In 1960, candidate for the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy considers herself to reassure the Protestant majority of the country. Faced with the association of pastors of Houston, he delivered a long speech to the message that is obvious: Catholic, it is nonetheless patriotic. Sixty-five years later, when James David Vance gained the country's vice-presidency, he brandished his Catholicism as a standard, going so far as to make his faith a component of the cultural war launched by the Trump administration and the Maga world (Make America Great Again). It is therefore no coincidence that he chose Easter celebrations to go to Rome.
The path traveled by the American company is as impressive as that of JD Vance is winding. As a teenager, the one who is still called James Donald Bowman frequent with the evangelical congregation Baptist of his father. Catholicism, he knows almost nothing. Raised in an disadvantaged family of the Rust Belt (“Rust belt”), this region in the northeast of the United States undermined by deindustrialisation, he imagines the “Catholic Jesus” like a “Majestic divinity” Reserved for privileged, he will confide in a long text retracing his spiritual journey, published in 2020 in the Catholic journal The lamp Under the title “How I joined the Resistance”. Now, he wrote, he and his relatives were not interested in “Majestic deities” because they “Were not a majestic people”.
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Source: Lemonde