I was born in Ohio in 1957. I want to be clear about that up front, the way you’d be clear about a preexisting condition before signing anything. Born there, raised there, left at eighteen for the Air Force and came back in 1989 with two daughters and the specific kind of optimism that only looks like stupidity in retrospect. I know what the place smells like in February. I know what Dayton looked like when the GM Moraine assembly plant shuttered in 2008, and then Delco-Moraine, and then Delphi Automotive—each one taking another chunk of the floor out. I have relatives who left and came back, relatives who left and never came back, and relatives who couldn’t leave at all, which is a distinction Ohio teaches you early.

From 1965 to 1968, my family lived in a very small town called Upper Sandusky, which sits below Sandusky. That alone tells you something about Ohio nomenclature. The towns make no sense on a map and perfect sense in the way places get named—declared once and then lived with, no questions asked. That was Ohio to me: things were just arranged in a way that expected your acceptance. Upper Sandusky had a population of approximately five thousand. We went to school and church at St. Peter’s. My brother Bob and I were altar boys. We learned the Mass in Latin before we understood a word of it, trusting that if we got the rhythm right, the rest would follow. I wanted to be a priest, seriously, not a cop or a fireman, because a priest stood closest to whatever mystery was running underneath it all. Once I talked a priest into letting me take home the big candle that burns continuously through Easter week. The Paschal Candle. I carried it home like I’d been entrusted with the Holy Grail. I lit it in my bedroom, and for about thirty seconds it felt like I understood the mystery of faith. I was drifting off to sleep when the door flew open and in bolted my old man. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. I thought the belt was next. But there was nothing, just a funny look and a shake of the head. The candle flame went out.

Vance came to the same Church at thirty-five, with a Yale law degree and a publicist, and knew exactly what he needed it to do. So when James David Vance—the man, the myth, the podcast-ready Appalachian—started selling the place back to the world at a premium, I noticed. You notice when someone picks your pocket. You notice even faster when they turn around and sell the wallet as folk art.

Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio. I lived just twenty miles up the highway in Kettering, and nobody there ever thought they were living in Appalachia. Middletown is a broke suburb on the way from Dayton to Cincinnati: flat, industrial, I-75 corridor, nothing romantic about it. The only hillbillies we knew lived across the Ohio River in Kentucky or West Virginia. Vance needed Appalachia—he needed the hills and the hollows and the literary pedigree, because a broke suburb doesn’t sell books. It doesn’t get you national media attention. So, he rebranded. Middletown became Appalachia, and a Yale lawyer became a griot of the forgotten people. Nobody in New York knew enough to laugh.

Then Vance found God, a story he tells in his new book, Communion. He converted to Catholicism in 2019, guided by the Peter Thiel money and J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing and perhaps the intuition that some affiliation with institutional religion would help his political career. Fine. Conversions happen. The road to Damascus is a public road, and anyone can take it. But I couldn’t help noticing that Vance’s religion arrived already preloaded with enemies, and that it was suspiciously painless. There was no dark night of the soul on the public record, no documented wrestling with the harder doctrines, no reported period of sitting in the back pew feeling like a fraud. Vance’s conversion was a narrative event—another chapter in the Memoir That Would Not End, and it landed with the satisfying click of a final act. The lost son of Middletown, Ohio, finds truth. Cue the Senate run, then the vice presidency. The narrative arc of Vance’s redemption is not long, and it bends toward power.

I’m not saying the man’s soul is empty; after all, I can’t peer into it. I am saying his theology is oddly convenient. The Church has a preferential option for the poor. That isn’t a bumper sticker. It’s a formal doctrinal position, centuries old, inconvenient as gout, demanding as a landlord. It means, among other things, that the suffering of the powerless isn’t just a backdrop for a memoir. It means the economy is a moral matter. It means a living wage is not a socialist plot but a human right. Catholic social teaching insists on this point so often and explicitly that you have to work hard to miss it. Vance works hard to miss it.

A man who wrote a book about the economic abandonment of working-class Ohio is now comfortably ensconced in a movement that calls their suffering a character problem. The people in Hillbilly Elegy are still there, clocking in at the distribution center, managing the second job, watching the fentanyl problem get worse, not better. Meanwhile, Vance has developed into the kind of Catholic who talks about “civilization” a lot. “Civilization” meaning a specific civilization with a specific arrangement of power and a specific God who has, upon examination, very few demands that inconvenience the rich and powerful. This isn’t Catholicism as I knew it; it’s a Catholicism stripped for parts and rebuilt as an ideology. The mystery is flattened, the ritual becomes signal, and the sacred language turns into a password. 

Hunter S. Thompson once wrote of Richard Nixon that he had “the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad.” I kept that sentence in mind driving through the remnants of Kenton, Ohio. My birthplace used to have a purpose and now only has a Walgreens. I wondered what to call a man who mined a place for its suffering, packaged the suffering beautifully, sold it to the people who’d never smelled February in Youngstown, then turned around and endorsed every policy position that guarantees the suffering will continue. You could call him a huckster. You could call him a supplier.

The Beatitudes, which the Catholic Church considers the center of the Gospel, contain specific instructions about the poor and the meek and the merciful. They say nothing about “winning.” They say nothing about borders as civilization-defense. They say nothing about enemies lists, which Vance’s movement runs on the way other organizations run on quarterly earnings reports. Christ in the Beatitudes sounds nothing like the God Vance celebrates in public. The Christ of the Beatitudes would be deeply unwelcome at a MAGA rally and would probably be carried out on a stretcher. But Vance found a God who endorses the rally. That requires work. It requires selecting from the doctrinal menu with a large but narrowly focused appetite.

The National Catholic Reporter called out Vance’s cafeteria Catholicism in January 2026, when he responded to a fatal shooting involving a federal agent with what NCR’s editor described as “gaslighting and agitation,” contradicting the Gospel message of human dignity. Vance loads his cafeteria tray with anti-abortion absolutism and immigration apocalypticism and the ambient suggestion that cruelty toward the right targets is a form of Christian witness. What he leaves behind is everything that costs you something. The faith is proven, the Church teaches, by what it costs you. Vance’s version costs him nothing. It rewards him with everything. That’s not a religion. That’s a brand strategy that uses genuflection and holy water.

I came back to Ohio with my family in 1989. I watched what happened to those towns across the nineties the way you watch a relative get sick and not get better. I took my daughters to places my parents had taken me, and I watched the places become memories while we stood in them. London, Ohio, where my parents grew up, is the ghost of a town. The small towns fell like dominoes. This is the actual experience of the actual state that Vance turned into his personal Book of Job, in which he is somehow both Job and God—and the human suffering is always in the past tense, safely bound between covers, unable to contradict him.

Many of the people from the book are still around, somewhere in Ohio. Their faith—and many of them have it—is real and unperformed. It asks something of them daily. It does not come preloaded with enemies. Their God shows up at the food bank and doesn’t take notes for the memoir. Vance took their suffering and turned it into a ladder. He took their faith and turned it into a costume. He took the cross, a symbol of sacrifice, and mounted it on the wall of a movement built entirely around avoiding sacrifice—around making others bear the cost, around the sanctification of wealth and power. Ohio knows this. Ohio has known hucksters before. The state has a long memory for men who climb the ladder and then kick it down after them. The people he climbed over are still down there. And the convenient God he found right on schedule doesn’t seem peculiarly troubled by any of it. Mine is.

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