Surprisingly, Vance departs from MAGA orthodoxy as he tells of his Catholic conversion
Book review: 'Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith' by JD Vance, ★★★★☆
Vice President JD Vance's second book1, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, is primarily a spiritual account, once that focuses on his conversion from the sort of unsophisticiated evangelical Christianity that he inherited as a child from his dysfunctional family to a self-styled atheism to a thoughtful Roman Catholicism. But it’s difficult to read his about his faith journey without thinking about its political implications — and they aren't what you might suspect if all you know about him is the unavoidably restrained vice presidential role he has played as one of President Donald Trump's key supporters.
Unfortunately, nearly all of the book was written before Vance became Trump's running mate in 2024, and it includes very few details of his short career as a U.S. senator before that. So it’s hard to know how, or even if, he reconciles his faith with his current political life, which includes support for policies, such as harsh anti-immigration action, that contradict Catholic social doctrine. But in the time period covered by the book, Vance comes across as sincere, searching and anxious to find ways in which his new faith can provide answers to problems facing American culture as well as personal meaning in light of his troubled upbringing.
Vance suggests that he sees himself in many ways as a Christian in general more than a Catholic per se, but that his choice of Catholicism came about in part because of its distinctives, which include a historical richness that ties the faith to a stable tradition.
Vance’s love for Christianity comes about in part because of what Christians often call its fruits: From Vance's perspective, although he does not see the United States as a Christian nation in some sort of legal sense, he sees its accomplishments as coming a legal system and culture based originally on Christian principles. Christianity, he writes, has been responsible from providing a framework for flourishing in the United States and elsewhere. “It's not a surprise that virtually all the modern theories of government arose in Christian societies,” he writes.
More to the point, he says:
I'm not demanding that you become a Christian, though I'd welcome it. I’m proposing that we have now run an experiment of replacing a Christian culture with something else for decades. And the fruit of that experiment includes rising racial strife, a gender gap among our young people, falling rates of love and partnership, and a society with a declining population.
In one of the most telling comments with political implications, one in which he splits from part of the MAGA political base, he criticizes Republicans and Democrats alike. Republicans, he says, frequently worship the economic markets and assume that they lead to good — when in fact they may lead to negative consequences such as business leaders taking jobs away from honest American workers and shifting them to Asian sweatshops. Several times, he even praises labor unions as helping shift some balance away from businesses and toward the workers. Vance displays a type of populism, one different than Trump’s version of populism.
Of course, Democrats come under fire too: They, he writes, “are far too willing to idolize the self and assume that everything done in the name of self-discovery is good.”
Vance's most entertaining observations in the book are those involving the nation’s culture of elite, of which he of course he has been a part of as a Yale law graduate since well before becoming a senator. His disillusionment with that culture is part of what led him to begin studying Christianity. And, as he tells it, his family life, which includes having three children with his wife, Usha, means far more to him than his social status possibly could. What he implies near the end of his book is even clearer: He cares more about becoming a good father than he does about being a good politician.
That idea comes across in another way as well: Traditional political issues don't seem to capture Vance’s interest in the way that does his concern over young adults living in a culture that fails to value friendship and the kind of connection that leads to the formation of families. Vance may have his views on tariffs and tax policies, but he appears to care far more whether young adults find love.
Where will that lead to in terms of Vance's future as a political leader? It's hard to say. But while the constraints of the office he holds limit his ability to focus on the issues he seems to care about the most, the book suggests that it may well be that a Vance unleashed would be, for better or worse, a surprising kind of politician in terms of the issues he would prioritize.
His first was Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, in which he discusses his upbringing, especially in connection with Appalachian culture.