How I Joined the Resistance
by J. D. Vance
On Mamaw and becoming Catholic.
About the author
by J. D. Vance
J. D. Vance is the New York Times bestselling author of
Hillbilly Elegy.
I often wonder what my grandmother—Mamaw, as I called
her—would have thought about her grandson becoming
Catholic. We used to argue about religion constantly.
She was a woman of deep, but completely de-
institutionalized, faith. She loved Billy Graham and
Donald Ison, a preacher from her home in southeastern
Kentucky. But she loathed “organized religion.” She
often wondered aloud how the simple message of sin,
redemption, and grace had given way to the
televangelists on our early 1990s Ohio TV screen.
“These people are all crooks and perverts,” she told
me. “All they want is money.” But she watched them
anyway, and they were the closest she usually came to
regular church service, at least in Ohio. Unless she
was back home in Kentucky, she rarely attended church.
And if she did, it was usually to satisfy my early
adolescent quest for some attachment to Christianity
besides the 700 Club.
Like many poor people, Mamaw rarely voted, seeing
electoral politics as fundamentally corrupt. She liked
F.D.R., Harry S. Truman, and that was about it.
Unsurprisingly, a woman whose only political heroes had
been dead for decades didn’t like politics as a matter
of course and cared even less for the political drift
of modern Protestantism. My first real exposure to an
institutional church would come later, through my
father’s large pentecostal congregation in southwestern
Ohio. But I knew a few things about Catholicism well
before then. I knew that Catholics worshipped Mary. I
knew they rejected the legitimacy of Scripture. And I
knew that the Antichrist—or at least, the Antichrists’s
spiritual adviser—would be a Catholic. Or, at the time,
I would have said, “is” a Catholic—as I felt pretty
confident that the Antichrist walked among us.
Mamaw seemed not to care much about Catholics. Her
younger daughter had married one, and she thought him a
good man. She felt their way of worshipping was rather
formal and peculiar, but what mattered to her was
Jesus. Revelation 18 may have been about Catholics, and
it may have been about something else. But the Catholic
she knew cared about Jesus, and that was all right with
her.
Still, Mamaw looms so large in my mind—she still, more
than a decade after her death, is the person to whom I
most feel indebted. Without her, I wouldn’t be here.
And the uncomfortable fact is that the Christ of the
Catholic Church always seemed a little different from
the Jesus I’d grown up with. A little too stodgy, too
formal. Sallman’s famous portrait of Christ hung
upstairs near my bedroom, and that’s how I encountered
him: personal and kind, but a little forlorn. The
Christ of Catholicism floated high above you, as a
grown man or a baby, wreathed in beams of light and
crowned like a king. There is no way to avoid the
discomfort a woman like Mamaw felt with that kind of a
Christ. The Catholic Jesus was a majestic deity, and we
had little interest in majestic deities because we
weren’t a majestic people.
This was the most significant hangup I encountered
after I began to think about becoming Catholic. I could
think myself out of most standard objections. Catholics
didn’t, it turned out, worship Mary. Their acceptance
of both scriptural and traditional authority slowly
appeared to me as wisdom, as I watched too many of my
friends struggle with what a given passage of Scripture
could possibly mean. I even began to acquire a sense
that Catholicism possessed a historical continuity with
the Church Fathers—indeed, with Christ Himself—that the
unchurched religion of my upbringing couldn’t match.
Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I converted I
would no longer be my grandmother’s grandson. So for
many years I occupied the uncomfortable territory
between curiosity about Catholicism and mistrust.
I got there in a pretty conventional way. I joined the
Marines after high school, like so many of my peers—
indeed, the only other 2003 high-school graduate on my
block also enlisted in the Marines. I left for Iraq in
2005, a young idealist committed to spreading democracy
and liberalism to the backward nations of the world. I
returned in 2006, skeptical of the war and the ideology
that underpinned it. Mamaw was dead, and without a
church or anything to anchor me to the faith of my
youth, I slid from devout to nominal, and then to
something very much less. By the time I left the
Marines in 2007 and began college at The Ohio State
University, I read Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris,
and called myself an atheist.
