Catholic cosplay

JD Vance, kiss my stole

There has been some preliminary bitchery about the forthcoming book by JD Vance, “COMMUNION: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” and it’s not about the publisher’s insistence that the first word be rendered all-caps like the name of a programming language, but rather that the church pictured on the dust jacket is a Methodist church rather than a Catholic one, which some people find risible because the whole selling point of the thing is that the Vice President, in youth an evangelical and later unchurched, became a Catholic.

The publisher, HarperCollins, rather lamely rejoins that they chose the church, Mt. Zion United Methodist, because it “comes from the part of the country where Vice President Vance grew up.” (The Columbus Dispatch mischievously adds that “Vance was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio, around 370 miles from Mt. Zion UMC.”)

That doesn’t seem like a big deal to me — or at least not the big deal.

I’m not sure why HarperCollins didn’t just associate the imagery with Vance’s crypto-ecumenical claim in their press release that by “sharing my journey I might be helpful to others — Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise — who are seeking reconciliation with God.” No one is going to buy the book to learn by what intellectual process this shallow, amoral grifter allegedly changed faiths. For one thing I suspect most of the casual readers who fell for Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy scam have since seen him in action as Trump’s mini-me, and figured out that his former paen to those rural pillheads he has since run like hell away from was bullshit, and are now twice shy.

No, the people who will be interested, besides the centrist columnists who never catch on that they’re being played by guys like Vance, will be a small set of Catholic converts who have already hooked up with the Whore of Babylon, not because they’ve had or are even capable of a sincere conversion experience, but because it’s a trend among a certain sort of rightwinger for whom the worst elements of Catholicism are actually the come-on.

I speak as a cradle Catholic who, though long separated from the RCC, was young enough and long enough steeped in the Faith that even after all this time I can sniff at twenty paces a Proddy poser crawling up under the robes of the Mother Church and be disgusted by the spectacle.

Take Rod Dreher, the religion tourist who stopped briefly at Catholicism before going Eastern Orthodox, because, he said at the time, he preferred the Easterners’ “seriousness about sin... the long liturgies, the frequent prayers, the intense fasts... Men love a challenge, and that’s exactly what Orthodoxy gives them.” He also professed to be disgusted by the child-fucking among the Catholic priests. Yet, years later, he happily escorted his buddy Vance into the RCC.

Why? Dreher didn’t then say, allowing Vance to spew his own guff instead (“Augustine gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way”). But I suspect it was because he thought of Catholicism, like EO, as a hardcore outfit. Think of the Jesuits (by whom I was educated), God’s Hard Men; think of the thick theology of the Doctors of the Church. Think of Latin — that’s really hard! For guys with the obvious masculinity anxieties of Dreher and Vance, that’s cathnip.

Joshua Tait makes a good point about the conservatives who turn tradcath: “Catholicism sits contrary to many aspects of modernity. To the extent that conservatism is an anti-modern project, Catholicism seems to be an appealing alternative.” I can imagine rightwingers of a certain temperament hanging out with the megachurch crowd and thinking it awfully tacky and insubstantial, and wanting to go Goth. Their plastic hearts just want to feel something.

And so we get the Dimes Square dipshits, the Candace Owenses and Russell Brands, and a bunch of other converts who seem not to have been unhorsed like Saul of Tarsus but to have made a career or fashion choice, like the Church is a kind of cigar bar for misogynist reactionaries.

For me the Church was something else.

I grew up in a working-class suburb in the North End of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Most of the fathers worked in factories, light industry, and low-end clerical, most of the mothers stayed home, and everyone was Catholic. The kids went to Catholic schools even if their parents didn’t have much money; there was always a way. On First Fridays the kids would go to Mass before school, and afterwards we marched to our classrooms where quarter-pint cartons of milk and warm buttered toast in wax paper were waiting for us at our desks.

What was our theology? The Baltimore Catechism, and what the priests said (and, if you were a kid, what the nuns said). There were rules, and sacraments, as well as all the guilt and confusion that the rest of you have heard about in the modern literature of the initiates, which is what finally drove me out.

But there was underneath it a homey kind of feeling. I recall being encouraged to pray at school for the souls in purgatory and, when we had said enough prayers, to move paper slips from one envelope stuck to a bulletin board to another higher up, signifying a soul lifted to heaven. I can’t recall how many prayers it took, nor whether anyone actually told us that meeting the quota automatically bought their entry to heaven (and I doubt that was doctrine).

This sort of thing was, as Dreher wrote in his stupid essay, rather “loosey-goosey” — or, as I would say, designed for human beings of no intellectual pretension who had inherited a religious order and would not benefit, spiritually or otherwise, from being made to jump though too many hoops to meet its requirements.

And when we did have to jump through hoops, we were shown, with white suits and celebratory parties, that our effort had been appreciated. We were taught along with the prayers and minor rigors some notions of duty and humility which I do not think went amiss. We were told to be servants and then soldiers of Christ, but not His slaves nor His cannon fodder. “God made us to show forth His goodness,” we were told, “and to share with us His everlasting happiness in heaven.” You could take that as the carrot meant to ease the effect of the stick, and might seek another way to explain the world and why you were in it. But compared to some others, that one wasn’t so bad.

That kind of Catholic is still out there, and I’m sure the Chesterton-quoting converts find them sloppy and ignorant. But those O.G. Catholics were there before them, and I expect that, no matter how many of the Spanish-surnamed ones Vance and his boss manage to deport, they will be there long after.