Driving back to his Marine Corps base in North Carolina alone after attending his grandmother’s funeral, a despondent J. D. Vance was steering through Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains when a combination of slippery roads and bad luck sent his car hurtling toward a guardrail. What came next, he describes as an almost “supernatural experience.” Instead of crashing through the guardrail and sliding off the mountain, the car, he says, mysteriously stopped.
“Even during my later years as a strident atheist, the experience sat there inconveniently in the back of my mind,” Vance writes in his new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. “It was as if it existed to annoy me, to challenge the confidence I had in the laws of the universe and the idea that I sat firmly—and alone—in life’s driver’s seat.”
Communion, a copy of which I obtained in advance of its release tomorrow, reads as a sequel to Vance’s first book, Hillbilly Elegy. It is billed as a conversion narrative, a reflection on Vance’s 2019 embrace of Catholicism. In an interview, Vance told me that he believes it is appropriate for political leaders “to talk about what influences them, what motivates them, what inspires them.” He added that there is a certain “humility and grace” required of political leaders and said it was his aim to project those things in the book.
A memoir is a rite of passage for anyone contemplating a run for president. Vance’s first book catapulted him to prominence with its portrait of working-class white America. In the decade since it was published, however, much has changed—both for the country and for Vance.
Communion also tells the story of Vance’s other conversion: from ardent Never Trumper to Donald Trump’s vice president, a shift that he argues was driven not by ambition but by the belief that Trump had proved himself an effective president. Not that he expects everyone to believe that. “To my critics, it was a politically cynical maneuver to gain political power. I doubt I’ll ever change their minds,” he writes.
Much of the book is a rumination on matters ethical and spiritual—a perhaps not-so-subtle way to show how he’s different from the man currently in the White House, whose office Vance is widely expected to seek two years from now. Although the book doesn’t directly address whether the vice president intends to run in 2028, it offers some clues, including a notably softer tone than Vance has frequently employed when doing digital battle with opponents on social media. And the man whom White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles dubbed a “conspiracy theorist” is not much in evidence.
But Vance does venture beyond his own faith journey to offer commentary on the spiritual health of the country, much of it in line with diagnoses popular among the religious right. He describes America as a nation that has lost its Christian foundations, and he calls Christianity “America’s creed” while allowing that one doesn’t have to be Christian to be an American. Both political parties, he writes, are “guilty of casting aside the Christian inheritance of our civilization.” This, he adds, has had an impact on issues such as marriage rates and population: “Our abandonment of Christian culture has coincided with an apparent decline in our collective will to live.”
I told him that I noticed a tonal difference between what he writes in the book and what he’s projected to the world, especially in some of his hyper-partisan posts on social media. Even compared with the first book, he curses less in this one. Vance told me he’s trying to reduce his use of profanity. Is that, I asked, an effort to appeal to a broader group of voters? “I definitely curse like a sailor,” he responded, sidestepping the question while noting that his habit is not ideal with young kids at home and a wife who’d prefer fewer obscenities. “I’ve tried to cut back on that.”
The book traces Vance’s path from religious drift and skepticism of faith during his younger years to his eventual embrace of Catholicism. He writes of an upbringing in which faith was deep-rooted, but also untethered from the Church. “Our family attended church very rarely,” he writes. “Our faith was amorphous, tied to family and oral traditions and not to institutional orthodoxy.” Many of his foundational religious memories center on his grandmother, whom he calls Mamaw and who largely raised Vance. He describes her religion as unconventional. “She loved to say the f-word, and when she died she owned nineteen loaded handguns,” he writes of the woman who is at the heart of Hillbilly Elegy. “Mamaw’s God suited her: loving and forgiving, but tough, demanding, and possibly packing.”
At one point, Vance acknowledges that his grandmother believed abortion should be legal and felt that the government should stay out of a woman’s business—a striking contrast to his own self-described “100 percent pro-life” views, which have shifted in their specifics over time. Vance describes over the course of his childhood and adolescence bouncing among Pentecostal and Southern Baptist congregations, all of them broadly conservative. “I didn’t know then about the various theological differences between these churches,” he writes. “Nor did I know of the host of mainline Protestant denominations whose teachings aligned more closely with the American Left than the Right.”
Catholicism, he writes, was foreign to him, but its teachings, as he got older, began to engage him on an intellectual level “more than anything I’d seen in either the secular or religious worlds I’d previously operated in.” He also describes a “rich social tradition” of Catholicism, which fostered in him a deeper understanding about relationships with others, but also with himself. “This resonated with me,” he writes.
