I was expecting a juicy exposé of 2019 Catholic convert J. D. Vance's radicalism in Paul Elie's "J. D. Vance's Radical Religion" for The New Yorker, here, but all you get is disappointment and dark insinuation.
If you are hoping to find out if Vance fasts for Lent, makes pilgrimage to Our Lady of Guadalupe, or goes to daily Latin Mass, you won't.
It's mostly an essay specializing in ideological assumptions and guilt by association, written from the sneering point of view of the illiberal ethos which can't believe there is still a religion in America which is thoroughly pro-life in its commitment to the unborn and the elderly, and committed to the sanctity of marriage between men and women.
For example, Paul Elie insinuates that Vance is a "conservative Catholic" just like Supreme Court justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, but never tells us exactly how. Therefore we should be afraid of a coming "top-down ordering of society . . . enshrined through regime change" if Vance advances to the executive branch and cooperates with this Supreme Court cabal.
We're not told what kind of Catholics are justices Roberts and Gorsuch, either, not to mention Sotomayor, or how the other four form a conspiracy against the American nation.
For Paul Elie, what it seems to come down to is that Vance is too buddy buddy with people like Patrick Deneen, whom he asserts to be anti-democratic without evidence:
In 2023, Vance took part in a discussion at the
Catholic University of America with the Notre Dame political scientist
Patrick Deneen, an advocate of “post-liberalism,” which, he explains in
his books “Why Liberalism Failed” and “Regime Change,”
is the view that liberalism has become an “invasive progressive
tyranny” and so must be replaced by “a conservatism that conserves.”
Vance greeted Deneen with a bear hug; during the discussion, Politico reported,
Vance “identified himself as a member of the ‘postliberal right’ and
said that he views his role in Congress as ‘explicitly anti-regime.’ ” ...
For Deneen, post-liberalism involves elevating “leaders who are part of
the elite but see themselves as ‘class traitors’ ready to act as
‘stewards and caretakers of the common good’ ”—and to enact their views
on abortion, marriage and divorce, euthanasia, the free exercise of
religion, and other issues without the constraints of legal precedent or
the democratic process. Evidently, Vance fits the bill. After learning
of Trump’s choice of running mate, Deneen, in a statement, called Vance
“a man of deep personal faith and integrity, a devoted family man, a
generous friend, and a genuine patriot.”
I'm not a fan of the Catholic integralists, nor of the broad influence of Catholicism at the expense of the nation's historic conservative Protestant character either, but I'm not particularly afraid of them, just as I am not afraid of the Christian nationalists.
Mostly they are amusingly grandiose.
These groups represent a reaction to illiberalism, which is what this is really all about. The radicals are the so-called liberals who like to read Paul Elie and subscribe to The New Yorker, who want to suppress speech and suppress religion and its influence and suppress everything about this country's past. This country is about freedom, and freedom is really messy, which is why ideologues of the left and right have so, so much to say against it.
Freedom really ticks them off.
I'm thoroughly confident that these idealists can blather on all they want and that the American people are still not going to submit to their religious tests for citizenship on the one hand, let alone to their pope on the other.
The country is just too damn LGBT for that.
