The New Vice Presidential Nominee and A Re-Examination of My Own Background

 Although I am not a registered Republican, I watched last week's RNC in Milwaukee with very personal interest.  Before I get to that however, I wanted to make a correction regarding the assassination attempt on President Trump last week - I got the would-be assassin's name wrong, as it was not Mark Violets but rather was a 20-year-old reclusive punk named Thomas Crooks.  While we should never totally glory in the death of anyone, Crooks was dealt with justly as a perceived threat to a Presidential candidate, and he was dispatched with precision (although in all honesty the Secret Service should have been more on top of its game and perhaps President Trump could have been safer from these nutcases who were seeking to destroy him). I wanted to note that correction up-front before I began today's discussion. 

While there were many things that were great about the Republican Convention (one being the true spirit of unity displayed - that was encouraging in and of itself), the most noteworthy announcement was Trump's VP pick, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance.  Vance is young (he isn't even 40 yet) and he is also of personal interest to me because of his background, which is remarkably similar to mine.  Seeing him accept the VP pick evoked a lot of things within me, and I wanted to talk about those now. I want to start by noting Vance's seminal book, Hillbilly Elegy. 

Hillbilly Elegy came off the press in 2016, when Vance was still very young.  This was written before he was elected to the Senate, and it is a combination of both personal memoir as well as a cultural analysis.  I bought my copy of it a couple of years back, and after seeing Vance become Trump's VP pick, I decided to give it another read.  Vance grew up a lot like I did - he has Appalachian roots, was raised by his grandparents and dealt with a broken home and a mother who was less than perfect when he was young.  Although Vance and I are almost a generation apart, I identify with many things he said in that book.  One thing that stuck out to me in particular is on page 194 of the copy of the book I have, and it says this:

"Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents.  Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers.  I have watched some friends blossom into successful adults and others fall victim into the worst of Middletown's temptations - premature parenthood, drugs, incarceration.  What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives.  Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It's not your fault that you're a loser; it's the government's fault." (J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy. New York: Harper, 2016. p. 194).  

If Middletown, OH, were replaced with Kirby, WV, that would echo my own sentiments over the years. The comedian Bill Cosby also made a similar observation about the Black community in his book Come On People: On the Path From Victims to Victors (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007) when he notes on page 20 the following: "Low expectations coming from a teacher can cause a child to fail.  Coming from a parent, low expectations can crush the soul."  Vance and Cosby are saying the same exact thing about two similar communities - expectations can make or break an individual, and those who the young look up to need to exercise more accountability for their own actions lest they cause catastrophic consequences for future generations.  A quote I heard from an evangelist many years ago sums that up also - your present position does not determine your future potential.  While adversities may create challenges, the right influences and encouragement and a proper support system in the community will go far in helping someone overcome those. When I was younger, I saw a lot of commonalities between my own poor Appalachian background and that of inner-city Blacks - we faced many of the same issues, and just like in many cases conservatives failed to meet the real challenges of those who should be their allies, the liberal Democrats have been doing the same thing for years.  J.D. Vance talks about this same thing in his book on page 31, and it seems he came to the conclusion I did about this although he cited his reference from a book called Appalachian Oddyssey.  It is one reason why I am an independent, as both of those major parties have failed us.  However, there may be hope, in that Trump seems to be doing something that many career politicians have failed to do, and he is getting results.  Trump was a huge factor in my home state of West Virginia becoming more Republican, and now he is making tremendous inroads among Black Americans for the same reasons.  The elitists in both parties have failed us all on so many levels, and a change is needed for sure.  I believe Vance is a catalyst for that change, and Trump did well choosing him. 