I won’t belabor the story of how I got there, because
it is both conventional and boring. A lot of it had to
do with a feeling of irrelevance: increasingly, the
religious leaders I turned 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 without any
riches to show for it. But there are two insights
worth reflecting from that phase in my life, as they
both presaged an intellectual awakening not long ago
that ultimately led me back to Christ. The first is
that, for an upwardly mobile poor kid from a rough
family, atheism leads to an undeniable familial and
cultural rupture. To be an atheist is to be no longer
of the community that made you who you were. For so
long, I hid my unbelief from my family—and not because
any of them would have cared very much. Very few of
family members attended church, but everyone believed
in something rather than nothing.
There were ways of compensating for this, and one of
those (at least for me) was a brief flirtation with
libertarianism. To lose my faith was to lose my
cultural conservatism, and in a world that was growing
increasingly aligned with the Republican party, my
ideological response took the form of overcompensation:
having lost my cultural conservatism, I would become
even more economically conservative. The irony, of
course, is that it was the economic program of the
Republican party that least interested my family—none
of them cared how much the Bush administration slashed
tax rates for billionaires. The G.O.P. became a kind of
totem—I attached myself to it ever more strongly
because it gave me some common ground with my family.
And the most respectable way to do so among my new
college friends was through a dogged commitment to
neoliberal economic orthodoxy. Tax breaks and Social
Security cuts were socially acceptable ways to be
conservative among the American elite.
The second insight is that my abandonment of religion
was more cultural than intellectual. There were ways in
which I found my religion difficult to square with
science as it came to me. I’ve never been a classical
Darwinist, for instance, for reasons David Gelerntner
has outlined in his excellent new book. But
evolutionary theory in some form struck me as
plausible, and though I consumed Tornado in a Junkyard
and every other work of Young Earth Creationism, I
eventually got to the point where I couldn’t square my
understanding of biology with what my church told me I
had to believe. 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.
And the truth is that I discarded it for the simplest
of reasons: the madness of crowds. Much of my new
atheism came down to a desire for social acceptance
among American elites. I spent so much of my time
around a different type of people with a different set
of priorities that I couldn’t help but absorb some of
their preferences. I became interested in secularism
just as my attention turned to my separation from the
Marines and my impending transition to college. I knew
how the educated tended to feel about religion: at
best, provincial and stupid; at worst, evil. Echoing
Hitchens, I began to think and then eventually to say
things like: “The Christian cosmos is more like North
Korea than America, and I know where I’d like to live.”
I was fitting in to my new caste, in deed and emotion.
I am embarrassed to admit this, but the truth often
reflects poorly on its subject.
And if I can say something in my defense: it wasn’t
exactly conscious. I didn’t think to myself, “I am not
going to be a Christian because Christians are rubes
and I want to plant myself firmly in the meritocratic
master class.” Socialization operates in more subtle,
but more powerful ways. My son is two, and he has in
the last six months—just as his social intelligence has
skyrocketed—transitioned from ripping our German
Shepherd’s fur out to hugging and kissing him
gleefully. Part of that comes from the joy of giving
and receiving affections from man’s best friend. But
part of it comes from the fact that my wife and I
grimace and complain when he tortures the dog but coo
and laugh when he loves on it. He responds to us much
as I responded to the educated caste to which I slowly
gained exposure. In college, very few of my friends and
even fewer of my professors had any sort of religious
faith. Secularism may not have been a prerequisite to
join the elites, but it sure made things easier.
