Episode Transcript
Episode 41.1: The Anti-Vance Would Like a Word, Part 2 with Nathan Evans Fox
Matthew Remski: Hello everyone, it's Matthew with Antifascist Dad podcast episode 41.1, The Anti-Vance Would Like a Word, Part 2 with Nathan Evans Fox. I'm really grateful for your support. I hope this project brings some joy and hope and utility to your works and days.
You can find me, as always, on Bluesky and Instagram under my name. I'm on YouTube and TikTok as AntifascistDad. And the Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast. And if you're listening to this episode on the day that it drops, you know that as a subscriber you get early access to every second part of the weekly episodes. And that includes this one, where I continue my conversation with Nathan Evans Fox.
If you haven't listened to that, you'll probably want to listen to that episode first.
I'll jump right back in to our discussion on JD Vance's Communion. Now, even if you didn't hear part one, maybe a little refresher will help. Nathan is Appalachian in a way that Vance only really masquerades at. I think he says that they're one click apart in the multiverse. He called reading the book like having a demon try to crawl into his body. And he has the theological chops to see what Vance is doing with Catholic virtue ethics and Protestant testimony culture. He tagged Communion as a form of apologetics — this intellectual work that begins from something you already believe and then works backward, funneling, in his case, open inquiry towards a kind of white supremacist ending point.
We also connected the aesthetic appeal of Catholicism for blogboy theology to a kind of desperate attempt to claim prestige for whiteness through ties to Rome, to Latin, to European ethnic continuity. All of which is a reaction against having to reckon with the foundational Blackness of American culture.
So I'll run part two in a moment after a few bars of another beautiful song from his new record, Heirloom. It's called Jesus and the Buck.
Matthew Remski: So you get at exactly this need to invent something real in this great passage that I just want to read back at you. You write: historians of American religions are keenly aware that with slim few exceptions, it's only a matter of time until religious cultures take on uniquely American form once they arrive in the US. America's a force so powerful it even outstrips the cultural characteristics of the world's great religions. Despite holding out for a while, the specific strain of JD's Catholicism is no different. Communion's Catholicism is a relatively new brand marked by evangelical sympathies and rootedness in American whiteness. It's distinct from its Roman predecessors that populated America before the turn of the millennium. After significant efforts to mainstream Catholicism via Fox News appearances, reactionary conservative movements like the Legionaries of Christ, and the inclusion of the pro-life coalition, Catholicism has lost the un-Americanism that made it an enemy of the Klan. And I think there's so much in there. I wonder if you have anything to add or to pull that all together.
Nathan Evans Fox: I think one thing that I just like to tell people — because part of the religious illiteracy that is foundational to American religious life is that folks think that religion just happens organically, that it comes up through belief. And the truth is that religion happens because people show up and interact with other people. This is not to say that — because there's also this kind of leftist myth that if you pay somebody to do something, eventually we'll all just believe it. And I don't think that's true either. You're trying to tell somebody who lives in the Bible Belt and in, specifically in Tennessee, where our crazy-ass legislators are not rich and not paid by the people you think, but they are genuinely true believers in some of the craziest shit. And it's because all the other people have showed up and just made community with them. They fellowshiped with them, they've broken bread, and eventually it starts to condition your moral intuitions. So what I want people to understand is that this happens just because people have continued to show up and build coalitions. Like Catholicism — they really worked really hard at finding ways to get into the conservative world. This didn't happen because people are just stupid. This didn't happen because people are even deeply nefarious. It happened because people just continued to shake hands and show up where it would be a good fit.
Matthew Remski: You know, there is perhaps an even more uniquely American form emerging, because as we're speaking, this just happened yesterday. The SSPX — the Society of Saint Pius X — which started in France. This is just as we're speaking. Basically the letters are bouncing back and forth as we're talking, but they're now in full schism with Rome. And one of the four bishops they consecrated in Switzerland is American. And I think they could have real legs here. And I think it's probably really good news for the blogboy theologians who want the pomp and the authoritarianism, but aren't so interested in rules. And so I'm wondering if you think a Catholic schismatic church would be where Vance might find his final form.
