“Broken idols, broken heads, broken people sleeping in broken beds, everything is broken,” Bob Dylan once sang.

On August 11, 2019, JD Vance at the age of 35 was baptized at St. Gertrude’s Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. After rigorous study, this novice chose Augustine as his patron saint. Five years later Donald Trump chose him, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” to be his running mate. Freed from Original sin, he entered “The Resistance” both in Catholicism and the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. His worldview welded to a theological perspective now animates his political ambition. In “City of God,” a work that explores the doctrine of Original Sin, Augustine sets forth a new moral order based on Christ’s redemptive sacrifice and church teachings. Senator Vance has called this work, “the best criticism of our modern age I’d ever read.” If given the chance, Vance appears eager to remake our world with all its secular ambiguities and transform our Democratic nation into a Christian theocracy.

In the 1970s I spent the last two years of my seminary training snuggling up to St. Augustine reading selections of his “Confessions.” In the study of Systemic Theology, we learned from Augustine that sin was passed biologically from Adam and Eve, through sex, to all his descendants and that our natural inclination is towards evil.

Seven centuries later, Aquinas grabbed this ball and ran with it. He posited that the willfulness of infants is proof of inherited Original Sin. Aquinas viewed women as “defective and misbegotten.” I soon understood his Theologica to be a misogynistic, pseudo-intellectual screed against a frail and vulnerable humanity. Calvinists planted this idea of a depraved humanity on American soil. The first New England Primer reminded every child, “In Adam’s Fall, we sinned All.”

Vance is quick to warn of the consequences of what he believes is a moral disorder: trans kids, drag queens reading banned books in the public library, gay marriage, divorce, abortion, liberals in the classroom, IVF. The wrong people doing the wrong stuff. He wants more babies and fewer immigrants. His affinity for the family seems to be pro-birth rather than pro-life. If you oppose the family tax credit or can’t see your way to giving a kid a free lunch at school, or proper health care are you really pro-life? This guy just oozes Christian compassion.

Vance has taken the grist of his evangelical libido and translated it into his newly adopted Catechism. Here’s what Evangelical fundamentalism, the fumes of his former spirituality, and traditional Catholicism have in common: a literalist understanding of Adam and Eve, people mired in sin and disorder and the need for a change agent, someone touched by the hand of God, who escaped an assassin’s bullet and can restore the nation. Vance converted to Catholicism, but there is no theological shift, there’s no soup kitchen, no water for migrants along their treacherous journey. Not much of a conversion and yet he appears enamored of conversion experiences, drifting from non-denominational Christianity to Pentecostal Young Earth advocate and finally from Never-Trumper to vice-presidential acolyte. Like William F. Buckley Jr. before him, he uses Catholicism as a bludgeon and bloodies anything that smacks of modernity or democratic pluralism.

His wife, Usha, claims that Post-conversion, he is a better father and husband. Like the Promise Keepers of old, he has stepped up. We don’t need men to step up but to partner.

Augustine, Aquinas and Dylan remind us that we live in a broken world. The devastation in Gaza, the despair of homelessness in a land of plenty, social anxiety, a world on fire, we are in desperate need of good-faith partners who will work together to create a world that serves the common good. We don’t need autocrats, theological or political, to drag us back to an imagined past, an Eden without snakes. Is it possible that we could elect a president who fantasizes about Jesus counting the vote and would take the oath of office on a Bible, that he autographed? We cannot be content to put a fifth-century lens on our 21st century world nor can we have that world be made in the Image and Likeness of JD Vance. Impossible you say? Trump is 78.

Jim Vacca is a retired English teacher who lived in Boulder for 30 years. Vacca lives in Louisville.