Vice is no virtue
January 29, 2025
Bolting Rough-legged Hawk (January 2025)
Why you wouldn’t want your children to become JD Vance
If you’re a person, a family, a community or a nation that stumbles into a dark maelstrom, an answer to your hopes and prayers can be a guiding source of light. That’s why millions of us were so inspired by the homily that Episcopalian Bishop Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde gave voice to early last week. In the procession of inaugural events, she delivered it to an assemblage in the National Cathedral that included President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and their entourage. The force of it was so powerful I thought it important to share all of if, which I did in this space, last week.
Much of what she said is self-evident to all people of good heart and conscience, and especially people who fashion themselves as people of faith. She carefully raised the question of whether unity was possible in a nation so divided in its politics. Here’s how she put it:
“I hope we care [about unity] because the culture of contempt that has become normalized in this country threatens to destroy us. We are all bombarded daily with messages from what sociologists now call the outrage industrial complex. Some of that driven by external forces whose interests are furthered by a polarized America. Contempt fuels political campaigns and social media and many profit from that, but it's a worrisome and it's a dangerous way to lead a country. I am a person of faith surrounded by people of faith and with God's help I believe that unity in this country is possible, not perfectly for we are imperfect people and an imperfect union, but sufficient enough to keep us all believing in and working to realize the ideals of the United States of America. Ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence with its assertion of innate human equality and dignity. And we are right to pray for God's help as we seek unity, for we need God's help. But only if we ourselves are willing to tend to the foundations upon which unity depends.”
She closed by asking President Trump directly to “have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” in which she included “gay, lesbian, and transgender children” and immigrants “who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals.”
Inevitably, press accounts and sound clips would condense her sermon to the 269 words she directed specifically to the incoming president. It was also inevitable—given how so many leaders of American Christian fundamentalist/evangelical congregations have whole-heartedly embraced Trump as a political messiah—there would be blowback. And there was, much of which I would describe as reactionary, evangelical ‘bitch-slapping’—including crude displays of grievance and dominance. It was as though they were trying to vindicate her diagnosis of a “culture of contempt” and an “outrage industrial complex” by putting it on display.
One of the first and most prominent, was the Reverend Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham (who died in 2018) the most prominent of American evangelical preachers, famous for his successive relationships and efforts to minister to Christian presidents of both parties.
One of the restraints that Rev. Budde placed upon herself is she said nothing about Donald Trump’s criminal and civil convictions (including fraud and sexual assault) , nor his well-documented lies.
Interesting, though, that Franklin Graham would bring up the subject of honesty as he ripped on Bishop Budde, accusing her of lying about Trump:
“Trump stands with truth,” Franklin Graham said in a televised interview with Newsmax, “As president, if Trump tells you something, he’s going to do it. You know, the media tried to make him out as a liar. He not a liar. He doesn’t wake up in the morning and think, ‘I’ll see how many lies I could tell today.’ No, he may get some wrong information from a staffer, he may get some facts twisted up sometimes but he’s not purposely out there lying or misleading people. But this lady is. She’s misleading people, and she was wrong.”
We should thank Rev. Graham for this.
No doubt part of Trump’s success (amply demonstrated in the past week) is that he is a veritable F5 tornado of chaos and “bullshit” (to quote from his former attorney general Bill Barr) who rumbles across the American landscape, tossing barns and trailer homes toward god above, apparently as some sort of satanic trolling.
But the reason we should thank Rev. Graham is his intemperate reaction to Rev. Budde is a signature plank in Trump’s political success—his ability to simultaneously galvanize and corrupt white evangelical Christians like Rev. Graham. These supposed prophets of virtue clearly understand Trump is not virtuous, but are compelled to defend and promote him as though he is. This because he’s been so successful and triumphal in castigating what the movement perceives as its demonic opposition.
The religious right is not the sum of the Trump movement, but it’s arguably the most crucial pillar of Trump’s support, in large part because it’s not reality-based, but faith-based. And it cuts both ways. American Christian evangelicals believe Trump and Trumpism is vital to restoring virtue in our culture. Trump believes that so-called White Christian Nationalism and conservative Catholics were crucial to his election prospects. It’s a potent transaction, though not a deal Jesus would fashion or abide. But it’s too late for that now.
That brings me to the subject of virtue and J.D. Vance, Why? Because Christianity is meaningless without virtue, and J.D. Vance offers us an uncluttered glimpse of what a void of virtue looks and sounds like.
Given the context of the January 6, 2021 crimes, the fact that millions have watched the truly shocking videos of rage and desecration, it stills seems surreal. And yet the instincts of contemporary journalism—the ingrained osmotic practice of trying to balance different perspectives even when one is vile and delusional—can lead one to think we’re all watching a volleyball match of sorts. A wider view would reveal the volleyball match is aboard the Titanic, and the ship is headed toward an authoritarian iceberg that can sink us.
The ancient proverb the fish rots from the head down (broadly construed as how a corruption of leadership infects the movement or organization below) applies to Vance. His most visible role—first as candidate for vice president and now as the elected version— has been to shamelessly defend Trump in mainstream media circles that Trump typically bypasses on his way to Sean Hannity and other friendly inquisitors at Fox News and other unabashedly pro-Trump media venues.
To audition for vice president, Vance had to vacate blistering criticisms he’d leveled at Trump privately and publicly—positing to a friend that Trump might be “America’s Hitler,” and writing a memorable article for The Atlantic, entitled Opioid of the Masses, in which he excoriated Trump and the Trump movement. When he opted to go from writer to politician, Vance decided to run for the Senate as a Republican. He recanted his criticism of Trump in order to secure his endorsement. Vance lamely explained that it was Trump’s growing popularity with Republican voters that led him to change his views, but this was just verification that it was his ambition, not his conscience, that persuaded him to change his mind.
As many would have noticed last September, this all blew up in his face when he and Trump latched onto the completely bogus story that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were capturing their neighbors pets and eating them. Again, here’s what Ohio’s Republican Mayor, Michael Dewine wrote in the New York Times:
“As a supporter of former President Donald Trump and Senator JD Vance, I am saddened by how they and others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal immigrants living in Springfield. This rhetoric hurts the city and its people, and it hurts those who’ve spent their lives there.”
This led to one of the most contentious and most memorable interviews of the 2024 campaign, when CNN’s Dana Bash confronted Vance with the Haitian lie on live TV.
What would Jesus do?
To continue reading this post, and lots of others, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to The Daily Rhubarb at the link above.
—tjc
