JD Vance once believed only dumb people were religious. His new book, Communion, exposes a cultural blind spot the Black church has challenged for centuries.
By EEW Magazine Online Faith Editors
JD Vance once sorted the world into a simple taxonomy. Dumb people were religious. Smart people were atheists. He carried that framework into Yale Law School, convinced that education and belief occupied mutually exclusive territory. Then, in 2011, while he was still a law student, he attended a lecture by Peter Thiel.
Thiel, the Stanford-educated co-founder of PayPal who would later become Vance’s employer and political benefactor, identified openly as a Christian. In “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” published in June by HarperCollins, Vance writes that Thiel was “possibly the smartest person I’d ever met.” The encounter dismantled the philosophy Vance had spent years developing. The world, it turned out, was more complicated than he had allowed it to be.
Peter Thiel, the Stanford-educated co-founder of PayPal and Silicon Valley venture capitalist, whose open Christian faith cracked the framework Vice President JD Vance had built around religion and intelligence. (Getty Images)
Public figures find religion all the time, and Vance is hardly the first prominent convert to Catholicism. What makes his admission worth weighing is that the assumption he describes was never his alone. It is a foundational premise of a strain of American intellectual culture. It has surveyed Christian faith, especially the demonstrative and communal faith of the Black church, and concluded it was looking at evidence of limited minds.
The cost of that presumption has fallen heaviest on a tradition that deserves far better.
For more than two centuries, the Black church has been the most consequential institution in African American civic life and one of the most condescended to. Its theologians have been overlooked and its preachers caricatured. Its worship, bodily and unashamed, has been mistaken for emotionalism by observers who confused expressiveness with the absence of thought.
To those who have watched only from the outside, it appears undignified. The congregation on its feet, the preacher moving under what the tradition calls the anointing of the Holy Spirit, and the believer yielded to glossolalia in prayer have registered as people who traded reason for feeling. What those observers missed was the theology underneath, carefully constructed and rigorously inherited, serious in ways the caricature cannot accommodate.
Modern Pentecostalism espouses the doctrine of the Holy Spirit’s active presence. Its practice of speaking in tongues emerged as a global movement most visibly through the Azusa Street Revival of 1906 in Los Angeles. Its leader, William J. Seymour, was a Black man and the son of formerly enslaved parents. Shortly before the revival, he had been barred because of his race from a Bible school classroom in Houston. He was required to hear the lectures from outside the door.
Early in 1906, he took what he had learned from that hallway west to Los Angeles. The movement he ignited from a small mission crossed denominational lines and spread around the world. Today, Pentecostal and charismatic Christians number an estimated 644 million. That legacy belongs to a man who carried something larger than the institutions that refused to seat him at the table.
William J. Seymour, the son of formerly enslaved parents who led the Azusa Street Revival of 1906 in Los Angeles and ignited a global Pentecostal movement now estimated at 600 million adherents worldwide. (Wikimedia Commons)
Seymour was not an exception. The Black church has always produced this kind of figure. People who were denied the formal credentials of intellectual life went on to build intellectual traditions that outlasted the institutions that excluded them.
Frederick Douglass taught himself to read in defiance of law. He later wielded the language of the King James Bible with a precision and force that bent the arc of American history.
Howard Thurman, the theologian and mystic whose work shaped the spiritual architecture of the civil rights movement, was a respected thinker. Martin Luther King Jr. carried Thurman's 1949 book, "Jesus and the Disinherited," with him throughout the Montgomery bus boycott.
Howard Thurman, theologian, mystic, and author of "Jesus and the Disinherited" (1949), whose spiritual framework shaped the architecture of the civil rights movement and whose work Martin Luther King Jr. carried with him throughout the Montgomery bus boycott. (Emory University/Journey Films)
Fannie Lou Hamer, who helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, testified before the credentials committee of the 1964 Democratic National Convention. She possessed a moral authority that made the powerful visibly uncomfortable, drawing every ounce of it from a biblical imagination her adversaries chronically underestimated.
Each of these historic figures inhabited faith as the primary instrument of an intellectual life. They read Scripture as a living text. They paid close attention to language, history and context. They held the full weight of human suffering against the promises of God without sentimentality or the luxury of easy resolution. Few intellectual undertakings ask more.
Fannie Lou Hamer, member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, enters the 1964 National Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, N.J. (Credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
The Black church has a particular genius, and it is the thing most persistently misread from a distance. It has never required its people to choose between the life of the mind and the life of the spirit.
The preacher who moved a congregation to its feet on Sunday morning had often spent Saturday evening in the original Greek. The woman in the third pew who had never set foot in a seminary knew the Book of Job with an intimacy that would challenge a doctoral candidate. Mainstream American culture never developed adequate categories for that kind of simultaneity, and so it defaulted to dismissal.
Vance’s admission illuminates the poverty of that default. Here is a man formed at one of the nation’s most elite institutions. The Marine Corps veteran who rose to the vice presidency spent years operating from a framework any serious engagement with the Black church’s history would have disproved. His was an error of exposure, the kind of blind spot that forms when a culture has already decided a tradition is unworthy of examination.
That failure runs deeper than Vance, through the culture’s relationship to faith and to Black faith in particular. When a tradition this generative is cast as the province of the credulous, the historical record suffers, and so does the wisdom it embodies. The Black church models how to build dignity when the law denies it, how to preserve hope when circumstances do not justify it and how to endure suffering without surrendering one’s faith.
Peter Thiel helped Vance begin cracking the template open. The Black church has been at that task for centuries, and its record has been there all along. The question is whether the culture will finally read it.
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