Of course, if you had told me this when I was twenty
four, I would have protested vigorously. I would have
quoted not just Hitchens, but Russell and Ayer. I would
have told you all the ways in which C.S. Lewis was a
moron whose arguments could only hold water against
third-rate intellects. I’d watch Ravi Zacharias just to
note the problems in his arguments, lest a better-read
Christian deploy those arguments against me. I prided
myself on an ability to overwhelm the opposition with
my logic. There was an arrogance at the heart of my
worldview, emotionally and intellectually. But I
comforted myself with an appeal to a philosopher whose
atheism-cum-libertarianism told me everything I wanted
to hear: Ayn Rand. Great, smart men were only arrogant
if they were wrong, and I was anything but that.
But there were seeds of doubt, one planted in the mind,
and the other in the heart. The former I encountered
during a mid-level philosophy course at Ohio State. We
had read a famous written debate between Antony Flew,
R.M. Hare, and Basil Mitchell. Flew, an atheist (though
he later recanted) argues that theological utterances—
like “God loves man”—are fundamentally unfalsifiable,
and thus meaningless. Because believers won’t let a
fact count against their faith, their views aren’t
really claims about the world. This certainly spoke to
my experience of what believers say when faced with
apparent difficulties. Confronted with unspeakable
tragedy? “The Lord works in mysterious ways.” In the
face of loneliness and desperation? “God still loves
you.” If real, obvious challenges to these sentiments
were processed and then ignored by the faithful, then
their faith must be pretty hollow. Our class spent the
most time discussing Flew’s opening volley, and the
response by Hare—which, essentially, concedes Flew’s
point but argues that religious feelings are meaningful
and potentially true nonetheless.
Basil Mitchell’s response received less attention in
class, but his words remain among the most powerful
I’ve ever read. I have thought about them constantly
since. He begins with a parable about a wartime soldier
in occupied territory who meets a “Stranger.” The
soldier is so taken with the Stranger that he believes
he is the leader of the resistance.
Sometimes the Stranger is seen helping members of the
resistance, and the partisan is grateful and says to
his friends, “He is on our side.” Sometimes he is seen
in the uniform of the police handing over patriots to
the occupying power. On these occasions his friends
murmur against him: but the partisan still says, “He is
on our side.” He still believes that, in spite of
appearances, the Stranger did not deceive him.
Sometimes he asks the Stranger for help and receives
it. He is then thankful. Sometimes he asks and does not
receive it. Then he says, “The Stranger knows best.”
Sometimes his friends, in exasperation, say, “Well,
what would he have to do for you to admit that you were
wrong and that he is not on our side?” But the partisan
refuses to answer. He will not consent to put the
Stranger to the test. And sometimes his friends
complain, “Well, if that’s what you mean by his being
on our side, the sooner he goes over to the other side
the better.” The partisan of the parable does not allow
anything to count decisively against the proposition
“The Stranger is on our side.” This is because he has
committed himself to trust the Stranger. But he of
course recognizes that the Stranger’s ambiguous
behaviour does count against what he believes about
him. It is precisely this situation which constitutes
the trial of his faith.
At the time, I tried my best to dismiss Mitchell’s
response. Flew had described the faith I’d discarded
perfectly. But Mitchell articulated a faith that I had
never encountered personally. Doubt was unacceptable. I
had thought that the proper response to a trial of
faith was to suppress it and pretend it never happened.
But here was Mitchell, conceding that the brokenness of
the world and our individual tribulations did, in fact,
count against the existence of God. But not
definitively. I would eventually conclude that Mitchell
had won the philosophical debate years before I
realized how much his humility in the face of doubt
affected my own faith.
As I advanced through our educational hierarchy—moving
on from Ohio State to Yale Law School—I began to worry
that my assimilation into elite culture came at a high
cost. My sister once told me that the song that made
her think of me was “Simple Man” by Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Though I had fallen in love, I found that the emotional
demons of my childhood made it hard to be the type of
partner I’d always wanted to be. My Randian arrogance
about my own ability melted away when confronted with
the realization that an obsession with achievement
would fail to produce the achievement that mattered
most to me for so much of my life: a happy, thriving
family.
