the Resistance.”
After finishing his service with the Marines and attending college at
The Ohio State University, Vance discarded his faith and claimed to be
an atheist.
Surrounded by secularism in college, Vance was ingrained in a culture
that saw faith “at best, provincial and stupid; at worst, evil” and got
caught up in “the madness of crowds,” which caused him to abandon his
faith. “Much of my new atheism,” he wrote, “came down to a desire for
social acceptance among American elites.”
Though Vance admitted to adopting a worldview tinged with an air of
arrogance at this time, seeds of doubt surrounding his newfound
perceptions took hold throughout college and later in law school.
For Vance, the “first crack in [his] proverbial armor” would come
from a meditation by Saint Augustine that he read while attending Yale
Law School as he contemplated his “twin desires – for success and
character – and how they conflicted (and didn’t).”
The passage from Saint Augustine criticized man’s arrogant attempts
to conform Sacred Scripture to his own opinions when man’s aim ought to
be to conform his opinions to the truth in Sacred Scripture. (Read more.)
