{"text":[[{"start":7.76,"text":"The writer is US editor of UnHerd. His next book is ‘The Triumph of Normal’"}],[{"start":13.6,"text":"Conservative Christians in the US obsess about the sins of the bedroom while excusing those of the corporate boardroom. They preach “family values” but ignore how wage and health precarity prevent workers from forming families or spending time with them. They cherish virtue but neglect the economic underpinnings needed to cultivate virtuous souls. And when recent popes have highlighted these failings, the American right has lashed out, accusing the successors of Saint Peter of “socialism”."}],[{"start":42,"text":"If you know your way around the Christian left, this critique of the hypocrisy and myopia of the religious right should be familiar. Remarkably, a version of it is also at the heart of JD Vance’s poignant Catholic conversion memoir, Communion, a book best understood as part of the vice-president’s effort to reimagine what it means to be a conservative Christian — if the Trumpian Republican Party lets him, that is."}],[{"start":66.02,"text":"Much of the book’s reception has focused on the question of its sincerity, with critics wondering if Vance’s Roman turn has less to do with faith than politics and cultural cachet. Even when lodged by secular writers, such objections reflect the Protestant sensibilities integral to Anglo-American culture."}],[{"start":83.34,"text":"But what is missed in these debates is the fact that it is a Republican vice-president who has written a book sharply critical of the old religious right, and sometimes even of the culture-warrior new right. Along the way, Vance praises labour unions, calls for a living wage and favourably cites Herbert McCabe, an Irish priest who sympathetically engaged with Marxism."}],[{"start":104.4,"text":"The question posed by the memoir is why people lose faith. For Vance, part of the answer is conservative Christianity’s obliviousness to the miseries of the working class. This was first driven home for Vance by the church community of his Ohio youth. That community, he recalls, was far more agitated by the Terri Schiavo case — a dispute over whether to pull the plug on a woman in a long-term vegetative state — than his family’s struggle to access healthcare."}],[{"start":128.08,"text":"Vance maintains this basic critique throughout Communion. As he regains his own faith and turns to Catholicism, he rails against Christian leaders who have “completely ignored questions of economic policy and material wellbeing”. They have no trouble condemning abortion and adultery, he writes, but stop short of telling a chief executive that “he must pay his people a fair wage”."}],[{"start":151.64,"text":"Yet Christianity — especially Catholic Christianity — makes fundamentally public claims. In Church teaching, as Vance notes, “the economic spheres of our social life” aren’t “quite so separable” from the moral and cultural. Ironically, Vance himself ended up telling Pope Leo XIV to mind his own business (in so many words) when the White House and Holy See found themselves at loggerheads over the Iran war."}],[{"start":177.44,"text":"There is a still bigger wrinkle, however: Vance’s new vision is still mostly confined to paper. For about a decade, ever since Donald Trump began winning over the workers and the lower middle class, a handful of Republican intellectuals have sought a new agenda to match the party’s new base. In his time in the Senate, Vance tried to own this agenda, for example by attacking the credit card duopoly and pushing for lower insulin prices, often in conjunction with reform-minded progressive Democrats."}],[{"start":206.52,"text":"His Senate efforts were thwarted — mostly by the GOP leadership, which remains wedded to the old market-fundamentalist agenda. As vice-president, he can claim tariffs and immigration restrictionism as means to tackle unfair trade, offshoring and wage arbitrage carried out by corporate America. But many of the other areas highlighted in Communion remain, well, academic."}],[{"start":229.2,"text":"Vance laments Big Tech’s power over the young, but Team Trump’s answer has been a law targeting deepfake porn (worthy), a push to shield AI companies from state regulators (not so worthy) and not much else. He denounces the cult of productivity for pushing mothers and fathers to maximise the amount of labour time they have to sell for wages. But a universal entitlement to parental leave isn’t on the administration’s agenda. The tone is set by the likes of Elon Musk, who has praised the Chinese labour market’s long hours. Vance, finally, decries poverty wages, but one has trouble imagining Trump promoting a higher wage floor."}],[{"start":265.12,"text":"One key question, then, is whether Vance can reconcile the ideas and aspirations laid out in Communion with the realities of the modern Republican Party. On the answer depend not just the spiritual life of one Christian politician but the fate of a party and a nation too."}],[{"start":286.64,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1785465986_7919.mp3"}