I had immersed myself in the logic of the meritocracy
and found it deeply unsatisfying. And I began to
wonder: were all these worldly markers of success
actually making me a better person? I had traded virtue
for achievement and found the latter wanting. But the
woman I wanted to marry cared little whether I obtained
a Supreme Court clerkship. She just wanted me to be a
good person.
It’s possible, of course, to overstate our own
inadequacies. I never cheated on my would-be spouse. I
never became violent with her. But there was a voice in
my head that demanded better of me: that I put her
interests above my own; that I master my temper for her
sake as much as for mine. And I began to realize that
this voice, wherever it came from, was not the same one
that compelled me to climb as high as I could up our
ladder of meritocracy. It came from somewhere more
ancient, and more grounded—it required reflection about
where I came from rather than cultural divorce from it.
As I considered these twin desires—for success and
character—and how they conflicted (and didn’t), I came
across a meditation from Saint Augustine on Genesis. I
had been a fan of Augustine since a political theorist
in college assigned City of God. But his thoughts on
Genesis spoke to me, and are worth reproducing at
length:
In matters that are obscure and far beyond our vision,
even in such as we may find treated in Holy Scripture,
different Interpretations are sometimes possible
without prejudice to the faith we have received. In
such a case, we should not rush in headlong and so
firmly take our stand on one side that, if further
progress in the search of truth justly undermines this
position, we too fall with it. That would be to battle
not for the teaching of Holy Scripture but for our own,
wishing its teaching to conform to ours, whereas we
ought to wish ours to conform to that of Sacred
Scripture.
Let us suppose that in explaining the words, “And God
said, ‘Let there be light,’ and light was made,” (Gn 1,
3), one man thinks that it was material light that was
made, and another that it was spiritual. As to the
actual existence of “spiritual light” in a spiritual
creature, our faith leaves no doubt; as to the
existence of material light, celestial or
supercelestial, even existing before the heavens, a
light which could have been followed by night, there
will be nothing in such a supposition contrary to the
faith until un-erring truth gives the lie to it. And if
that should happen, this teaching was never in Holy
Scripture but was an opinion proposed by man in his
ignorance.
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the
earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the
world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even
their size and relative positions, about the
predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of
the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals,
shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he
holds to as being certain from reason and experience.
Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an
infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the
meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these
topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an
embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast
ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The
shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is
derided, but that people outside the household of faith
think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to
the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil,
the writers of our Scripture are criticized and
rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian
mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and
hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our
books, how are they going to believe those books in
matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the
hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when
they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts
which they themselves have learnt from experience and
the light of reason?
I couldn’t stop thinking about how I would have reacted
to this passage when I was a kid: If someone had made
the very same argument to me when I was 17, I would
have called him a heretic. This was an accommodation to
science, the kind that someone like Bill Maher rightly
mocked contemporary moderate Christians for indulging.
Yet here was a person telling us 1600 years ago that my
own approach to Genesis was arrogance—the kind that
might turn a person from his faith.
This, it turned out, was a little too on the nose, and
the first crack in my proverbial armor. I began
circulating the quote among friends—believers and
nonbelievers alike, and I thought about it constantly.
Around the same time, I attended a talk at our law
school with Peter Thiel. This was 2011, and Thiel was a
well-known venture capitalist but hardly a household
name. He would later blurb my book and become a good
friend, but I had no idea what to expect at the time.
He spoke first in personal terms: arguing that we were
increasingly tracked into cutthroat professional
competitions. We would compete for appellate
clerkships, and then Supreme Court clerkships. We would
compete for jobs at elite law firms, and then for
partnerships at those same places. At each juncture, he
said, our jobs would offer longer work hours, social
alienation from our peers, and work whose prestige
would fail to make up for its meaninglessness. He also
argued that his own world of Silicon Valley spent too
little time on the technological breakthroughs that
made life better—those in biology, energy, and
transportation—and too much on things like software and
mobile phones. Everyone could now tweet at each other,
or post photos on Facebook, but it took longer to
travel to Europe, we had no cure for cognitive decline
and dementia, and our energy use increasingly dirtied
the planet. He saw these two trends—elite
professionals trapped in hyper-competitive jobs, and
the technological stagnation of society—as connected.
