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At the close of his RNC speech accepting his party’s nomination for vice president in July, then-Senator J. D. Vance lingered on the specific patch of earth where he hoped he would one day be buried.

“Honey, I come with $120,000 worth of law-school debt and a cemetery plot on a mountainside in eastern Kentucky,” he said, recounting how he had proposed to his wife, Usha. If they were to eventually be interred there, he explained, they would mark the sixth generation of his family buried in the region he called his “ancestral home”: Appalachia.

Since the release of his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance’s ties to Appalachia have been a perennial topic of discussion. His connection to the region, some assumed, conferred credibility to speak on behalf of Americans who felt they had been left behind, in Appalachia and elsewhere; many saw in his book’s depiction of poverty and addiction an explanation for why the “white working class” had fled the Democratic Party and backed Donald Trump in such great numbers. Others pointed out that Vance had in fact grown up in Middletown, Ohio, about 200 miles away from his family’s “ancestral home” and burial plot; they bristled at his bootstrap politics and claimed that Hillbilly Elegy didn’t reflect the Appalachia they knew.

In advance of the 2024 election, the debate over Vance’s identity returned with heightened stakes. Donald Trump had picked Vance as his running mate at least in part because his “hillbilly” credentials could appeal to the voters his book purported to represent. Then, of course, there was the factual matter: Appalachia, many assumed, was a region like New England or the Pacific Northwest; you were either from there, or you weren’t. The day after Vance’s nomination-acceptance speech, the New York Times standards desk weighed in, issuing guidance to its staff that clarified that he was not “from Appalachia.” The memo, obtained by the reporter Justin Baragona, concludes by cautioning journalists against “anything that suggests he grew up there or is a son of Appalachia.”

But ever since it was first defined as a region in the late 19th century, Appalachia has always existed as much in myth as in literal geography. A simple adjudication of Vance’s ties overlooks a complicated history of what “being Appalachian” really means in America.

The term Appalachian America is believed to have been coined by William Goodell Frost, an Ohio educator who served as president of Kentucky’s Berea College from 1892 to 1920. Berea had been founded by an abolitionist and was intended to function as a racially integrated, coeducational liberal-arts college, the first in the South. But after a 1904 Kentucky law required that schools in the state be segregated, Frost pivoted the college’s mission toward educating the population he had called, in an 1899 Atlantic essay, “our contemporary ancestors”—the white inhabitants of Kentucky’s mountainous east. In his article, Frost recounts traveling through the area and being shocked by how its inhabitants lived. With their rudimentary homes and blood feuds, the mountain folk were, in his words, “an anachronism.” “Appalachian America may be useful as furnishing a fixed point which enables us to measure the progress of the moving world!” he wrote. He had invented a region, one principally defined not by its place on a map but by its position in history: the past.

Over the next decades, Frost’s conception gelled in the American mind. Appalachia came to represent an area spread loosely across the mountain range of the same name—portions of Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee—but distinguished (at least in the eyes of outsiders) by its backwardness. In one 1929 Atlantic story, the writer Charles Morrow Wilson suggested that the region remained trapped in Elizabethan England, with a dialect and social mores that were centuries out of date. And in the 1960s, the Kentucky lawyer Harry M. Caudill turbocharged Frost’s ideas with a series of Atlantic articles and best-selling books that helped make the region synonymous with poverty.

Caudill, not unlike Vance, became an overnight celebrity. The success of his books, his son James told me, drew visitors from all across the country and even abroad; they were eager to see the desperation he described up close, and an obliging Caudill led “poverty tours” through the valleys around Whitesburg, where he lived. Caudill’s writing fleshed out stereotypes for the people Frost had diagnosed as backward: They were poor but scrappy, suspicious of outsiders but fiercely loyal to their families, unsophisticated but endowed with a certain sort of folk wisdom.

Driven in part by Caudill’s writing, Congress finally affixed Appalachia to a map in 1965, creating the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) and tasking it with dispersing federal funds across a list of counties deemed sufficiently Appalachian. With money up for grabs, states wanted in. Included in the commission’s charter are decidedly mountainless counties in northern Mississippi; an advocate for the state had even submitted a doctored map as evidence, drawing in mountains with a fine-point pen. The ARC’s list of counties, which stretches from Mississippi into upstate New York, constitutes America’s “official” definition of Appalachia today.

