Sympathy for the Devil

Feeling empathy for J.D. Vance this morning has left me feeling a little freaked out.

The New York Times website today posted a profile of how he converted to conservative Catholicism in his mid-30's. It's a religious world-view I couldn't be much more at odds with. I've rubbed shoulders with enough of its proponents over the years--eager young intellectuals in grad school convinced that Thomas Aquinas more or less said it all, and what he didn't say can be extrapolated from his writings--to know just how dangerously repressive and exclusionary a world view it is. I've listened to the juggernauts of Catholic Truth steam rolling over the lived experience of others in conversation because, well, Correct Faith is Correct Faith, everyone else's feelings and experiences be damned. More or less literally.

But I can also relate to the younger Vance's longing for certainty in reaction to the chaotic upbringing he described in his memoir. I can understand the pull of an ancient faith and its dramatic rituals, for someone who's experienced precious little stability in his previous life, and who desperately craves solid ground on which to stand. God knows, I've been there myself, before my karma ran over my dogma.

It can take decades to wear the inhuman edges off some people's pivotal religious experiences. If it ever happens at all. As the gifted comic novelist Stephen McCauley quips in Alternatives to Sex, "I'm sure there's a place for religious conviction, but on the whole, freedom of religion pales in importance next to freedom from it." 

Somewhere inside the carapace of Vance's militant, masculinist version of virtue, of his hostility and inflammatory, antifeminist, homophobic and transphobic rhetoric, there's a desire to belong, to find meaning in life, to connect to something larger and more authentic than the self-absorbed preoccupations of American materialism. And then somewhere along the way, that desire took a hateful wrong turn.

I don't know exactly what I'm feeling toward Vance. Not forgiveness, exactly, for the choice he made to sell his soul to the narcissistic huckster, serial abuser, and aspiring dictator to whom he is now running mate. But awareness of something at the core of his life that isn't erased by the shitty choices he's making.

Maybe it's my own edges that are getting worn down.