Patriotism as a civic religion

Patriotism as a civic religion is the framework through which J.D. Vance understands both his family’s attachment to the United States and the sense of loss spreading through his community. For Mamaw, love of country stood alongside Christian faith as a source of identity and meaning. That shared devotion helped Vance imagine a future beyond childhood hardship; its apparent disappearance among his neighbors suggested that the community had lost not merely confidence in politics, but a bond that once connected people to one another and to the country.

A Family Faith in the Nation

Mamaw’s patriotism was grounded in family memory and national service, not simply in public symbols. When Vance interviewed her for a school project about World War II, she was proudest of the part she and her family had played in the war. The conversation moved from marriage, children, poverty, and other events in a long life to wartime rationing, Rosie the Riveter, her father’s letters from the Pacific to her mother, and the day the United States dropped the atomic bomb. The hours spent on those subjects gave Vance a vivid measure of what mattered to her: national history was also intimate family history.

Her attachment to the United States belonged beside her Christian faith. Vance describes Mamaw as having two gods, Jesus Christ and the United States of America, and says that he shared this outlook. The comparison does not make patriotism identical to church practice. Mamaw’s faith was personal and suspicious of organized religion, even as she supported churches in Jackson, Kentucky. In a similar way, patriotism appears here less as a formal doctrine than as a belief that the country gives people a place in a larger story and the possibility of better days.

Learned Meaning and Personal Practice

Mamaw and Papaw taught Vance that the United States was the greatest country on earth. That conviction furnished his childhood with a particular kind of hope. When family life became overwhelming, he believed that better days remained possible because he lived in a country where he could make choices that others had not made. In his adult life, he connects that inheritance to the financial security, friendships, new experiences, and loving partner he once could only imagine. His gratitude is not presented as a claim that hardship had been absent; it is a way of understanding how opportunity and personal choices helped him escape some of its consequences.

Vance’s attachment also takes bodily, habitual forms. He says that he chokes up at Lee Greenwood’s anthem “Proud to Be an American,” and that at sixteen he resolved to make a point of shaking every veteran’s hand. He still avoids watching the final scene of Saving Private Ryan with anyone but close friends because it makes him cry. These practices make patriotism personal and emotionally charged: national belonging is renewed through encounters with veterans, popular culture, and remembered sacrifice, rather than remaining an abstract political position.

Community Alienation

The family’s confidence in the country contrasts with Vance’s description of Middletown, where patriotism remained important but no longer seemed to join residents to the wider national life. He argues that family, neighborhood, and community identity drew heavily on love of country. Yet he saw few contemporary figures who could command shared admiration. Barack Obama was widely admired nationally, but many Middletonians regarded him with suspicion; George W. Bush had few local fans, while Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan carried sharply different associations. Residents loved the military, but Vance doubted they could name a senior officer. The space program, once a source of pride, had receded from public prominence along with celebrity astronauts.

This thinning of common reference points coincided with material insecurity. Vance portrays the community as caught between two wars, with a disproportionate share of the fighters coming from its neighborhoods, and an economy unable to provide what he calls the most basic promise of the American Dream: a steady wage. The contrast is consequential. The nation remained an object of family devotion, but many neighbors experienced little connection to the institutions and prosperity that might make national belonging feel reciprocal. For them, patriotism could no longer reliably supply the hope it had supplied to Vance as a child.

Religion, Support, and the Lost Bond

The book distinguishes civic attachment from the practical support that religious communities can provide. In a region affected by manufacturing decline, joblessness, addiction, and broken homes, Vance describes his father’s church as offering concrete help: support for people struggling with alcoholism, housing and classes for expectant mothers, job leads, and introductions. When his father faced financial trouble, the congregation pooled resources to buy the family a used car. These examples show what a functioning community bond can do in daily life. The comparison also sharpens the point about patriotism: shared belief matters most not as a declaration, but when it helps people feel supported and connected.

Vance presents his neighbors’ loss of national identification as something akin to losing a religion. In his account, the country had once inspired people and bound them to their neighbors, much as Mamaw’s patriotism had inspired him. The claim is not that patriotism alone could reverse economic decline or repair family crises. Rather, its erosion forms part of a broader civic and cultural detachment, made especially painful by the absence of a dependable wage and widely shared sources of pride.

Meaning Within the Book

The idea develops through a movement from intimate recollection to social diagnosis. The interview with Mamaw supplies the inherited story: family sacrifice becomes a lasting source of national pride. Vance’s account of his own rituals shows how that inheritance persists into adulthood. His portrait of Middletown then turns the same attachment into a measure of absence, revealing how little common confidence many residents feel even while national loyalty remains part of their identity.

That diagnosis does not end with a simple policy remedy. Vance doubts that problems rooted in family, faith, and culture can be solved like a puzzle, but he argues that people at the margins can receive help when others tilt the balance in their favor. His own life, as he recounts it, depended on many such interventions: his grandparents’ presence, his sister’s protection, his mother’s encouragement of learning, and the care of relatives, teachers, and friends. Patriotism as a civic religion therefore names both an inheritance of hope and a standard against which social abandonment becomes visible. The nation’s promise matters in the book because it gave Vance a way to imagine choices and a future; the community’s estrangement shows how fragile that promise feels when shared bonds and material opportunity fall away.