Nathan Evans Fox: So I'm not going to lie. I've thought about this a bit. It could be. To me, it's not so much belonging to Catholicism that motivates where he'll end up. It's belonging to America and to his whiteness. Religious cultures do follow — there is always a religious offshoot of folks that follow wherever the big political moment is. And folks can get pretty quickly whisked down that pipeline. So in Nazi Germany, it was some Catholics, many Lutherans, and then a giant number of Norse pagans. And I want to be very clear: I have pagan friends, Norse pagan friends. This is not a representation of the entire tradition. But different moments find different things to exploit. And sometimes some things are more exploitable than others by bad actors who will do whatever they can to muddy everything up and make a very bad bastardization of what people love.
I wouldn't be surprised if JD Vance gets whisked off further down the pipeline. There is right now on the right a significant rise once again in paganism because of how extreme the right has gotten. I think part of the danger of the pragmatism in the argument that JD puts forward about his Catholicism — he says what he loves about Catholicism, what keeps him there, what has made him a true believer, is the ways that he sees it creating virtue, not just in him, but like Christianity as a whole induces this. It's like a moral creed for the Western world. And so it creates social cohesion. Virtue in this sense is the ways that we interact with one another. It's like citizen virtue. It's a kind of sense of kinship and fellowship that we have with one another.
I think if he found that somewhere else, or he found something that was a more compelling ground — like if he decided that just being a white chauvinist was more interesting than being American in a way that was more divisive and schismatic — he would probably just do that. The benchmarks of people who are lifelong Catholics, the ways they handle conflict and difference within the church, the ways that they negotiate the authority structure of the church, the things that keep them in the church, are very different than what he is doing here. I wouldn't be surprised if 15 years from now he's doing something else because he found some other people that he's into. I wouldn't be surprised if he ended up in one of your weird yoga articles one day.
Matthew Remski: You know, I guess it's time to move beyond the Catholic stuff because you also have this very deep psychological arc that you hound dog him on. You see the spiritual hunger as a kind of addiction logic that moves through prestige to money and finally virtue. And I suppose it follows the track of colonial and capital logic.
Nathan Evans Fox: As a general rule, I don't like saying things that you would hear in grad school because it's some of those off-putting things that — it just takes you back to the most annoying person you know saying, well, that's just capitalism. Yeah, if I hear one more person say that's just capitalism, I'm going to lose my mind. But it is. I didn't say it as explicitly because, rhetorically, that's not how I like to roll. But it is just capitalism. It's the logic of I need more, I need more, I need more.
I was a hospital chaplain and I'm a country musician. I work in people's affect and in their imagination, not just in ways that are kind of nice and cute, but in ways that are really functional for them and impact the ways that they deal with life's big and small things. So the ways that we are socialized really impact the ways that we experience hardship, the ways that we receive our joys, what we find joy in, who we build kinship with, who we can empathize with, what empathy leads us to — whether it leads us to intervention or to presence.
And yeah, I think JD Vance is someone who — if I had to fully psychologize him — the story that is presented in Communion and the story that I know from the news, the way that he has presented himself, is the story of someone who can't help but find another thing to accumulate, who is probably most beholden to the logic of capital out of anyone in our time. Donald Trump was born into it, so there's a little bit of just, you know, he didn't have to strive to be this kind of capitalist. JD Vance had to empty out so many parts of his soul and cut off so many of his roots to the family he says he cares about to then find this logic of capitalism. I don't think anyone has done that kind of self-emptying work quite to the level that he has.
Matthew Remski: You know, it's fascinating actually to realize, just listening to you, that Hillbilly Elegy — the format is a memoir and I suppose elegy is in the title — but I haven't really grasped the fact that he's writing something that disclaims a former identity. He's trying to do two things at the same time. He's trying to say I come from this, but also I really am not that. Because Appalachia is imbued with a culture of poverty, it's self-sabotaging, and I didn't do that. It's a weird form of praise. It's not praise at all. But it's very contradictory to want to romanticize something that you are expressing contempt for.
Nathan Evans Fox: I mean, I think he's a man full of profound contradictions. I think that's all he has to offer, really — contradiction. Reading this book, I was just like, this is a man who doesn't know. Nothing follows from the premises. Nothing. His conclusions are completely dissonant with what he says he's starting with and what he's working with. But that to me says he is an everyman in the sense that he's a white guy who has truly — I said this in the review — he's eaten everything on the American menu and it's all empty calories. He's an everyman in the sense that he can tell you every kind of thing that is being offered by imperial culture and by dominant American culture. And he still ain't happy and he still doesn't make sense.
