JD Vance: Unforgivable Moral Failure.

Politics requires compromise. It does not require selling your soul.

Failure is not always measured by lost elections. Sometimes the greatest failure is moral. A man can achieve everything he ever wanted and, in doing so, lose the very self that once made him worth listening to.

That is the tragedy of JD Vance.

When Hillbilly Elegy appeared, I thought I was reading a young man capable of honest self-reflection.

The vice president who now spends hours with Joe Rogan discussing UFOs, alien conspiracies, Jeffrey Epstein, bananas, corn dogs, and whether Joe Biden looks sexually suggestive eating an ice cream cone bears no resemblance to the writer who first appeared on the national stage.

The transformation from thoughtful observer to political opportunist is overwhelming. In chasing the approval of the manosphere and pandering for its illiterate votes, Vance abandoned moral seriousness. The search for truth gave way to the pursuit of celebrity in service of power.

Watching Vance these days is painful.

He was the intelligent Yale Law graduate who once understood exactly who Donald Trump was, but now he is the politician who submits himself to defending whatever Trump said five minutes ago, even when it contradicts what Trump blabbered five minutes before that.

Not able to leave well enough alone, Vance has written a book describing his conversion to Catholicism. Yet what we have witnessed is not a conversion toward spirituality and vivid humility, but toward godless power.

That is why I find Vance’s public embrace of any form of Christianity so profoundly unconvincing.

Jesus warned repeatedly about the dangers of wealth, status, vengeance, and political power. The first shall be last. Blessed are the meek. Love your enemies. Welcome the stranger.

None of those teachings sit comfortably beside the politics Vance now embodies.

When an ICE agent shot a mother of three in the face, JD Vance’s response was not one of grief, caution, or even curiosity. Before the facts were even known, he defended the agent by insisting that those carrying out Trump’s immigration agenda deserve total immunity.

That single statement revealed far more about Vance than any speech about faith, family, or Christian civilization ever could, let alone a book about his conversion.

And now, very recently, another killing has stripped away the last bandage of sanctimony covering Vance’s sins.

In Maine, a 25-year-old Colombian immigrant was shot and killed during an ICE operation. Federal officials have said that the officer allegedly moved toward him and felt threatened. The identity of the shooter has not been officially confirmed by the Department of Homeland Security, although the officer has been publicly identified by family members and others who say they recognize him. His former wife told The New York Times that he admitted to her that he was the one who fired the fatal shots and insisted the shooting was justified.

The details that followed, reported by The New York Times, are chilling.

His former wife recounted years of abuse, saying he had choked her, hit her, thrown her to the floor, threatened to kill her, and begged her not to reveal what he had done to her over the years.

Court records show that another former wife also sought protection from this same ICE agent after alleging violent and threatening behavior. Friends from his youth describe a man with a long history of aggression.

His former wife said plainly that someone with those problems should, quoting her, “never have been entrusted with the extraordinary authority granted to police by civilians.”

And this is who and what JD Vance and Donald Trump are part of, when, in Vance’s case, he is not writing a book about converting to the Catholic Church.

This story is just one of hundreds that illustrate the moral collapse of the Trump-Vance project.

They wrap themselves in the language of Christianity while constructing a government in which armed agents with dubious, violent backgrounds are encouraged to believe they answer only to political power that has given them absolute immunity.

In fact, after the shooting, the current head of ICE said there would be no more traffic stops and car chases. Then, 24 hours later, this was rescinded by Trump, who had gotten pressure from white nationalists and racist groups to continue with the thuggery.

The tragedy is not simply that he defends Donald Trump. It is that he has become a theologian of impunity.

History has seen this pattern before. Every authoritarian movement eventually discovers that once immunity becomes a governing principle, violence expands to fill the space where conscience once lived.

The law ceases to protect citizens from the state and instead protects the state from its citizens. That is the destination toward which Vance has willingly helped lead America.

Up to and including excusing murder by wife abusers in an open season on the defenseless.

Every contradiction is rationalized. Every insult is excused as “strategy.” Every humiliation becomes “loyalty.” Every abuse of power becomes realism.

The gospel is no longer permitted to judge politics. Politics judges the gospel.

And that is not Catholicism, but libertarian, self-serving hedonism.

Vance’s recent book tour and appearance with Joe Rogan illustrated the point perfectly.

America faces genuine crises: a foolish lost war of choice, empowering Iran as never before, democratic instability at home, loneliness, collapsing communities and birth rates, and an increasingly divided, toxically misinformed nation.

Yet our current imitation of a vice president presents himself as just another vapid fool, an internet personality rather than a leader, while the people working for his administration gun down innocent people, while ICE hires wife abusers.

In fact, he said it was blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. It is the one sin he described as unforgivable, not because God refuses mercy to those who repent, but because the sinner has so corrupted his own conscience that repentance becomes impossible.

The religious leaders in the Gospel witnessed acts of Jesus’ healing and called those healings demonic. They were not ignorant of what was really going on. They fully recognized the goodness that Jesus was performing and deliberately renamed it as evil because Jesus’ truth threatened their authority and quest for power.

He is intelligent, educated, and deeply familiar with Christian teaching. Yet he repeatedly places the language of Christianity in service of a movement built on humiliation, vengeance, fear, murder, dishonesty, and the worship of power.

JD Vance’s lies are excused by him as necessary political strategy. His cowardice is excused as loyalty, and his ambition is sold as Christian duty.

Vance once called Donald Trump dangerous and morally unfit for office. He saw the fraud clearly.

Then he discovered that serving this fraud might advance his own career.

Since then, he has used his considerable intelligence not to tell the truth, but to make countless outright falsehoods appear momentarily respectable.

The voice that might have called his party to repentance instead assures the powerful that repentance is unnecessary, and that the foot soldiers of the administration have immunity to perform the cruelest acts.

The older I become, the less interested I am in theological labels and the more interested I become in character.

Maybe that happens when you’re a father and a grandfather, and the husband of a wife you’ve loved for 56 years. I don’t know. But that’s what’s happened to me.

After nearly 75 years of life, I have learned that intelligence without integrity is vile. Education without humility is empty. And religion without repentance is nothing more than another costume worn in the theater of power.

The Vance tragedy is that somewhere along the way, JD Vance stopped allowing truth to inconvenience his ambition.

JD Vance has achieved extraordinary success as a nobody from nowhere. The creation of his billionaire backers out of thin air. Peter Thiel and others got their money’s worth in JD Vance. He serves their purposes.

But the Jesus JD Vance writes about in his book on his conversion is not the Jesus he describes.

The historical Jesus asks JD Vance a far more unsettling question than what podcast will help him become president someday.

Jesus asks an altogether different question:

“What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?”

None of us can answer that question for another human being, but we may judge public character.

And after watching JD Vance exchange early moral courage for political advancement, conviction for calculation, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the gospel of power, there is no way to escape what he has done.

He decided to serve his oligarch backers’ interests and cover for the most corrupt presidency in American history, and then write a book professing to have become a Catholic while excusing the murder, in broad daylight, of innocent victims by ICE agents as enjoying complete immunity.

JD Vance is the last person anyone who values honesty, humility, repentance, and simple human decency should want as President of the United States.

Ever.

He is an example of what happens when ambition replaces integrity and Christianity becomes a servant of power rather than a challenge to it.

History will not remember JD Vance as a politician, but as something else entirely.