In ‘Communion,’ Vice President Vance Mixes Political Manifesto With Spiritual Memoir

(ANALYSIS) J.D. Vance has lately written two books but, somewhat awkwardly, combined both within the same covers. The result is “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” a fascinating document for obvious reasons. But neither of the two parts is fully realized or satisfying.

The 41-year-old Veep follows up his best-selling 2016 book “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” with its childhood “chaos,” brushes with poverty and abuse, drug-addled mother, absent father and emergency upbringing by his beloved and profane “Mamaw” (as his grandmother was known).

In sector one, “Communion” provides a truncated once-over on selected political issues in a customary though unusually religious campaign book that everyone assumes anticipates the vice president’s 2028 run to succeed President Trump. This material barely begins to explain and justify the range of public issues on which Vance is a major player. For instance, readers surely would expect more depth on this Catholic’s newsworthy contentions with the Vatican and American bishops on war and immigration.

The media tend to slight his second sector, a truly intriguing story of a pilgrim’s spiritual progress. Again, many would like to learn more at greater length. Vance’s youth involved haphazard brushes with evangelical-fundamentalist-Southern Baptist-Pentecostal-independent-King-James-Only kinds of churches, then a decade as an “arrogant atheist” while a U.S. Marine, student at Ohio State and Yale Law School, and a young careerist, and further reflection culminating in 2019 baptism as a celebrated adult convert to the Catholic Church. By 2023, he was a United States senator and in 2024 Trump’s surprise running mate.

There are strong reactions from cradle Catholics unimpressed by their newborn co-religionist. Lurking behind this, no doubt, is wariness over his more famous conversion. The present professions of spiritual change come from a man who was once harshly contemptuous toward Trump, then turned worshipful supporter, and was rewarded with the vice presidency in which such supplication is the job description.

Steven Millies of Chicago’s Catholic Theological blesses Joe Biden-y Catholicism and thinks Vance offers a “strange account of Catholic faith” while observing that he “both craves elite status and is repelled by it.” On that, Vance himself candidly admits his younger self was plagued by an “arrogant desire to rise above others” and obsessed with achievement, “not to accomplish something meaningful but to win a social competition.”

Gerard Baker, former editor-in-chief and now columnist at The Wall Street Journal, admits converts can be “a little unnerving.” Regarding this one, he carps that “whenever his newly Catholic conscience is in conflict with his political priorities” the latter “wins every time.”

That’s nothing compared with the corrosive Kevin Williamson, an anti-Trump National Review conservative now at The Dispatch. He dismisses “Communion” as a “half-baked story about his religious wanderings” that is “phony, tacky and cheap,” with an “insincerity” that is “comically transparent,” from a writer who dragoons the angels to serve Trump’s “grotesque and infernal project.”

Naturally, Vance gets more respect from tradition-minded Catholic Bishop Robert Barron at First Things. He summarizes the Vance saga thusly: “He was a success addict, or rather, an approval addict, and his heart was still utterly restless” till he found solid footing in Christianity and then its Catholic expression.

This writer seeks to set aside the bitterly polarized politics of the Trump epoch, and takes Vance at his word in the religious narrative. By 2013, he had become not a Christian but “Christian curious.”

The early stirrings were intellectual. He figured that of all the cultural options, Christianity “generated the most good, the most truth and the most beauty. … Nothing else came close.” Only gradually did he contemplate worship of Jesus Christ as the Son of God and Savior. Personalities like billionaire Peter Thiel and his “best friend,” the martyred evangelical activist Charlie Kirk, nudged him along, plus some wise Catholic priests.

Given Vance’s biography, one can psychologize that among competing churches Catholicism represented authority, continuity and stability, though he had to wrestle with bishops’ “deep institutional neglect” on priestly molesters. In pondering politics, he was especially impressed by Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical on social and economic justice, Rerum Novarum.

Negative aspects from his boyhood were a factor, and here the conservative Protestants whose vote he needs in 2028 should pay close attention. Modern Protestantism is increasingly cursed with church vagabondage. Young Vance put in sporadic time with an assortment of churches but his formative experience was watching TV preachers with his Bible-believing Mamaw, who despised them (except Billy Graham) and felt no actual church was worth the bother.

He recalls “silent rage” when teaching on the End Times or issues like euthanasia and abortion overcame local folks’ pressing needs. He resisted pulpit “bromides” and became “sick of” the “overwrought emotion” during worship. Church insistence that God created planet Earth 6,000 years ago was not ideal intellectual backgrounding for this future college grad. And the churches he knew sidestepped the unavoidable problem of why God allows suffering. Only in maturity did he learn Christians across the ages, and the Bible itself, struggled with such doubts. He was drawn to atheism not by intellectual arguments but “sadness and a sense of betrayal.”

Vance is often branded a “Christian nationalist,” a slippery term at best. Vance explains that he’s “not demanding that you become a Christian, though I’d welcome it.” Instead, he says the West has for decades now “run an experiment of replacing a Christian culture with something else” and the results include increased racial strife, a gender gap, falling rates of youthful love and partnership, and – a fervent worry – falling birth rates that will eventually replace hope with doom.

When Vance undertook consistent church attendance for the first time in his life, his Hindu wife Usha encouraged this saying he became a better guy. The advent of their first child sealed the Christian commitment. One would have welcomed detail about interreligious discussions with Usha, a person he so deeply loves and admires. Unlike her husband, she embraces legal practice and excels at it. She’s been a clerk for Chief Justic Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh, no less.

In the end, Vance is a work in progress — as all Christians ought to be. The Veep never quite reconciled with his father before he died. But there’s a “second chance” with his long-troubled mother, now substance-free and happily part of the family circle doting on her grandkids.

A closing admonition to Harper: Next time you publish a memoir by a potential POTUS, spend a little money on an index.