If technological innovation were actually driving real
prosperity, our elites wouldn’t feel increasingly
competitive with one another over a dwindling number of
prestigious outcomes.
Peter’s talk remains the most significant moment of my
time at Yale Law School. He articulated a feeling that
had until then remained unformed: that I was obsessed
with achievement in se—not as an end to something
meaningful, but to win a social competition. My worry
that I had prioritized striving over character took on
a heightened significance: striving for what? I didn’t
even know why I cared about the things I cared about. I
fancied myself educated, enlightened, and especially
wise about the ways of the world—at least compared with
most of the people from my hometown. Yet I was obsessed
with obtaining professional credentials—a clerkship
with a federal judge and then an associate position at
a prestigious firm—that I didn’t understand. I hated my
limited exposure to legal practice. I looked to the
future, and realized that I’d been running a desperate
race where the first prize was a job I hated.
I began immediately planning for a career outside the
law, which is why I spent less than two years after
graduation as a practicing attorney. But Peter left me
with one more thing: he was possibly the smartest
person I’d ever met, but he was also a Christian. He
defied the social template I had constructed—that dumb
people were Christians and smart ones atheists. I began
to wonder where his religious belief came from, which
led me to René Girard, the French philosopher whom he
apparently studied under at Stanford. Girard’s thought
is rich enough that any effort to summarize will fail
to do the man justice. His theory of mimetic rivalry—
that we tend to compete over the things that other
people want—spoke directly to some of the pressures I
experienced at Yale. But it was his related theory of
the scapegoat—and what it revealed about Christianity—
that made me reconsider my faith.
One of Girard’s central insights is that human
civilizations are often, perhaps even always, founded
on a “scapegoat myth”—an act of violence committed
against someone who has wronged the broader community,
retold as a sort of origin story for the community.
Girard points out that Romulus and Remus are, like
Christ, divine children, and, like Moses, placed in a
river basket to save them from a jealous king. There
was a time when I bristled at such comparisons, worried
than any seeming lack of originality on the part of
Scripture meant that it couldn’t be true. This is a
common rhetorical device of the New Atheists: point to
some creation story—like the flood narrative in the
Epic of Gilgamesh—as evidence that the sacred authors
have plagiarized their story from some earlier
civilization. It reasonably follows that if the
biblical story is lifted from somewhere else, the
version in the Bible may not be the Word of God after
all.
But Girard rejects this inference, and leans into the
similarities between biblical stories and those from
other civilizations. To Girard, the Christian story
contains a crucial difference—a difference that reveals
something “hidden since the foundation of the world.”
In the Christian telling, the ultimate scapegoat has
not wronged the civilization; the civilization has
wronged him. The victim of the madness of crowds is, as
Christ was, infinitely powerful—able to prevent his own
murder—and perfectly innocent—undeserving of the rage
and violence of the crowd. In Christ, we see our
efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a
victim for what they are: a moral failing, projected
violently upon someone else. Christ is the scapegoat
who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at
our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen
victims.
People come to truth in different ways, and I’m sure
some will find this account unsatisfying. But in 2013,
it captured so well the psychology of my generation,
especially its most privileged inhabitants. Mired in
the swamp of social media, we identified a scapegoat
and digitally pounced. We were keyboard warriors,
unloading on people via Facebook and Twitter, blind to
our own problems. We fought over jobs we didn’t
actually want while pretending we didn’t fight for them
at all. And the end result for me, at least, was that I
had lost the language of virtue. I felt more shame over
failing in a law school exam than I did about losing my
temper with my girlfriend.
