(ANALYSIS) The young J.D. Vance was used to the melodramas surrounding his mother, Beverly Vance, with her addictions to painkillers, heroin and alcohol, as well as the chaos caused by her five marriages and countless live-in boyfriends.

But his mother was trying to steer a car during one pivotal clash with Bonnie Blanton Vance, the matriarch known to all as "Mamaw."

“There was a lot of screaming, some punching and driving, and then a stopped car on the side of the road,” wrote Vance in his bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy,” from 2016. “It’s a miracle we didn't crash and die: Mom driving and slapping the kids in the backseat; Mamaw on the passenger side, slapping and screaming at Mom. ... We drove home in silence after Mamaw explained that if Mom lost her temper again, Mamaw would shoot her in the face.”

Once he was safely home — to his grandmother’s house — Vance approached her on the battered couch where she napped, watched TV and read her Bible. He asked one question: “Mamaw, does God love us?”

She hugged him and began weeping.

What Vance calls “wisdom of the Book of Mamaw” guided his rise through the U.S. Marines to Ohio State University, Yale Law School, Silicon Valley, the U.S. Senate and now the Republican nomination to become vice president of the United States.

Mamaw was a lifelong Democrat who distrusted organized religion — including “holy rollers” and snake handlers — cursed like a sailor, and when she died, her house contained 19 loaded handguns. But the soft heart and steel spine of the family’s “hillbilly terminator” provided stability when needed.

In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance described what she taught him: “To coast through life was to squander my God-given talent, so I had to work hard. I had to take care of my family because Christian duty demanded it. I needed to forgive, not just for my mother's sake but for my own. I should never despair, for God had a plan.”

Mamaw wasn’t much of a churchgoer, but no one doubted her faith. After one terrifying spinout on an interstate highway, she screamed: “We’re fine, godd-----. Don’t you know Jesus rides in the car with me?”

Bonnie Vance died while her grandson was in the Marines, a stunning blow that helped push Vance into a flirtation with academia-friendly atheism.

“Much of my new atheism came down to a desire for social acceptance among American elites,” wrote Vance in an essay for The Lamp, a Catholic journal. “I knew how the educated tended to feel about religion: at best, provincial and stupid; at worst, evil. ... I didn't think to myself, ‘I am not going to be a Christian because Christians are rubes, and I want to plant myself firmly in the meritocratic master class.’”

As Vance began pondering a return to the Christian faith, he once again weighed the implications of his grandmother's credo. He also watched his mother achieve sobriety.

“I felt desperate for a worldview that understood our bad behavior as simultaneously social and individual, structural and moral,” he wrote in The Lamp. He sought a worldview “that recognized that we are products of our environment; that we have a responsibility to change that environment, but that we are still moral beings with individual duties; one that could speak against rising rates of divorce and addiction, not as sanitized conclusions about their negative social externalities, but with moral outrage.”

Instead of embracing political slogans, Vance dug into centuries of Christian classics, including the fifth-century text “The City of God Against the Pagans” by St. Augustine of Hippo.

In 2019, Vance converted to Roman Catholicism. Vance was already headed in that direction in 2016, when I interviewed him as “Hillbilly Elegy” sales began to soar. He said it’s clear that personal sin destroys far too many lives, but it's also impossible to ignore the systematic cracks in the public square.

“Which comes first: Poverty and economic problems, or people making bad moral decisions that wreck marriages and homes?” he asked. “If it’s just me and my mom and all her boyfriends, then I never would have made it out. ... The single individual, or even one stressed-out nuclear family, is not enough. You have to see the bigger picture.”

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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.