J.D. Vance Used to Be an Atheist. What He Believes Now Is Telling
He’s not an evangelical Christian. He’s a Catholic.
His enthusiasm for a particular and relatively obscure kind of contemporary Catholic political thought shows up in his politics—his longing for Americans to build robust nuclear families, his comments about banning porn, his scorn for childless cat ladies. It’s tempting to see these stances as old ones from the Christian right, familiar to anyone who has followed the evolution of the GOP in the past couple of decades, but Vance’s past comments indicate that they’re motivated by something newer, and more radical, than that.
As a young man, he identified for a while as an atheist. Then, as he recounted in a 2020 essay about his conversion for the Catholic magazine the Lamp, he reconnected with Christianity when he was searching for greater meaning in his life during law school. He began to feel drawn to Catholicism in particular after reading up on Catholic moral philosophers and discussing theology with conservative Dominican friars he knew.
He had come to Catholicism in part because of the writings of Saint Augustine. “Augustine gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way,” Vance said. “As someone who spent a lot of his life buying into the lie that you had to be stupid to be a Christian, Augustine really demonstrated in a moving way that that’s not true.”
In the past few weeks, Vance has come under fire for resurfaced comments attacking “childless cat ladies” as “miserable” and bad for society; claiming that childless people tend to be “deranged” and “psychotic”; and proposing giving extra voting power to parents with young children.
These anti-modern comments fit with a certain kind of worldview that prizes a traditional and family-oriented society above individual liberties—and even democracy.
https://slate.com/life/2024/08/jd-vance-...igion.html
He’s not an evangelical Christian. He’s a Catholic.
His enthusiasm for a particular and relatively obscure kind of contemporary Catholic political thought shows up in his politics—his longing for Americans to build robust nuclear families, his comments about banning porn, his scorn for childless cat ladies. It’s tempting to see these stances as old ones from the Christian right, familiar to anyone who has followed the evolution of the GOP in the past couple of decades, but Vance’s past comments indicate that they’re motivated by something newer, and more radical, than that.
As a young man, he identified for a while as an atheist. Then, as he recounted in a 2020 essay about his conversion for the Catholic magazine the Lamp, he reconnected with Christianity when he was searching for greater meaning in his life during law school. He began to feel drawn to Catholicism in particular after reading up on Catholic moral philosophers and discussing theology with conservative Dominican friars he knew.
He had come to Catholicism in part because of the writings of Saint Augustine. “Augustine gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way,” Vance said. “As someone who spent a lot of his life buying into the lie that you had to be stupid to be a Christian, Augustine really demonstrated in a moving way that that’s not true.”
In the past few weeks, Vance has come under fire for resurfaced comments attacking “childless cat ladies” as “miserable” and bad for society; claiming that childless people tend to be “deranged” and “psychotic”; and proposing giving extra voting power to parents with young children.
These anti-modern comments fit with a certain kind of worldview that prizes a traditional and family-oriented society above individual liberties—and even democracy.
https://slate.com/life/2024/08/jd-vance-...igion.html
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
