{"id":2617611,"date":"2026-06-23T07:47:01","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T11:47:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/tedious-legacy-media-midwits-hate-jd-vances-new-book-about-faith\/"},"modified":"2026-06-23T07:50:39","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T11:50:39","slug":"tedious-legacy-media-midwits-hate-jd-vances-new-book-about-faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/tedious-legacy-media-midwits-hate-jd-vances-new-book-about-faith\/","title":{"rendered":"Legacy Media Midwits Hate JD Vance&#8217;s New Book About Faith"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">20<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Ftedious-legacy-media-midwits-hate-jd-vances-new-book-about-faith%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2617611&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>The content discusses the critical reception of JD Vance\u2019s new memoir about his journey back to religious faith. Critics from mainstream media, such as The New Yorker and The New York Times, dismiss Vance\u2019s account, portraying him as confused or insincere, often framing their critique through political or cultural biases rather than engaging with his actual narrative. Vance\u2019s book recounts a turbulent childhood marked by instability, various church experiences, and a lack of guidance, portraying his personal spiritual struggle and growth. He describes feeling lost and unsupported, emphasizing that his faith journey was one of confusion rather than clarity. Vance\u2019s narrative is about an honest quest for meaning and virtue amid lifeS chaos, rather than declaring theological expertise.Critics,however,dismiss his story,attempting to associate it with political stereotypes and moral condemnation. The author defends Vance\u2019s honest portrayal, arguing that his story is a genuine account of a man trying to find his way, and criticizes media critics for superficial and disparaging interpretations.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>The East German border guards who write about culture for the legacy media have read Vice President JD Vance\u2019s new book about his journey back to religious faith. You\u2019ll be shocked, and hold onto something to steady yourself, but they didn\u2019t like it, and they don\u2019t like him. Sample headlines:<\/p>\n<figure><\/figure>\n<p>The New Yorker says that JD Vance is very bad, and the New Republic says that JD Vance is very bad, and the New York Times says that JD Vance is very bad, and Newsweek says that JD Vance is very bad. Maybe you can identify a pattern, there. The commissariat has a single role, and they perform it like synchronized swimmers.<\/p>\n<figure>\n<p><span><\/p>\n<blockquote data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Saw an interesting video about why people are so annoyed by this genre of facial expression. Speaking for myself I think of it as Appeal To Consensus Face, an attempt to triumph via social proof and fashionable opinion rather than via argument and debate. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/Ce0FQ7WdwW\">pic.twitter.com\/Ce0FQ7WdwW<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 NPRG (@CptHastings1916) <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/CptHastings1916\/status\/2069122847675494526?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">June 22, 2026<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/span> <\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<p>This is low-status product. Citizen, you must turn away from it!<\/p>\n<p>At the New Yorker, Jessica Winter almost allows herself to see the point in her opening paragraph before wandering away into condescension and eyerolling: \u201cHis second memoir, released on June 16th, recounts the erratic Baptist and Pentecostal churchgoing of his boyhood, his wallow in atheism as a young man, and his\u00a0eventual Catholic baptism, at the age of thirty-five, but it renders this <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3YuVZYV\" >years-long religious reckoning<\/a> in impassive, even indifferent, terms.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>She <em>actually says<\/em> that his background in faith was erratic. Then she spends the rest of a long and dull essay denouncing his absence of doctrinal clarity and consistency, without noticing that she just told you that she\u2019s recounting a journey that was explicitly framed as, note the actual word that was used, \u201cerratic.\u201d<\/p>\n<div>\n<ul>\n<li>This person is describing a confusing and erratic journey through a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/what-you-need-to-know-about-trumps-latest-drug-pricing-moves\/\" title=\"What You Need To Know About Trump\u2019s Latest Drug Pricing Moves\">subject<\/a> he is trying to understand as a person who has newly returned to it<\/li>\n<li>He has failed, because he writes with an absence of theological precision and does not appear to possess properly credentialed subject matter expertise <\/li>\n<\/ul><\/div>\n<p>Vance isn\u2019t writing as a theologian, and he\u2019s not <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/gillibrand-using-democratic-house-success-in-new-york-to-launch-bid-for-dscc-chair-washington-examiner\/\" title=\"Gillibrand using Democratic House success in New York to launch bid for DSCC chair - Washington Examiner\">claiming expertise<\/a>. He\u2019s explicitly describing a journey through years of confusion, as a man who was lost and then found his way to something that he now embraces as home. He\u2019s <em>trying<\/em> to live there, and he says so. <\/p>\n<p>So the critics aren\u2019t trying to write about the thing Vance has written; they\u2019re trying to maintain their <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/aoc-blamed-trump-for-her-grandmothers-squalid-living-conditions-while-making-six-figures-and-driving-a-tesla\/\" title=\"AOC Blamed Trump For Her Grandmother\u2019s Squalid Living Conditions, While Making Six-Figures And Driving A Tesla\">cultural status<\/a> by saying in ritual unison that a thing adjacent to Orange Man is tainted by its proximity to the bad orange thing. These are not interesting people, and they have no thoughts that are worth considering. They all do the thing about Vance <em>claiming<\/em> to be a supposed Christian while he <em>actually<\/em> supports deportation, by the way. If you\u2019re not yet tired of the Talarico-style gambit in which <em>true<\/em> Christianity is precisely identical with far-left politics, there\u2019s plenty of that to go around this week.