Why JD Vance's Graveyard Visits Are Not What You Think

JD Vance and his new book Communion are our focus, specifically his claim that when he speaks to his dead relatives at his family cemetery in Kentucky, they answer back. We examine his own words defending prayers to saints as "consulting dead people" and trace this belief to the ancient lie of the immortal soul.

We open Vance's book and let him describe, in his own words, what happens when he visits his family graveyard: he assigns each of four dead relatives a spiritual specialty and believes they answer him, even if only as a vapor. We then take this claim to the law and the testimony, working through the state of the dead in scripture, from Genesis 3:4's first lie through Ecclesiastes, Job, Psalms, and the words of Jesus and Paul, to show that the dead know not anything and sleep until the resurrection.

We also look at Saul and the witch of Endor as the biblical case study for what really happens when someone consults the dead, quote Ellen White's warning in The Great Controversy about spirits impersonating loved ones, and connect Vance's defense of consulting the dead to his separate defense of state-enforced sacred days in the same book, showing how both errors were described together over a century ago as one end-time strategy.

0:00 Vance's graveyard confessions
3:00 The dead say something back
6:23 Consulting dead people defended
10:05 Bullet and casing theology
13:41 Genesis 3:4, the first lie
15:51 What is man, biblically
18:04 Who alone is immortal
19:41 The dead know not anything
25:19 Lazarus and Christian sermons
26:23 Hebrews 11, no one ahead
27:23 1 Thessalonians, comfort with hope
28:50 Rest, the doctrine's mercy
29:58 Two great errors combined
31:29 Isaiah's test has no exemptions
32:10 Saul consults a familiar spirit