Vance’s Faith Memoir Evidences America’s ‘Invigorated Public Christianity’

NASHVILLE — Little over a decade ago, J.D. Vance was an atheist Yale Law School graduate obsessed with pursuing achievement in private life. Today he is a United States vice president who professes faith in Christ and rejects upward mobility as a means of fulfillment. Things have changed.

Vance explains the change in his book “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” released this summer.

“What started my journey back to my faith,” he writes, “was that Christianity bore the best fruit. It was the set of ideas and practices that generated the most good, the most truth, and the most beauty of anything I’d encountered. Nothing else came close.”

Vance’s journey aligns with an emerging resurgence of Christian thinking in American society, theologians and sociologists say. That resurgence affects the way Americans view church, family and career, and it could help frame the 2028 presidential election, where Vance is expected to be a leading Republican contender.

Vance’s faith memoir “speaks to a cultural moment,” said Andrew Walker, a Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor who reviewed a prepublication copy of the book at the vice president’s request. “For the last 15-20 years, we were told Christianity is going to be on the margins of society, so prepare to be banished from polite society. We’re actually seeing, in many ways, an invigorated public Christianity in general. In specific, this book bears witness to that reality.”

Countering socialism

Vance’s faith journey began in childhood with exposure to Southern Baptist and Pentecostal versions of Christianity that struck him as simplistic and disconnected from reality. During military service and law school, Vance drifted into what he classifies as atheism.

But while fixated on achieving elite professional status, he writes, “I eventually realized that elite professional life demands a disconnection from much of what makes us human.” That realization – along with Bible reading, books by C.S. Lewis and a dose of marriage and family – led Vance to profess faith in Jesus. He was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church in 2019.

The book may draw mixed reviews from evangelicals. Along with its positive assessment of Christianity, it includes coarse language, an apparent affirmation of premarital cohabitation, praise of Roman Catholicism and a relative lack of reference to any personal relationship with Jesus.

Still, a sitting vice president’s affirmation of Christianity could indicate the direction America’s spiritual winds are blowing, said Richard Land, former president of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

“I’m delighted that the vice president of the United States is interested enough in spiritual things to write a book about his engagement with spiritual things,” Land said. “The fact he’s the vice president encourages me that there are millions of Americans that are still similarly interested in spiritual things.”

That reality carries particular importance amid ascending socialism in the U.S., Land said, with candidates associated with the Democratic Socialists of America winning congressional and statewide Democratic primary elections in Florida, Michigan, New York, Colorado and elsewhere this year.

Vance’s book “makes me hope that the debate will deepen as we see this boomlet of democratic socialism,” Land said, and that more people will seek “answers from a spiritual perspective, because in the end, socialism, when you boil it down, is Marxism. And Marxism and Christianity are two fundamentally different worldviews.”

In some ways, Vance’s Christian testimony “is not representative of the median American religious experience,” said Ryan Burge, a data analyst on religion and politics.

“The return to serious religion, the move from evangelicalism into Catholicism and the attempt to construct a comprehensive Christian worldview all require a level of intentionality that is relatively uncommon,” said Burge, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis.

But does Vance’s story also hint at emerging trends? Burge thinks so.

“Pieces of his story do intersect with things worth watching,” he said, “especially the stabilization of religiosity among young men and the increasingly strong connection between religion, marriage, family and a search for meaning.”

Resonance with evangelicals?

While polls do not show “a broad return to religion among young men,” Burge said, younger men are attending church at higher rates than their older counterparts, and “Gen Z men look at least as religious as Gen Z women in several measures.”

As in Vance’s experience, “marriage, children and religion are tightly intertwined” for many Americans, Burge said, with marriage and children increasing a person’s likelihood of attending church regularly. Studies also show that “committed religion” shapes how people think about “politics, sexuality and a host of other issues.”

Land thinks Vance’s Christian worldview could resonate with evangelical voters in 2028. Walker agrees, arguing the vice president’s Roman Catholicism may not turn off evangelicals because “he’s not wholly disrespectful” toward evangelicalism and “knows its language, knows its people.”

Vance’s departure from evangelicalism is not “a difference of substance on matters of … moral convictions,” Walker said. It “has more to do with him searching for a faith that met his intellectual template and profile better.”

If Baptists and other evangelicals want to see whether they agree with Walker’s analysis, he urges them to read the book.

“I would encourage Southern Baptists to pick up a book by someone who we would obviously have major and substantive disagreement with on the nature of the church and the nature of saving faith. But this book evidences a very robust and sincere wrestling with the claims of Christian faith by what is obviously a very top-tier intellectual.”