It’s true that Vance’s hometown isn’t included in the ARC’s charter, which the Times memo references to justify classifying Vance as not “from” the region. But the charter’s list is so expansive as to be meaningless. In a 1981 survey of college students in and around the ARC’s definition of Appalachia, fewer than 20 percent identified New York and Mississippi as part of the region.

Perhaps whether or not Americans consider someone to be “from” Appalachia has less to do with where that person grew up on a map than with their embodiment or rejection of the myths we associate with the region—and, at least in some cases, with how those myths can serve our political priorities. One popular T-shirt in support of the Trump-Vance ticket read “It’s Gonna Take a Felon and a Hillbilly to Fix This,” as if the experience of Appalachian hardship afforded Vance a unique ability to tame inflation. But to strip from Vance his Appalachianness is to make a political argument, too—that his perspective is closer to that of the Silicon Valley billionaires with whom he associates than an unemployed coal miner in West Virginia.

At the RNC, Vance invoked his Appalachian burial ground to challenge the notion that America was built on an idea; instead, he argued, you were an American if your ancestors had been buried in America, and if, over generations, they had fought and died for America. “That’s not just an idea, my friends; that’s not just a set of principles,” he said. “That is a homeland—that is our homeland.” He used his ties to the land to make a political argument of his own, to advance a nationalism rooted in the soil of a cemetery plot and the bones of the people buried there. His rejection of America as a nation of ideas was itself based on an idea—that of Appalachia.

I’m a hard target for Ross Douthat’s evangelism. When I got a copy of his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I felt an impulse to answer, Nope: Why You Should Leave Everyone Alone. I come from a family of atheists and am a lifelong nonbeliever. At difficult times I’ve tried very hard to cross the river into the kingdom of faith—read the Jewish Bible and the New Testament, attended church and temple services, immersed myself in Kierkegaard, and stared at the sky for a flicker of divinity. None of it made any difference. The universe remains random, empty, cold. We’re alone in the dark, nothing means anything until we give it meaning, and death is the end. These are comfortless facts, but I’ve come to accept and even, at times, embrace them, with no desire to disenchant anyone else.  

Douthat came to religion through his parents’ New England Protestantism, which took a turn during his childhood from the mainline to the charismatic. His own systematic thinking and interest in the workings of worldly power led him to become a conservative Catholic. When The New York Times hired him as a columnist, he asked me for advice, which in itself showed his open-mindedness. I suggested that, as a precocious Harvard-educated blogger for this magazine, he should make sure now and then to get out of the world of precocious bloggers and talk with people unlike him—to report on the rest of the country. Douthat didn’t follow my advice, and he was probably right not to. His own mind, nourished by innate curiosity and wide reading, has become the most interesting site in the landscape of Times opinion. I read him, with admiration and annoyance, religiously.

But Believe suffers from the limitations of Douthat’s brilliance. He has absorbed a good deal of recent literature on cosmology, physics, neuroscience, and supernaturalism, and he devotes most of the book to arguing that scientific knowledge makes the existence of God more rather than less likely. Douthat is speaking to the well-educated contemporary reader who requires a rational case for religion, and among his key words are reasonable, sensible, and empirical. Belief, in Believe, isn’t a leap of faith marked by paradox, contradiction, or wild surmise; it’s a matter of mastering the research and figuring the odds. If brain chemistry hasn’t located the exact site of consciousness, that doesn’t suggest the extent of what human beings know—it’s evidence for the existence of the soul.

Douthat guides the reader through the science toward God with a gentle but insistent intellectualism that leaves this nonbeliever wanting less reason and more inspiration. I can’t follow him into his Middle Earth kingdom of angels, demons, and elves just because a book he’s read shows that a universe in which life is possible has a one in 10-to-the-120th-power chance of being random. We don’t fall in love because someone has made a plausible case for being great together. Some mysteries neither reason nor religion can explain.

[Read: Why did this progressive evangelical church fall apart?]