One other thing that has been going through my mind about this over the weekend was this - I have had to reconcile my Appalachian upbringing with my Catholic faith and other status in life, and this has proven an interesting challenge.  I recently wrote a book about some of the negatives I have experienced, and if someone were to read that initially, it would seem like I am more or less eschewing my former life and maybe even would be ashamed of it.  Let me assure you though that this is not the case at all - my readings of Aquinas in recent years since my graduation from Steubenville have taught me some things, and one of those things is supernatural grace.  I have taught on supernatural grace before, and in Thomistic terms its purpose is to elevate, heal, and perfect us as humans, but also nature in general.  If I were to put this another way, it would be what I have said many times over the years - preserve what is good, and learn from what is bad but don't let the bad define you.  In all honesty, I love where I come from in small-town West Virginia, and it is ingrained as part of me that I deeply appreciate and value.  But, it was far from perfect - growing up, I knew what it was like to just have fried cabbage and boiled potatoes for dinner, and I also knew what it was like to wash clothes in a bathtub, and even at one point when we couldn't afford electricity we had to use a small creek at the hill below my step-grandfather's house as a refrigerator, and we cooked meals on an old woodburning stove outside at times.  I am also one of the few Gen Xers to probably understand what using an outhouse was - my grandmother and step-grandfather did not have an indoor bathroom for years, and during the day the toilet necessities were met by an outdoor outhouse while at night a "chamber pot" was used which was a rather clever invention my step-grandfather came up with.  He essentially took an old kitchen chair, cut a hole in the seat, installed a toilet seat on it, and then underneath was placed a large 25-gallon plastic bucket.  That setup behind a curtain in the bedroom was how we dealt with bodily functions then.  Likewise, bathing was in a large metal tub with water heated on a wood stove in the winter and this too was done behind a curtain for privacy sake.  For the time we were without electricity, my step-grandfather dammed up the creek and made a huge reservoir of water in which he stuck a large cooler with all the refrigerated perishable items - thankfully that was in the winter months, and it served as our refrigerator for about a month.  That was essentially how I grew up, but as time went on it gradually got better.  Additionally, having a single mother who struggled with alcohol abuse was not a picnic either - many times from about the time I was 11 I had to practically take care of myself.  Mom would eventually get better as well, and by the time she passed away a couple of years ago, she had done well over the past 30 years, roughly from after I started high school up to fairly recently (my mom stayed with me the last couple of years of her life, and I was essentially her caregiver).  When I read Hillbilly Elegy, I see J.D. Vance as going through many of those same challenges to some degree, and that is why I relate to him so much.  His leadership as VP is essentially reflecting people like me, and thanks be to God for that.  That all being said, let me now talk a little about reconciling Appalachian culture and my faith. 

Like myself, Vance was a convert to Catholicism from a more conservative and strict Appalachian Protestant religious background.  And, like his own family who was originally from Kentucky, my West Virginia relatives were part of the Appalachian migration to bigger metro areas - the only difference was where we all went.  Kentuckians such as Vance's family often ended up in the big metro areas of Ohio as well as cities such as Detroit and Fort Wayne.  For us West Virginians, the destination was often either Baltimore or Pittsburgh.  I have discussed before how a large area off of Wilkins Avenue in Baltimore was often called the "Hillbilly Ghetto" due to so many West Virginians who lived there in the 1960s and 1970s, and my own family essentially lived in our own neighborhood - I spent part of my childhood in Baltimore, where I attended Stuart Hill Academy when I was in kindergarten in 1974-1975.  Many of my cousins now - the kids and grandkids of the original relatives - were born and raised in the Baltimore suburbs and still live there today.  St. Agnes Hospital probably welcomed more cousins in our family than any other institution in the US.  I stuck out though because I was one of the few of that generation of our family to actually be born in West Virginia, and I also spent more of my childhood there than many of my Maryland-born cousins did.  For many of them, West Virginia was a place to visit on weekends to see "Granny and Pop-Pop," or my great-aunts and uncles who were their grandparents. Also, Baltimore was good in many aspects to the economic stability of the older family - they came there young, worked and raised families, but all of them practically returned home after retirement and would die where they were born.  That is what the whole "sense of place" concept in our region is all about, and it defines us to this day.  I can say essentially that the same thing happened to me as well - after living in Florida, where I got married, finished college, and built up a decent occupational resume, I ended up moving back to the region I grew up 7 years ago.  Although I live in Maryland, my home state is just a 10-minute drive across the Potomac from my house now, and many of these areas I am familiar with still from my childhood.  There were many good memories about that too, and Baltimore for me as a kid was an exciting place in all honesty.  Further, those years in Baltimore were some of the last times our family was really close - it seems like over the years we have all scattered to the four winds and other than social media we don't have anything to do with each other anymore, and that is sad.  So, that being said, let me reflect some on reconciliation and reflection. 

Like anything in life, our personal "story" has both positives and negatives that shape us.  As we grow in life, many of these attributes merit re-examination.  What was good that I can keep, and what is bad that I can keep the lessons learned but otherwise discard?   Change is both constant and inevitable, and we all go through personal changes as we grow older.  We are not exactly the same people we were when we were 16, 25, or 30, and we will change more as we turn 80 eventually.  That is life.  That being the case, two things are going to happen usually at the same time.  As we look back at our earlier lives, we begin to miss certain aspects and it causes us to reminisce and ask what happened to that old passion and enthusiasm we once had about certain things, and we really feel like a piece of ourselves was lost.  The second thing that happens is this - as we ponder all that, we start to think if there is a possibility we can revive that old passion, and if so how would it fit into the person we are now?  That is really what inspired my whole discussion here, as over the past few days I have been thinking about a few things that evoked those feelings, and my mind has not rested since.  I want to talk about that some now, as it actually relates to my religious faith. 