That all had to change. It was time to stop
scapegoating and focus on what I could do to improve
things.
These very personal reflections on faith, conformity,
and virtue coincided with a writing project that would
eventually become a very public success: Hillbilly
Elegy, the hybrid book of memoir and social commentary
I published in 2016. I look back on earlier drafts of
the book, and realize just how much I changed from 2013
to 2015: I started the book angry, resentful of my
mother, especially, and confident in my own abilities.
I finished it a little humbled, and very unsure about
what to do to “solve” so many of our social problems.
And the answer I landed on, as unsatisfactory then as
it is now, is that you can’t actually “solve” our
social problems. The best you can hope for is to reduce
them or to blunt their effects.
I noticed during my research that many of those social
problems came from behavior for which social scientists
and policy experts had a different vocabulary. On the
right, the conversation often turned to “culture” and
“personal responsibility”—the ways in which individuals
or communities held back their own progress. And though
it seemed obvious to me that there was something
dysfunctional about some of the places in which I’d
grown up, the discourse on the right seemed a little
heartless. It failed to account for the fact that
destructive behaviors were almost always tragedies with
terrible consequences. It is one thing to wag your
finger at another person for failing to act a certain
way, but it is something else to feel the weight of the
misery that comes from those actions.
The left’s intellectuals focused much more on the
structural and external problems facing families like
mine—the difficulty in finding jobs and the lack of
funding for certain types of resources. And while I
agreed that more resources were often necessary, there
seemed to me a sense in which our most destructive
behaviors persisted—even flourished—in times of
material comfort. The economic left was often more
compassionate, but theirs was a kind of compassion—
devoid of any expectation—that reeked of giving up. A
compassion that assumes a person is disadvantaged to
the point of hopelessness is like sympathy for a zoo
animal, and I had no use for it.
And as I reflected on these competing views of the
world, and the wisdom and shortcomings of each, I felt
desperate for a worldview that understood our bad
behavior as simultaneously social and individual,
structural and moral; that recognized that we are
products of our environment; that we have a
responsibility to change that environment, but that we
are still moral beings with individual duties; one that
could speak against rising rates of divorce and
addiction, not as sanitized conclusions about their
negative social externalities, but with moral outrage.
And I realized, eventually, that I had already been
exposed to that worldview: it was my Mamaw’s
Christianity. And the name it gave for the behaviors I
had seen destroy lives and communities was “sin.” I
remembered one of my least favorite passages from
Scripture, Numbers 14:18, in a new light: “The LORD is
slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and
rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished;
he punishes the children for the sin of the parents to
the third and fourth generation.”
A decade ago, I took this as evidence of a vengeful,
irrational God. Yet who could look at the statistics on
what our early twenty-first century culture and
politics had wrought—the misery, the rising suicide
rates, the “deaths of despair” in the richest country
on earth, and doubt that the sins of parents had any
effect on their children?
And here, again, the words of Saint Augustine echoed
from a millennium and a half earlier, articulating a
truth I had felt for a long time but hadn’t spoken.