<\/p>\n<p>Now, let\u2019s talk about what Vance actually wrote. <\/p>\n<p>Rotating through a series of homes, raised by his grandmother but occasionally raised by a drug addict mother who disappears and reappears, and cycling between a long series of poorly chosen father figures as mom invites new men into her life, Vance encounters a bunch of incompatible things that people call Christianity. He goes to different churches, some with noticeably eccentric lay ministers, and hears radically different expressions of a faith that keeps going by the same name. <em>The point<\/em> is that he experienced confusion as a child.<\/p>\n<p>If you have a copy of Vance\u2019s book in hand, turn to page 22. That\u2019s where you\u2019ll find him wrapping up a discussion about the way he kept encountering different and apparently incompatible expressions of a faith that went by the same name, and here\u2019s what he says about those conflicting representations: \u201cI did not have the spiritual and intellectual tools to negotiate them.\u201d Read that quoted sentence again, and compare it to what the New Yorker told you Vance was doing in this book.<\/p>\n<p>Later, Vance says that \u201cmost of the knowledge in your head is mediated by the people and institutions you trust.\u201d And he didn\u2019t have that: \u201cI had lost most of the Christians I trusted.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This is the first thing he\u2019s <em>actually talking about<\/em>. He needed someone to guide him to faith, but couldn\u2019t hold on to trusted voices so he could make that journey. A few pages later, writing about being a very young man: \u201cAnd I was so unrooted. I had no pastor I could turn to.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This isn\u2019t a confused story; rather, it\u2019s a coherent story about being confused. This is a distinction that eludes the commissariat. Vance describes being lost, and a bunch of professional cultural critics say in unison look at this moron, he writes like he\u2019s <em>lost<\/em> or something, does he not even <em>understand<\/em>?<\/p>\n<p>Lacking guidance and mature community, Vance depicts himself, at length and with evident despair, as a proudly foolish young man, arrogant but mistaken about everything. <\/p>\n<p>Into this depiction of a suffering man who doesn\u2019t understand, Vance drops <a href=\"https:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?search=Job%2038&#038;version=KJV\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Job 38<\/a>: \u201cWho is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?\u201d He identifies precisely his condition and the significance of faith in the face of his pain and his sense of himself as a person who didn\u2019t understand anything.<\/p>\n<p>Arriving at the stage of adulthood that followed the military, school, and professional credentialing, Vance gets married and starts thinking about the life he intends to live. He wants to be a man, a father, and a husband. But he finds he doesn\u2019t have a stable language for the virtue he wants to grow into. Since his difficult childhood, he writes, \u201cI had promised myself, again and again, that I would be a good father to my kids and a good husband to my wife in the eyes of God. It was the only thing I ever really wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>If you have patience for a book about a man who was lost, who perceived himself as being lost, and who struggled to stop being lost, this is one of those books. It probably won\u2019t teach you new things about faith, and it doesn\u2019t demonstrate startling new insight into Christianity. It\u2019s about an unfinished journey, and it\u2019s a narrative that declares its imperfection. Vance has written about his effort to live by faith, not about the perfection or clarity of his faith. The legacy media have no ability at all to tell you about that story without distorting it with their boring contempt.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>      Chris Bray is a senior correspondent at The Federalist and a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army. He has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles, not that it did him any good. He also posts on Substack, at &#8220;Tell Me How This Ends,&#8221; <a href=\"https:\/\/chrisbray.substack.com\/\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Media critics dismiss Vance\u2019s faith journey<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2086,"featured_media":2617612,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/vance.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33651],"tags":[32557,5250,32082,4188,5894],"class_list":["post-2617611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-western-journal","tag-book-review","tag-faith","tag-jd-vance","tag-media","tag-politics"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/vance.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2617611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2617611"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2617611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2617615,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2617611\/revisions\/2617615"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2617612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2617611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2617611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2617611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}