All of you who know me know my story as well.  Although raised in a fairly religious environment, I was not converted to believe in Christ until I was 16, and I was baptized that same year in a small Baptist church in Rowlesburg, WV.  I took to my new faith of course with great enthusiasm, and right before I started college in 1989 something else happened - although I had become somewhat ambivalent toward the cultural Pentecostalism of my youth, I began to learn more about it and then I received the Pentecostal experience of speaking in tongues at a small Pentecostal Holiness congregation in Georgia in 1989.  This led to a 6-year identification as part of the Foursquare Church, a Pentecostal denomination founded in 1923 by the late female evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson.  However, although in principle I liked the Foursquare denomination, my experiences in its individual parishes I was involved in were not so positive.  The first, in Alabama, ended up being a hotbed of spiritual abuse overseen by an authoritarian pastor who had ambitions to start his own personality cult.  The second, in Florida, was the exact opposite - it was a house church led by a weak pastor who didn't know how to lead a congregation, and everything was dysfunctional there too.  Both churches ended up closing - the Alabama church location was eventually purchased by a Hindu temple, and the pastor of it would die some years later of Alzheimer's.   The Florida church likewise folded, and the pastor and his wife ended up divorced. This led to my involvement with a movement called Convergence which in time would lead me home to the Catholic Church, but that process would take in total 4 years.  I will do a whole thing on Convergence later, but it is an integral part of my testimony and I include it here now because much else that happened in my life was contingent on my identification with this movement. And, that is where we go now.

The Convergence Movement was the product of several of us who were former Pentecostals and Evangelicals who began to see the richness and beauty of the ancient Church, especially how the liturgy spoke to us.  We wanted the heritage, but also we sought to retain the spirituality of our old backgrounds too, and to be honest, that gave us a job of sorting everything out and was a constant process of growth. I mention it here as it does play into this discussion, and a fundamental question is asked in particular by those of us who eventually ended up as Catholics or Orthodox Christians - what good can we preserve to integrate into our personal spirituality?  Over the past couple of days, I was thinking about the Kathryn Kuhlman crusades I used to wish I was part of as a young Pentecostal college student.  Now, she was technically not a Pentecostal herself (I think she was a General Baptist or something) but she did gain quite a following in her lifetime among even some old-time Pentecostals - my mom always admired her.  And, through her association with Demos Shakarian and the Full Gospel Businessmen, her audience was also very ecumenical, and many Catholics loved her crusades as well, especially during the earlier days of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement.  The one thing though that always drew me to her legacy was the music she featured at her meetings - it was first-class and not the crazy stuff that I had seen either in "contemporary" churches or the bad but well-meaning mountain singing of the Appalachian churches I recalled from my childhood.  I think that is also why she had a more ecumenical appeal.  And, her message was basic too - without Christ we are nothing, but he transforms us into something beautiful (or as she was quoted saying, "God doesn't make gold vessels or silver vessels - he makes yielded vessels.").  This was not to say Kathryn Kuhlman didn't have her controversies or problems - she was still a fallible human being, and her detractors often pointed out those flaws and magnified them in such a way as to discredit her.  And, many also try to associate her with the "Word/Faith" nonsense of people such as Kenneth Hagin, which to be fair often that is propagated by the guy who self-identifies as her heir-apparent, Benny Hinn.  In reality, she never preached that - her crusades largely talked about how God makes something out of nothing and how healing and other benefits of the Atonement were not merit-based, but freely given.  In the past couple of days, I began to somehow pivot my thoughts to Kathryn Kuhlman, and the question came up - can her legacy be accepted as part of my Catholic spiritual identity now, and if so, how?  The same could be said about my Appalachian upbringing too - what can that do for my own faith journey now?  That made me revisit a few things from my Personalist Philosophy textbook I had at Steubenville, and that is the direction of the discussion I want to go in now. 

The textbook I am speaking of is W. Norris Clarke, S.J., The One and the Many - A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001).  There are several important takeaways from Clarke's book that in all honesty I have applied even to my dissertation, and they are as follows:

1. God authored two "Books" - Revelation and Nature.

2. Nature affirms and authenticates Revelation, and Revelation perfects and completes Nature.

3. In the perfection and completion of Nature, Revelation is manifest in supernatural grace, which is an exclusive gift of God in the Atonement - it elevates, heals, and perfects.

