Newt and I recently attended the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where we heard Ohio Senator J.D. Vance accept the Republican nomination for Vice President on July 17th. And he said,“Tonight, my friends, is a night of hope. A night to celebrate what America once was, and, by God's grace, what America can soon become again.”
In his acceptance speech, before thousands at Milwaukee's Fiserv Forum and millions watching from home, Vance shared his own experiences, articulated the values he lives by and vowed to fight for Americans who have been overlooked, forgotten or ignored. (Related article: Gabriel Nadales: Harris could help unite the country if she promises to drop charges against Trump)
Vance spoke of being raised by his Christian grandmother, “Mamaw,” in Middletown, Ohio, “a small town where people spoke their minds, built things with their hands, and loved God, family, community and country with all their hearts.”
While Vance was raised surrounded by Christian beliefs and values in his youth (he had a highly respected Catholic uncle), he did not join the organized church until his teenage years.
As a young man, Vance attended a large Pentecostal church after being reunited with his biological father. “I'm not sure whether I liked the structure of the church or whether I just wanted to share something important to my father—probably both—but I became a devout convert,” he wrote in his best-selling memoir.Hillbilly Elegy.”
But Vance's faith waned throughout his adolescence, as he wrote in a 7,000-word essay for the magazine Ramp:How I joined the ResistanceAfter completing his service in the Marines and attending Ohio State University, Vance abandoned his faith and claimed to be an atheist.
During his college years, Vance was surrounded by secularism and was immersed in a culture that viewed faith as “provincial and foolish at best, and evil at worst.” He became swept up in the “madness of the crowd” and abandoned his faith.
“Much of my new atheism is He wrote“It came down to a desire for social acceptance among America's elite.”
Vance acknowledged at the time that he had adopted a worldview tinged with arrogance, but doubts about his newfound understanding persisted throughout his undergraduate years and later law school.
For Vance, [his] “Proverbial Armor” comes from St. Augustine's Meditations, which he read while at Yale Law School, in which he reflects on “the twin aspirations of success and character and how they have (and have not) collided.”
This passage from St. Augustine criticizes man's arrogant attempt to make the Bible conform to his own opinions, when man's aim should be to conform his own opinions to the truth of the Bible.
Augustine gave Vance “a very intellectual way of understanding the Christian faith,” but he is a Christian venture capitalist. Peter Thiel Vance was inspired to reconsider what he was trying to achieve and learn more about the Christian faith, after which French philosopher René Girard's work The Scapegoat Theory and What it Reveals about Christianity prompted Vance to “rethink Christianity”. [his] faith.”
After pondering faith and virtue, Vance sought out “a worldview that would make sense of our bad behavior” and ultimately realized he had “already been exposed to that worldview: Mamaw's Christianity.”
In an essay for The Lamp, Vance writes that St. Augustine wrote about Roman debauchery:City of GodHe studied books by policy analyst Oren Cass, who criticized the cult of consumerism, and learned from Dominican friars, all of which ultimately led him to decide to become Catholic.
Vance wrote about his conversion: “I realized that there was a part of me that was inspired by Catholicism, the best part of me. … It was the Catholic part of my heart and mind that challenged me to think about the things that really mattered. … And I needed grace; in other words, I needed to be Catholic, not just think.”
J.D. Vance entered the Catholic Church in August 2019. His lifelong path to Catholicism has been an inspiring and motivating journey of faith.
Ambassador Calista L. Gingrich Gingrich 360a multimedia production and consulting company based in Arlington, Virginia. She is a former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See.
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