Matthew Remski: And I suppose that's why he has to keep going, right?
Nathan Evans Fox: Yeah. And that's why I don't think he'll be a Catholic in 15 years.
Matthew Remski: A little bit more on the social function that I found fascinating. You write: for all the ways I find JD disturbingly insincere, I do believe he is sincere in his belief that the story of American belonging connects him to his family lineage. I'm convinced of his sincerity not simply because it explains the absurd moves he has made as America's chief sycophant, but also because he fits a type. In abusive family systems, there are often key family members who play the pivotal role of upholding the family myth that all that abuse has its reasons, compliance is the best option, and the abusers aren't really that bad. These people are often complicated caretakers of the family culture. They are familiar with the abuses endemic in the family because they have personally experienced them, yet they cannot imagine belonging anywhere else, believing any other story, or building any other system. JD is the conformist older brother apologizing for Uncle Sam in the abusive American family. His only way of maintaining kinship is to include everyone he loves in the myth of an America that has good enough reason for its ongoing violence. And he loudly expects the rest of us to conform to that myth as well.
It's funny. When you try to create a portrait of somebody, the visual image is, I think, the primary medium that people think of. But there's so many aspects here that are so perfectly rendered in the older brother metaphor and the loud expectation of everybody conforming not just to the storyline, but to the way he feels about it. And you can see this in his responses to every moral disaster he's called in to cover up for. It would be impossible to imagine seeing him express a lack of confidence in the family. So tell me more about the conformist older brother. What does he have to suffer before he gives up on Uncle Sam?
Nathan Evans Fox: Honestly, at this point, I do not know. And that's why I don't know if this is an exorcism, this review. Because I don't know if JD can be helped.
I think part of the story that I get from JD — and the way that he writes about things, and the ways that I've also seen him operate, and the ways that I've seen him code his own behavior and his own impact — assuming that he is someone who actually comes from a working-class background and is now one of the most connected people in the history of the world, there's a lot of loss that you have to carry to get there. There's a lot of giving up things that are precious to you, things that, frankly, have helped you to survive. Like, you have to give up an ethic that would sustain your grandmother that you say you care about so much. You have to give up on — for lack of a word that people tend to freak out about, but it's feminism, right? He doesn't want to be a feminist, but he wants to say that his wife and his grandmother sustained him and kept him and inspired him. He wants them to. And can we just put a pin in that? Because I did say I wanted to talk about what he talks about with Black folks and women in this.
But he's someone who cannot. He's had to use people and go through all the things that have sustained him without honoring them, without being committed to them, without letting it generate any kind of meaningful loyalty, any meaningful ideology, any meaningful politic. And so I think that is part of what makes him the conformist older brother — he has already done all the work of making himself oblivious to and unaccountable to the things that have kept him alive, the things that have made his life worth living, the things that have grounded him. He's given up, in some ways, more than anyone.
And part of that too — I've been doing this Anti-Confederate Southern History Reading Club, which I am going to plug the living hell out of, because it's one of the coolest things I get to do. But you read the story of the South, and really — the South is the story of the US. No, you don't get to say that we're just weirdos and dummies down here.
You read this story and you see the ways that in early, early colonial periods, whiteness was not something that had emerged. There was just the planter class and then all the people who were being exploited by the planter class or physically battling the planter class. And then as you follow the march of colonialism, you see the ways that the invention of whiteness really, really did disrupt the ways that there was an America outside of America. The way that there were people who belonged to maroon communities, who belonged to communities of sabotage, who belonged to freedom-seeking communities, who belonged to kinship models — not necessarily even blood family, but kinship models of community that took care of one another. The traditions of commoning that were already here from indigenous folks merged really well with folks who had escaped slavery and the traditions they brought from West Africa, and the traditions that a lot of poor and indentured folks brought with them from the backwaters of Europe.