This is a passage from City of God, where Augustine
summarizes the debauchery of Rome’s ruling class:
This is our concern, that every man be able to increase
his wealth so as to supply his daily prodigalities, and
so that the powerful may subject the weak for their own
purposes. Let the poor court the rich for a living, and
that under their protection they may enjoy a sluggish
tranquillity; and let the rich abuse the poor as their
dependants, to minister to their pride. Let the people
applaud not those who protect their interests, but
those who provide them with pleasure. Let no severe
duty be commanded, no impurity forbidden. Let kings
estimate their prosperity, not by the righteousness,
but by the servility of their subjects. Let the
provinces stand loyal to the kings, not as moral
guides, but as lords of their possessions and purveyors
of their pleasures; not with a hearty reverence, but a
crooked and servile fear. Let the laws take cognizance
rather of the injury done to another man’s property,
than of that done to one’s own person. If a man be a
nuisance to his neighbor, or injure his property,
family, or person, let him be actionable; but in his
own affairs let everyone with impunity do what he will
in company with his own family, and with those who
willingly join him. Let there be a plentiful supply of
public prostitutes for every one who wishes to use
them, but specially for those who are too poor to keep
one for their private use. Let there be erected houses
of the largest and most ornate description: in these
let there be provided the most sumptuous banquets,
where every one who pleases may, by day or night, play,
drink, vomit, dissipate. Let there be everywhere heard
the rustling of dancers, the loud, immodest laughter of
the theatre; let a succession of the most cruel and the
most voluptuous pleasures maintain a perpetual
excitement. If such happiness is distasteful to any,
let him be branded as a public enemy; and if any
attempt to modify or put an end to it let him be
silenced, banished, put an end to. Let these be
reckoned the true gods, who procure for the people this
condition of things, and preserve it when once
possessed.
It was the best criticism of our modern age I’d ever
read. A society oriented entirely towards consumption
and pleasure, spurning duty and virtue. Not long after
I first read these words, my friend Oren Cass published
a book arguing that American policy makers have focused
far too much on promoting consumption as opposed to
productivity, or some other measure of wellbeing. The
reaction—criticizing Oren for daring to push policies
that might lower consumption—almost proved the
argument. “Yes,” I found myself saying, “Oren’s
preferred policies might reduce per-capita consumption.
But that’s precisely the point: our society is more
than the sum of its economic statistics. If people die
sooner in the midst of historic levels of consumption,
then perhaps our focus on consumption is misguided.”
And indeed it was this insight, more than any other,
that ultimately led not just to Christianity, but to
Catholicism. Despite my Mamaw’s unfamiliarity with the
liturgy, the Roman and Italian cultural influences, and
the foreign pope, I slowly began to see Catholicism as
the closest expression of her kind of Christanity:
obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that
virtue is formed in the context of a broader community;
sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without
treating them primarily as victims; protective of
children and families and with the things necessary to
ensure they thrive. And above all: a faith centered
around a Christ who demands perfection of us even as He
loves unconditionally and forgives easily.
It was this insight that took me from a few informal
conversations with a couple of Dominican friars to a
more serious period of study with one in particular. I
almost wish it hadn’t been so gradual—that there had
been an “aha!” moment that made me realize I just had
to become Catholic. There were some weird coincidences
that hastened my decision. One came about a year ago,
at a conference I attended with largely conservative
intellectuals. Late at night, at the hotel bar, I
questioned a conservative Catholic writer about his
criticism of the pope. (My growing view is that too
many American Catholics have failed to show proper
deference to the papacy, treating the pope as a
political figure to be criticized or praised according
to their whims.) While he admitted that some Catholics
went too far, he defended his more measured approach,
when suddenly a wine glass seemed to leap from a stable
place behind the bar and crashed on the floor in front
of us. We both stared at each other in silence for a
bit, a little startled by what we’d just seen, before
ending our conversation abruptly and excusing ourselves
to turn in for the night.
Another took place in Washington, D.C., during a
particularly grueling week of travel. I hadn’t seen my
family in a few days, and hadn’t even had the time to
call my toddler on the phone. In moments like this, I
sometimes listen to a beautiful setting of of a psalm
performed during Pope Francis’s visit to Georgia in
2016 by an Orthodox choir. I listened to it on the
train from New York to Washington, where I knew a
Dominican friar whom I decided to ask to coffee. He
invited me to visit his community, where I heard the
friars chanting, apparently, the same psalm. Now, I
know it’s easy to make the skeptic’s case: J.D. watched
a video of a priest chanting a Bible verse, and then he
emailed a member of a religious order who later chanted
the same thing. But to quote Samuel L. Jackson from
Pulp Fiction: “You’re judging this shit the wrong way.
