The history of Western Christianity is, largely, a history of conversion. St. Augustine, we may remember, was an atheist rhetorician and pagan before he turned to Christianity. G.K. Chesterton was a dandified atheist, a child of post enlightenment Britain. Orestes Brownson, whom many consider to be an American John Henry Newman, a persuasive Christian apologist, was also an atheist. Brownson’s road to Rome was a winding affair: first atheist, then transcendentalist, then Catholic, after which he found himself shorn of friends and enemies.
But he was not alone for long.
J.D. Vance’s spiritual memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, may be viewed as a modern take on Augustine’s
autobiography, The Confessions of St.
Augustine, perhaps the most honest spiritual biography in the Western canon
of Christian apologetics. The book is unflinchingly honest because its author,
Augustine, is the book’s central villain. We remember the plaint, almost a
prayer, that is unremittingly repeated throughout the book: Augustine prays to
be received into the Christian fold – “but not yet”; not yet while the joys of
a pagan eroticism lie beseechingly before him.
Hillbilly Elegy is
not a confession in the manner of Augustine, but it does pass the George
Bernard Shaw test of an authentic biography. Shaw said that the only biography of Napoleon
one should accept as authentic would be one written by his butler.
Hillbilly Elegy is
an unvarnished and honest account of Vance’s life as seen from inside and
outside the hillbilly culture. And just as Augustine’s spiritual life was saved
by his mother, a convert to Christianity, so Vance’s spiritual life was saved
by the hard-edged virtues of his grandmother and grandfather.
The book is, among other things, a painfully honest
assessment of the ravages of poverty and neglect.
When I read recently a brief piece in the New York Times, “How J.D. Vance found his path to Catholic
Church,” my first thought was – here is that rarest of all things, an
honest appreciation of Vance’s journey, fully explored in his book, from what
Jacques Maritain might have called “practical atheism” into the glowing heart
of Christianity.
“It is still bad taste to be an avowed atheist,” G. K.
Chesterton writes in his book Heretics,
“but now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian.”
Is there anything new under the secularist sun?
In What I Saw in
America “Wells and the World State,” Chesterton writes, “Progress is
Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always
perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based
on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.”
The piece in the Times is not a hit-piece, and that itself is miraculous, because a good
chunk of modern gotcha journalism is now in hot pursuit of Vance.
The author of the Times piece, Elizabeth Diaz, writes,
“Vance’s turn to Catholicism was tied to his maturation: graduating from Yale
Law School, falling in love and marrying his classmate Usha Chilukuri, becoming
a father and figuring out his professional aspirations.
“He began to assess the elite academic world around him” and
found it a spiritual wasteland.
Upon graduating from Yale, Vance wrote in a 2021 podcast, “I
would be judged on did I get a Supreme Court clerkship, did I work at a fancy
bank or consulting or law firm. I just realized to myself, this is an
incredibly hollow and even gross way to think about character and virtue.”
Vance’s conversion was quiet and modest. He is not
interested in pulling the secular practical atheist world into his spiritual
cloister.
Preeminently, Vance is a hillbilly. That is to say, he is
skeptical of the notion that virtue can survive in the absence of character.
And the character of the hillbilly is the same as that of the contrarian.
It is always worthwhile to take seriously Chesterton’s view
of the atheist – a man called to a great feast who rejects a table loaded with
nourishing food and who contents himself by hiding in a dark corner catching
and eating flies.
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