> At a Mississippi Turning Point event in October, Vance fielded a question about his wife's Hindu faith by saying, “I believe in the Christian Gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.”
Bloody hell.
Your response illustrates the dilemma. Yes there is a problem with race on the right but the left don’t even understand the problem. Look at your example. We believe faith matters. It is perfectly understandable that a committed Christian would want his wife to share his religion. A Hindu in the equivalent situation would want his Christian spouse to share his. (Well, he probably wouldn’t marry one in the first place. Is that racist?)
Choosing to be with someone of a different religion and/or culture, and then expecting them to assimilate to your culture, IS racist. You don't have to do that.
No, that's the problem: you don't. If you did, you'd be appalled that JD was so callous in wanting Usha to abandon her faith. What you really mean is that you believe faith matters when it's the right sort of faith held by the right sort of person, and when that's the case you use it as justification for ignoring basic human decency.
I have noticed that for all their vaunted “empathy” leftists have great difficulty in understanding what motivates other people. Read Jonathan Haidt, he has a lot to say about it.
Why do you single out Christians by saying "that's what Christians do" when you already stated "A Hindu in the equivalent situation would want his Christian spouse to share his"?
The disagreement we're having here fundamentally is that you want to portray this as an argument about how liberals "don't even understand" faith, but the content of your argument treats faith as nothing more than an excuse for the husband to dominate the wife. When a Christian husband disrespects his wife's Hindu faith, you support the husband. When a hypothetical Hindu husband disrespects his hypothetical Christian wife's faith, you support the husband. What's the determining factor? Spoiler alert: It's not faith.
So please, just be honest about the reason you really support JD, about the real thing liberals "don't even understand": that women should be subservient to their husbands.
Now traditional Hindus are unabashedly patriarchal; we don’t even try and pretend but if you think that’s what’s happening here you really don’t understand. (And let me again point out understanding != endorsement.)
A major difference in viewpoint is between those who believe the fundamental moral unit is the individual versus the family (or tribe or nation depending on context.) The labels left and right don’t really fit; let’s say universalist and particularist. Vance and I both believe that our faith is true and better than any other therefore it is important that our families who we love more than anyone else share that true belief. Vance also has the universalist belief that _everyone_ should share his faith whereas I do not but as far as spouses are concerned we are in agreement.
The only unusual thing about this is typically it’s the other way around. The husband is blasé about religion and it’s the wife who is more devout, drives family church attendance etc. Take one of my neighbors for instance. She is almost a parody of a Jewish liberal; there are few universalist causes she doesn’t support except when it comes to Judaism. Her husband is of Jewish descent but raised as an atheist in the Soviet Union. He goes along with all her observances even though he doesn’t afaik care personally because “it’s good for the kids.” Is he “subservient”? Is he being “dominated”? That would be a very jaundiced way of looking at it.
Faith matters but it's not a deciding factor on who to marry? Then I don't think faith matters that much.
Now Vance is Catholic but he is a convert who grew up Protestant (and his recent spat with the Pope suggests it might not have entirely rubbed off.)
For me it absolutely was a deciding matter.
I’d missed that he used to be a Protestant; I’m guessing one of the weirder American varieties. I’m not religious, but from a traditionally Catholic country, and I suppose culturally Catholic (my grandparents were Catholic). Most of my experience with Christians would be Catholics and Anglicans.
It _is_, I think, a fairly un-Catholic attitude (certainly post-Vatican II Catholic, which he would have to be, having been born after it), but maybe it fits better with evangelical Protestantism? That said, it’s surprising to me that someone who holds such views would marry someone of another religion; you’d think that either they’d respect the spouse’s beliefs, or find them a barrier.
The middle ground of “I can marry this person, but also _they should convert_” is pretty odd to me.
(I mean, honestly in this case I’m kind of assuming that it’s performative for his audience, and that he didn’t hold any such views when they got married, and probably still doesn’t. Because you’d be a fool to take this guy at his word. But if it’s _real_, yeah, sorry, that’s pretty fucked up)