The rational, speculative approach of Believe comes to an end in its last pages, when the authoritarianism that underlies Douthat’s, and perhaps all, religion, suddenly shows its face. He adopts a darker tone as he asks what you will do if you’ve guessed wrong—if God turns out to exist and is waiting on the other side to punish you for failing to get the point of Douthat’s book. “What account will you give of yourself if the believers turn out to have been right all along?” he demands—and then goes on to portray nonbelievers as shallow, mentally lazy, and status-obsessed, too concerned with sounding clever at a dinner party to see the obvious Truth:

That you took pointlessness for granted in a world shot through with signs of meaning and design? That you defaulted to unbelief because that seemed like the price of being intellectually serious or culturally respectable? That you were too busy to be curious, too consumed with things you knew to be passing to cast a prayer up to whatever eternity awaits?

This move—a dubious assumption that imputes unflattering qualities to the opposition and stacks the deck in Douthat’s favor—is familiar from some of his columns, and it brings Believe closer to his political journalism. Throughout the book Douthat the divine has a reflexive habit of belittling nonbelief in the same way that Douthat the columnist disparages liberalism. He repeatedly sneers at “Official Knowledge,” the capital letters suggesting that scientific materialism is some sort of conspiracy of the legacy media and the deep state. He accuses atheists of taking the easy way out, of claiming to be serious grown-ups when their worldview is irresponsible and childish: “It is the religious perspective that asks you to bear the full weight of being human.” But even in Douthat’s own account, religion is driven by hedonistic self-interest, for it promises an escape from the suffering of this world, and it conditions the offer on a desire to avoid pain in the next. The humanist view that we have only one another in an instant of eternity—that this life, with all its heartache, is all we’re given—raises the stakes of love and imposes sacrifice beyond anything imaginable to a believer in the afterlife.

Believe appears at a moment when nonbelief seems to be running out of gas. Douthat’s purpose is to hasten the process. “Already the time of the new atheism is passing,” he writes; “already mystery and magic and enchantment seem to be rushing back into the world.” He has been predicting this for some time, and he is almost certainly right. Large numbers of people throughout the West feel that liberal society and the bureaucratic state are failing—not just to provide practical benefits but to offer meaning and community. Secular liberalism is not the same as atheism, but disillusionment with the former seems to be driving modern people into a new period of anti-rationalism and mysticism, with a growing distrust of established science, a leveling off of the percentage of nonbelieving Americans, and a trend toward public figures making high-profile conversions—to Christianity, in the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the atheist refugee from repressive Islam; to Catholicism, in the case of J. D. Vance and others. Christopher Hitchens is dead and UFO sightings are on the rise.

[Read: Evangelicals made a bad trade]

President Donald Trump himself, whose first 78 years were nearly unmarked by signs of faith, has sworn a newfound religiosity since his near assassination. God saved him to make America great again, he has said several times, so “let’s bring religion back.” Days before Believe was published, Trump announced the creation of a Justice Department task force to root out anti-Christian bias, as well as a White House Faith Office, led by Paula White-Cain, Trump’s religious adviser, who has said that opposing him means opposing God. (This kind of theocratic edict has turned a generation of young Iranians against religion.) The president’s more ardent followers regard him as a kind of mythic figure, above history and politics, leading by spiritual power that connects him directly to the people. By this light, faith is inseparable from authoritarianism.

Believe is not a political book, but it would be naive to imagine that Douthat’s evangelism has no political implications. He acknowledges that the book could be “a work of Christian apologetics in disguise,” and his invitation to religion in general leads predictably to a case for Christianity in particular, preferably of the conservative-Catholic variety. In his columns he draws no bright line between religion and politics: Contemporary America is decadent, liberalism has famished our souls, and any renewal depends on faith—not New Ageism, not progressive Protestantism, but religion of a traditional, illiberal cast. Douthat has carried on a years-long flirtation with MAGA, endorsing many of its policies while hedging his personal dislike of Trump against his antipathy toward the opposition. (He refused to disclose his choice in the most recent election, which seems like a misdemeanor for a political columnist.) Douthat hasn’t gone as far as the head of the new White House Faith Office, but when he calls Trump a “man of destiny,” it isn’t easy to extricate his metaphysical leanings from his partisan ones.

Douthat wants you to abandon secular liberalism and become a believer at a moment when democracy is under assault from a phalanx of right-wing ideas, some of them religious. That is not a reason to believe or not to believe, for belief needs no reason. But it should make you pause and think before following Douthat on the path to his promised land.