Since becoming vice president, J. D. Vance has been a scandalous presence in these pages. It makes sense: While President Trump seems fairly uninterested in religion even at his most performative, Vance actually speaks the language of the faithful. He is outspoken about his spirituality and about the streams that nourish it. From his association with Catholic integralism to his anti-immigrant scapegoating, Vance has come to embody everything that is wrong with the religious right. Trump’s hypocrisy feels banal by now, but Vance’s inspires a moral urgency that’s been palpable ever since he became 47’s running mate. It has felt very important—it is very important—to point out how Vance is wrong.
The strange force of this feeling is almost imperceptible until you find yourself exhausted by it. I think Valerie Weaver-Zercher may have saved my sanity when she wrote, “Even now this essay grows scales and fangs." Writing this one, that same sentiment sent me back to the drawing board at least ten times. While Weaver-Zercher spoke of the snake of despair, my situation was closer to what she called “birds caught in the snare of last week.” Or maybe, a case of tripping over my own shadow.
The literary critic and anthropologist René Girard used this image to describe tripping over the skandalon—a good biblical word meaning “trap,” “snare,” or “stumbling block.” To be scandalized means I feel so outraged, so frustrated, that my feelings take on a “repetitive and addictive dimension,” as Girard writes in his most theological book, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. I wander labyrinths of the same thoughts and words without getting anywhere. Before I know it, I’m finding my whole identity in this cycle, scouring it for insights that will never come.