I mean, it could be that God stopped the bullets, or He
changed Coke to Pepsi, He found my f—g car keys. You
don’t judge shit like this based on merit. Now, whether
or not what we experienced was an ‘according to Hoyle’
miracle is insignificant. What is significant is that I
felt the touch of God.”
So yes, during little moments over the last few years,
I’ve felt the touch of God. As much as it would make
for a better story, I cannot say that any of these
things made me stand up and say, “It’s time to
convert.” The move was more incremental. I became
convinced that Mamaw would accept Catholic theology
even if its cultural trappings made her feel uneasy.
There were the words of Saint Augustine and Girard and
the example of my Uncle Dan, who married into our
family but demonstrated Christian virtue more
thoroughly than any person I’d met. There were good
friends who made me see that I didn’t need to abandon
my reason before I approached the altar. I came
eventually to believe that the teachings of the
Catholic Church were true, but it happened slowly and
unevenly.
There were things that made it harder, even after I’d
made up my mind. The sexual abuse crisis made me wonder
whether joining the Church meant subjecting my child to
an institution that cared more for its own reputation
than the protection of its members. Working through
these feelings delayed my conversion for at least a few
months. There was a concern that it would be unfair to
my wife: she hadn’t married a Catholic, and I felt like
I was throwing her into it. But from the beginning, she
supported my decision, so I can’t blame the delay on
her.
I was received into the Catholic Church on a beautiful
day in mid-August, in a private ceremony not far from
my house. I woke up on the day of my reception a little
apprehensive, worried that I was making a big mistake.
For all of my doubts about how Mamaw might have
reacted, it was one of her favorite phrases that I
heard, in her voice, ringing in my ears that morning:
“Time to shit or get off the pot.”
I was baptized, and I received my first Communion. I
found it all very beautiful, though I should admit that
I still felt uneasy about something so far removed from
my youthful churchgoing experiences. Much of my family
came to support me. My two-year-old son—one of my
favorite parts about the Church is that it encourages
parents to bring their kids—chomped on a lot of
Goldfish crackers. At the end of it, the Dominican
friars who welcomed me hosted my friends and family for
coffee and doughnuts.
I try to keep a little humility about how little I
know, and how inadequate a Christian I really am. I am
most comfortable engaging with people around ideas. If
you can’t read something and debate it, I’ve always
been a little less interested. But the Church isn’t
just about ideas and Saint Augustine, whom I chose as
my patron. It’s about the heart, as well, and the
community of believers. It’s about going to Mass and
receiving the Sacraments, even when it’s difficult or
awkward to do so. It’s about so many things that I’m
ignorant of, and the process of becoming less ignorant
over time.
My wife has said that the business of converting to
Catholicism—studying and thinking about it—was “good
for you.” And I came, eventually, to see that she was
right, at least in some cosmic sense. I realized that
there was a part of me—the best part—that took its cues
from Catholicism. It was the part of me that demanded
that I treat my son with patience, and made me feel
terrible when I failed. That demanded that I moderate
my temper with everyone, but especially my family. That
demanded that I care more about how I rated as a
husband and father than as an income earner. That
demanded that I sacrifice professional prestige for the
interests of family. That demanded that I let go of
grudges, and forgive even those who wronged me. As
Saint Paul says in his Epistle to the Phillipians:
“Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true,
whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are
just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are
lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there
be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on
these things.” It was the Catholic part of my heart and
mind that demanded that I think on the things that
actually mattered. And if I wanted that part of me to
be nurtured and to grow, I needed to do more than read
the occasional book of theology or reflect on my own
shortcomings. I needed to pray more, to participate in
the sacramental life of the Church, to confess and to
repent publicly, no matter how awkward that might be.
And I needed grace. I needed, in other words, to become
Catholic, not merely to think about it.
This essay appeared in the Easter 2020 issue of The
Lamp.
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