4.  The Transcendental Properties of Being are three in number and are part of the restorative process of supernatural grace - those are Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.

5. All of this applies to us as individuals, but also in many ways also is applicable to the universe as a whole, since it is God's creation. 

There are other areas all this applies to as well (in particular it helped shape my acceptance of the Marian dogmas) but let's now take this to another level.  You heard me talk many times about CNCs, or Central Narrative Convictions.  This was a concept a professor I had, Kenneth J. Archer, introduced me to years ago when he talked about the documenting of the "story" as being part of the way a community (or an individual) interprets Scripture.  Archer borrowed and refined his idea from Brian J. Walsh and J. Richard Middleton, The Transforming Vision - Shaping a Christian Worldview (Downer's Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1984).  The terminology of CNC is not mentioned by Walsh and Middleton, but the concept is discussed by them as being the basis of a worldview, and they note the connection between worldview and language, and the latter reflects the former, and the former shapes the latter.  Within this is the role of faith, and the answers to four fundamental questions which in turn would be defined by Archer as CNCs - those four questions are as follows:

Who am I?

Where am I?

What's wrong?

What's the remedy? 

As the authors note, the answers to these questions (CNCs) help the individual begin to see reality in a sensible pattern, and thus the worldview that results is not synonymous with a philosophical or theological system, but is foundational to it (Middleton and Marsh, 35).  I would somewhat differ here in that here is how I see worldview - what you think (philosophy, or reason) joined with what you believe (faith).  The questions are answered by those two concepts, and there is always room for growth.  Further, this defies the thrust of the Enlightenment, which sought to divorce faith from reason - the two are inseparable in all honesty, as we need both. And, that is how everything encapsulated in that would relate to this particular discussion. 

For those of us who are converts to Catholicism, we have had adjustments to make.  There are things we had to struggle with - long-held convictions which were often at odds with our new faith.  And, as is the case, it was hard to let some of that go.  For instance, let's say that when you were converted to the Catholic faith, you had an eschatology that was formed by dispensational premillennialism.  That created an issue because you start to find out that in the Holy Land in particular there are Christian minorities who are even persecuted by "God's Chosen," the modern nation of Israel.  And, if you have some Jewish ancestry as I do, it really created a conundrum.  Can a faithful Catholic, for instance, support the nation of Israel while at the same time acknowledging Catholics among the Arab populations as our spiritual brethren?  After much, much travail over that issue, I did come to a conclusion which was fully conciliatory while being able to grow beyond the dispensational eschatology I once held, and that discussion is for another day.  So then, what of tongues, miracles, and other things - can a Catholic accept those and still be a faithful Catholic??  Again, it took a process, but supernatural grace likewise helped me clarify that too.  Essentially, my faith heritage is a part of me still and it is not something I can totally divorce from, so I learned to discern what is not in conflict with Catholic faith and I retained it with a new understanding of it.  Now, some more radical "Trads" among my Catholic brethren are going to huff and puff about that, but that is OK - while I am almost totally in agreement with their basic convictions too, I am also not a "cradle Catholic" and don't believe God ordained my history just to reject it all.  I am devoutly Catholic yes, but I am also an Appalachian American with a totally different journey than someone like Dr. Taylor Marshall (whom I do admire) may have had, and I don't feel that God rejects everything about my past because to do so is to deny him.  Even now as I think about those old Kathryn Kuhlman crusades from decades ago, I am in the process of being refined and polished like my dissertation I am finalizing, and as I look at the legacy of a person like J.D. Vance, I see that with him as well.  Nice "circling back" to that, right?  I would make Biden's former press secretary Jen Psaki proud due to the fact I actually did "circle back."  It took me a while, but we got there. 

Many issues I touched upon could be merited for discussion in their own right, but the idea here is essentially this - we all grow, and change is inevitable to us personally.  But, that doesn't mean change is bad, and good change is always built upon old and strong foundations of past tradition.  If you try to obliterate everything old - like the Emergents among Evangelicals and the "Woke" ideology of modern politics try to do - it leaves a void and that ultimately leads to destruction.  We have to build upon what we have, and we cannot afford to jettison everything about ourselves or even our civilization.  We can clean it up, refine it a bit, and even make some needed repairs and replacements, but the foundation must remain the same.  That is why as a Catholic Christian, I embrace the best of who I am, learn from past mistakes, and get rid of whatever hinders me or causes erosion to a good foundation.  Thank you for allowing me to ramble, and will see you next time.