And there was always this — you can belong to your working-class background, your background, even if you were a person that would be considered white. You're belonging to working-class folks, to folks who share these traditions of commoning, who share these traditions of debt forgiveness, who don't feel the need to fit themselves into the hierarchy of the planter class. You always have belonging. And the moment that you begin to believe that you are more white than you are working class, that's the moment that you lose all of the roots and the kinship and the community that was provided to you with America's underclass, with indigenous folks, with Black folks, with other poor folks.
And JD to me is someone who has traversed incredibly far. And being working class — we're at the point where whiteness is such a part of American life and such a part of the world that's been colonized that we can't undo whiteness. But for someone like JD, who, assuming his self-report is true, was white and working class, he found himself in this position where he had to choose who he was going to side with. Was he going to side with being working class, or was he going to side more with being white? And he sided with being white. He's deeply loyal to the interests of white power in this country and internationally. And I see someone who has just given up so much so that he can pursue whiteness and the little bit of power and hierarchy and status that it brings.
Matthew Remski: You know, one thing that you say about whiteness is very stirring to me, and I can't quite pull it into focus. You basically argue that if you buy into whiteness, as Vance has, at the expense of solidarity, you lose the ability to properly grieve. Can you do a little bit more on that?
Nathan Evans Fox: Yeah, I think so. This is something that really came into focus for me during my work as a chaplain. Identity matters a lot. Without getting into even identity politics — identity matters a lot because it's the worlds that you belong to when you're in a private experience of grief. What we think of as a good death in many ways depends on what it took to keep us alive and what the shape of a good life had to be, the kinds of barriers we encountered or didn't encounter. So death and loss and all of this is deeply enculturated. And the ways that we respond to it is deeply enculturated.
I came to realize that identity — or rather privilege — is about points of non-resilience. Because privilege is built off of dominance, off of a sense of mastering the world, mastering your social setting, mastering things that are supposed to be bigger than you, or you're supposed to be in relationship with things that have their own sense of agency and can't be subordinated. And what is less possible to dominate than death and loss?
And I began to realize that real resilience is our ability to bounce back. And grief is a way of claiming agency and building resilience. Grief is about being able to let go of an old world as we enter into a new one and find new routes of agency and feeling and connection out of the ashes of what we came from. How do we build family after a patriarch or matriarch has died? How do we build a new life after we've had to pick up and move from the place where our house burned down? Grief is about being able to build new life and find new connections.
If you've only known dominance, you haven't had to learn the process of how to experience and metabolize the pains of loss and then build the kinds of community around it. You haven't developed the ego strength, the facility with pain, the comfort with pain, the non-reactivity to pain. And so you haven't ever learned to grieve. Walter Brueggemann — he's a biblical scholar who teaches on the prophets — he says that what you see with empire is that empire is an inability to imagine death. And so it's a denial of death. And if that's not true in the ways that empire sorts itself out in our identities, in the ways that we respond to death, where we find our identities embedded in empire — then there's also probably going to be something there that is very deeply averse to loss and death.
Matthew Remski: You write that Communion's theology is the palliation of a man who believes power and privilege should be comforting, but only finds it riddled with imperial anxiety. What does a theology riddled with imperial anxiety do? How does it calm itself down? How does it satisfy itself?
Nathan Evans Fox: It ultimately doesn't. I was talking to Carsey Blanton the other day for the book club, and I asked her what hope means to her, and she said she likes the term revolutionary optimism — the sense that the world as it is today cannot continue. It never has. These kingdoms, these empires, whatever you want to call them, they come and go. And the thing that will be here is the ways that we have to make life with one another.
And I think so much of imperial religion and just imperial work in general is always having to keep up with, resisting the grain of life, which is that we're here because somebody decided, even if they didn't like us, to feed us. Somebody fed us, somebody took care of us, somebody loved us into being. And we extend that to one another. We're here because our bodies are giant biomes of all kinds of critters that we can't even see crawling around. And we are here because of like six inches of topsoil. And we're here because of the air and the ecosystem and the food system that sustains us. We are deeply, relationally set. And empire just can't handle that. The world doesn't operate according to hierarchies. It just really doesn't. I hate to be that foundationalist about it, but it's just the goddamn truth.
Matthew Remski: It also can't capture it. It can't capture the six inches of soil. It tries really, really hard. And it just can't.
