The American novelist Elmore Leonard once explained that he sought to “remain invisible when writing a book” so he could “show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story.” Journalist Tom LoBianco did not take this approach in writing Piety & Power, his biography of Vice President Mike Pence. Indeed, this is not so much a book about Mike Pence as one about LoBianco’s view of Pence. And Tom LoBianco evidently does not like Mike Pence.
LoBianco’s manifest distaste for Pence obscures what is otherwise an informative account of the vice president’s enigmatic personality, earnest religious convictions, and hard-won political ascendancy. While President Trump’s volatile temperament is daily on display in his tweets, Pence appears reserved, formal, and somewhat calculating. Love or hate Trump, many Americans feel like they understand him by now. Pence seems indecipherable by comparison. Is he a pathetic errand boy, futilely trying to keep up with Trump’s erratic behavior? Is Pence the Svengali of the administration, pulling the levers of power, as many believed Dick Cheney did under George W. Bush? Or is he basically a decent man and traditional politician who occasionally becomes a bit queasy on Trump’s roller-coaster ride?
LoBianco prefers the errand boy narrative. He casts Pence as a tragic figure who once embraced Christian convictions (antiquated as those values may be to LoBianco) but who has given up virtually all principle to defend an ungrateful Trump. His Pence has gone through several stages of self-fashioning, from establishment Republican hatchet man to sanctimonious Christian conservative to Trumpian lackey.
LoBianco steers the reader constantly toward the conclusion that most of what Pence has done is disturbing or weaselly. The influence of many of the important people in Pence’s life has been malign. Take John Gable, the leader of the Christian fellowship group at Hanover College through which Pence became a convert to the evangelical faith. Gable, the “shepherd” of the group, was more “wizened” [sic] than the freshman Pence. Gable “occasionally plucked one of his favorites from the flock to take over,” LoBianco says. “In 1978, he picked Pence.”
Pence wanted a gold cross such as the one that Gable wore. “It would make him a Christian,” LoBianco says, in a characteristically patronizing comment. (Does any believer think that wearing a cross makes them a Christian?) In any case, Gable almost immediately vanishes from the book after he allegedly “took over” Pence. Yet Pence went with his fellowship group in 1978 to the Ichthus Music Festival, an annual hippie-style Christian assembly put on by Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky. At the festival, Pence said that he “made a personal decision to trust Jesus Christ as my Savior.” He was born again, which also made him, in LoBianco’s telling, a “Fundamentalist.”
Although evangelicals and fundamentalists have deep theological disagreements, LoBianco generally uses the terms as synonyms. The only doctrines in which LoBianco shows much-sustained interest are those of dispensationalism, the end-times prophecy system which ostensibly inclines Pence to support Israel in hopes of hastening the second coming of Jesus Christ. It is not clear that Pence actually embraces dispensationalism, but he does speak in biblical phrases when addressing pro-Israel groups, as one might expect an evangelical Republican to do.
LoBianco’s Pence is not self-assured enough to be Trump’s Svengali. But Pence’s own Svengali, at least until Trump came on stage, is his wife Karen. According to LoBianco, she gave him the focus and drive he needed to become a successful politician. The Pences’ relationship has been the subject of much attention and scorn already because of the vice president’s adherence to the “Billy Graham rule” of never meeting women other than one’s wife in private settings.
Even some evangelical women have raised legitimate questions about the rule (aren’t female colleagues more than just potential partners in extramarital affairs?). But when it comes to his relationship with Karen, Pence could never win LoBianco’s approval no matter what he did. So, Pence tries really hard (if ham-handedly) to be faithful to his wife? He constantly listens to her, even in the midst of his hectic schedule as Indiana governor and vice president? I suspect many American women would prefer Pence’s qualities as a husband to those of Pence’s boss. But LoBianco apparently finds their relationship bizarre. He seems particularly aghast at the antique-style red phone that Pence has often kept on his desk. Only Karen has the number for it.
Most readers will find the story of Trump’s selection of Pence as vice president the most engaging section of the book. LoBianco seems to have discovered new evidence about the improbable circumstances that led the mercurial Trump finally to pick Pence, in spite of Trump’s opinion that Pence was kind of a “loser.” Pence’s aides convinced Trump that Pence would remove his name from consideration as vice president if Trump didn’t stop wavering about the pick and announce. Trump didn’t like the idea of losing Pence as an option and agreed to go ahead. Would a tweet do the trick? Absolutely, Pence’s aides enthused. These negotiations probably took Pence over the finish line, allowing him to beat out former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
Trump’s domination of his presidency has probably caused us to underestimate the extent to which Pence galvanized the GOP’s white evangelical base in 2016. We have heard endless chatter about the “81% of evangelicals” — meaning self-identified white evangelical voters — who voted for Trump. But many of those voters had supported Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio in the primaries, and some were troubled by Trump’s personal traits and his lack of traditional conservative credentials. Chris Christie wouldn’t have assuaged those concerns. Most white evangelicals were not going to defect to Hillary Clinton, but they could have stayed home. Whether that would have turned the election to Clinton is unclear, but Trump’s choice of Pence certainly boosted his credibility with Republican stalwarts.
Whether you think this is a good or bad thing depends on what you think about having Trump in power. LoBianco leaves no doubt as to his view.
Thomas S. Kidd is the Vardaman Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University and an author, most recently of Who Is an Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis.