Nathan Evans Fox: And so part of what imperial religion and theology tries to do is give us this kind of way of resisting, transcending, avoiding the flux of life — the fact that there are seasons to things and we die and then things are born. Not to get all circle of life, but death happens. And also birth itself — one of the longstanding feminist critiques of patriarchal theology has been that there's been an emphasis on crucifixion and on suffering in the Christian story, when in fact the incarnation should be given more prevalence, because it is in fact pretty cool that the divine was born. That should mean something, that should be seen as inherently redemptive. So much of imperial theology is trying to just avoid the realities of being a body, being in community, being actually vulnerable, being actually mortal, being actually finite, and then also the kinds of responsibilities and commitments that should come out of that.
I think about Dietrich Bonhoeffer — talk about someone who's been put into blogboy theology. I'm not particularly fond of his thought, but every once in a while, broken clocks. But he's somebody who's been completely bastardized and misrepresented by the right, specifically. It all starts with Eric Metaxas's big biography that was all over Barnes and Noble in the 2010s. But Bonhoeffer says that religion should call us into responsibility. And that is something that has stuck with me as a general principle in life.
Imperial theology doesn't call us into responsibility. You see this in JD Vance in the way that he talks about going to the Vatican, the leaders in Rome critiquing and calling out the Trump administration's treatment of immigrants. And he says, well, it was just trite platitudes. What did they even mean? It's like, JD — if you actually care, if anyone could find out, it would be you. If anyone could have follow-up conversations, it would be you. If anyone could actually change it, it would be you. And you see the ways that he wants all the benefits of religion. He wants the clout, he wants the social currency, he wants to be able to get a book deal off of it, but he doesn't want to actually be called into responsibility for it. Which is interesting because virtue is all about your responsibilities to other people.
Matthew Remski: You know, you already said that the book is not an exorcism, which I kind of led with. I do think you end with a bit of a curse. You do say that Communion represents genuine moral evil and psychopathy — that here's a guy publishing this quiet, gentle faith memoir that starts with this bungling scene of them getting ready for church and going out the door in the morning. And this is the guy who's also, at the same time, actively responsible for murder, torture, child abuse, genocide. You really damn him to hell. And at the same time, your whole vision is rooted in you both coming from the same place. And so I have never personally had the experience of going so deep and so hard on something like this, as you have done, without feeling some kind of affinity, some kind of desire to reach out to this wayward person. And if not him, then to other people like him. I just don't imagine putting in the effort if you didn't mourn for him in some way. Is that fair?
Nathan Evans Fox: I'm going to be honest. I do not feel any affinity for him. I feel — this is the redneck, the hillbilly in me, where I'm like, good, go on, get. You want it out? That's fine.
I do feel a great sense — frankly, I feel a great sense of grief as I was reading this. For myself, for the ways that there is now a cultural apparatus that has been built to try to continue erasing all the roots that I love and that have kept me alive and that have given me a sense of what I want to pass on to my kids, that connect me to my grandmother. He cares about family lineage, but he only sees it through imperial dominance. I care about family lineage because I only see it through the ways that feminism has kept us alive and kept us committed to one another, through the ways that resistance to capitalism has maintained systems of kinship. I see the ways that I have to fight a certain version of the future so that I can provide a future for my kids and so that I can bring my grandmother into that future.
So I felt a great sense of grief for the ways that I feel a kind of loneliness sometimes. That is a deep function. That's just typical of the US. The US is a place where deracination is your ticket in — giving up your roots, whether it's immediately or through a slow process over a couple of generations. That's how it goes.
Matthew Remski: But it's way worse for you in this circumstance, because not only has he deracinated himself, but he's also stolen the aesthetics, some of the affect, the terms. Just the words. So you're talking about a thief.
Nathan Evans Fox: Yeah, I am talking about a thief. I'm fully talking about a thief. I actually thought about writing that, but I struggle with that word — because what I don't want in the conversation of JD Vance is to lean too heavily on metaphors about property, just because I know he's probably too big on that. But yeah, he is a thief.
I do feel a real compassion — and I don't want this to go too far, because people build weird industries out of things and it ends up distracting from the ways that we have to be committed to what we know matters. And that's women, that's trans folks, that's Black folk. There are certain targets of American violence that tend to bear out more often.
Matthew Remski: Yeah, they've got to be prioritized.
Nathan Evans Fox: They've got to be prioritized. But I do feel a real sense of compassion and loss for young men. I was once a lost young man. I didn't grow up thinking like this, but I had all the experiences, I had all the things that — I see how I'm not living in contradiction with the things that kept me alive. And so I do. The only reason I wrote this is because I do want people who think JD is an example or a model to know that he's not.
And there's a part of me that still wishes that I could write something more constructive, because it is deeply important to me to communicate how awful he is, how awful this is, how sinister and harmful his work and his mission and his books and his cultural work are. And also there is such a constructive vision, and it's so underrepresented, and it's been so removed from the vernacular of folks who come from where I'm from. Even though we have the history, we have the tradition, we've got all the resources — but we don't know how to talk about it because it's been deliberately suppressed. Like this isn't tinfoil hat. It's been deliberately suppressed by the CIA, by the FBI, by having conservative politicians in our textbooks.
I grew up 15 minutes from a famous labor massacre, an anti-labor massacre. I didn't know about this until two years ago.
Matthew Remski: Which one was it?
Nathan Evans Fox: The Marion Massacre. They killed six men who were trying to unionize. You know, I grew up knowing about Frankie Silver, who was the first woman executed by the state of North Carolina because she chopped her husband up into bits — which is a pretty cool little story. But we had to learn about that nonstop, because that was local history. But not the Marion Massacre. All the experiences and the histories are there, but they've been beat out of us by the powers that be. And I do want to say, part of this was also — I also have to give myself some grace. I do this in my music. The constructive part is done in my music and in the ways that I try to give people a sense of grief and hope and joy and fun and sass and all of that. But yeah, I feel a tremendous sense of loss reading this book, but not for that man.
Matthew Remski: I'll tell you one idea that comes to me about being constructive, or something that could come out of this that was constructive. I mean, what's Ta-Nehisi Coates's book? Is it Letter to My Son? It sounds like there's a resonance there of that format — if you were to imagine the Appalachian kid, assigned male at birth, growing up and seeing and being exposed to this fork in the road, right — the capacity to find solidarity with working-class people or to cast your lot in with whiteness — there's a whole bunch of conversations and stories that precede that decision or that tendency. And so yeah, I can imagine something definitely constructive coming out of the other side of this curse, right? Which is: well, let me tell you what you will be pushed towards. Let me tell you how you will be influenced. Let me tell you what empire might tempt you with and why it won't work.
Nathan Evans Fox: Yeah, that's the truth. I think that's half of my new record, if I'm not trying to be self-promotional. But it's about having kids. And I say it in the last track — the demons of empire have to be exorcised because they come home every time. And that's what I want my kids to know. We've got it. We just got to get Uncle Sam out of our family. We've got to imagine a family system that's bigger.
And the truth to me is, if you're poor enough — and no rule is like everybody, but if you're working-class enough — you don't get to be too picky to be hospitable, to receive it or to give it. And I have seen the hospitality. I've seen working-class hospitality that was practiced at my grandmama's table and some practice in my family, very complicated. I'm not JD Vance. I'm not going to sit here and idolize everybody and say that they were perfect and didn't have profound biases. But they had these practices that survived in spite of the ways that whiteness and that poverty and that work and that war and that scarcity had tried to tell them the world had to operate, had tried to cut the grain of their soul. And instead they had these practices that were remarkably hospitable in spite of everything. And those are the things that the world that JD Vance is trying to create are trying to cut out. They're trying to privatize and close on and kill off.
Matthew Remski: Nathan, thank you so much for your work on this terrible book. Apologies again.
Nathan Evans Fox: Thank you for asking me to read it.
Matthew Remski: And yeah, I think it's a great service to what has to be a growing body of knowledge around this guy who's probably going to be number 48 one way or the other.
Nathan Evans Fox: I know.
Matthew Remski: And yeah, then you'll have some sort of commentarial gig somewhere, won't you?
Nathan Evans Fox: I will say — CNN, put me at a table next to Scott Jennings. Just do it. I don't know why people let him talk the way he does. And I'm good. I'm good for some jail time.
Matthew Remski: Thanks, Nathan. It's great to see you.
Nathan Evans Fox: Thank you.