I was interested to know how he squares this concept of a Christian creed in America with the First Amendment guarantee of separation between Church and state. He pointed to the founding of the country, when many of the original colonies had officially established churches. “There was this recognition that public religion would have a significant role in public life,” Vance told me. “We just didn’t want Congress mandating or requiring religion, or really getting involved at the federal level in questions of faith.”
He insisted that Christian teachings can complement American life. He told me he also embraced the notion that “different people could come at different truths with some broad understanding, but also some disagreement. And that dynamism was, I think, very much part of the American founding too.”
After publishing Hillbilly Elegy in 2016, Vance writes, he found a “comfortable niche as a Trump skeptic.” He was criticizing Trump “from a conservative perspective while defending his voters,” he writes in Communion. (The account soft-pedals the extent of Vance’s discomfort with Trump, whom he referred to in 2016 as “reprehensible” and an “idiot” who could well become “America’s Hitler.” In a story 10 years ago for this magazine, Vance wrote that Trump was “cultural heroin.”) Vance explains his stance then in the context of “social rituals” of political commentary: “I was rewarded for saying bad things about Donald Trump even though my background and politics made me an odd fit for elite media culture.”
“Trump criticism,” he adds, “functioned as social immunity.”
But he noticed that his family and friends back in Ohio and Kentucky supported Trump overwhelmingly and were unbothered by his coarse approach to communication. Vance came to believe that he needed to focus less on the “stylistic element” of Trump and pay more attention to his policies. “Part of the reason the anti-Trump conservatives hated Donald Trump,” he says, revisiting comments he made to The New York Times, “was that he represented a threat to a way of doing things in this country that has been very good for them.” Vance voted for Trump in his losing 2020 bid.
By the time Vance ran for Senate in 2022, he was fully on board with Trumpism, perpetuating the then-former president’s claims of a stolen election, downplaying the gravity of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and claiming that Democrats had encouraged illegal immigration to grow their support base. With Trump’s backing, he won. He recalls being stunned two years later to make Trump’s vice-presidential shortlist, given that he was a white senator from a non-swing state, and describes enduring a somewhat jarring vetting process that scrutinized everything, including his marriage (“Have you cheated on your wife?” he says he was asked, in a conversation that included his wife).
Usha, his wife, is Hindu. But Vance credits her with propelling him on his journey back to Christianity, through her openness to exploring the world and challenging received ideas and teachings. There is, he writes, “at least a little irony in the fact that my non-Christian wife helped lead me back to my own Christian faith, and then made it possible for me to discuss the journey on paper. The Lord works in mysterious ways, indeed.”
Vance blends together his reflections on faith and politics in Communion, not least in his discussion of the Vatican, an institution with which Vance has been unafraid to tangle. He briefly mentions his meeting last year with Pope Francis, whom he says was more frail than he had expected. (Francis died a day after the meeting.) He also reflects on his conversation with Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who was then viewed as a favorite to be the next pope. He writes that he found the conversations “unsettling” because the Vatican’s criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration policies struck him as disconnected from the hard choices involved in governance. Vatican officials acknowledged America’s right to secure its borders while also urging humane treatment of migrants, but didn’t seem to Vance to recognize just how difficult it was to balance the two. “Here I was, the most senior Catholic in the United States government, and the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes,” he writes.
The Vatican’s stance has become a more direct point of tension under Pope Leo XIV, the first American pontiff. Since his election in May, Leo has emerged as a sharp critic of the administration’s immigration policies and its approach to the war with Iran, prompting Vance to publicly defend the White House.
At a Turning Point USA event at the University of Georgia in April, he admonished the pope to be “careful when he talks about matters of theology,” after the pope posted on social media that anyone who is a disciple of Christ “is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” The pope’s comments were widely interpreted as criticism of the Iran war—a conflict that Trump launched despite his vice president’s reservations. Leo has also urged Catholics to heed U.S. bishops’ calls for a more humane approach to immigration, arguing that people who have spent years or decades building lives in America deserve to be treated with dignity.
In the book, Vance tries to reconcile his record on immigration—which has included spreading unverified rumors about immigrants in Ohio eating pets—with his Christian beliefs. “Real engagement with the immigration issue requires real engagement with the trade-offs. Law enforcement is an inherently difficult business,” he writes. “The difficulty is applying these principles in a messy world with competing values.”
In recent months, Trump’s once-impenetrable MAGA coalition has begun to show cracks, with divisions emerging over the Iran war and the Epstein files, among other things. I asked Vance if he feels well placed to bridge those divides, both as a possible Trump heir and as a onetime Never Trumper. His answer was carefully calibrated to avoid alienating Trump: “The president is the person most uniquely placed, obviously, as the leader of the party and the leader of the movement,” he told me.
If Vance runs in 2028, he’ll have to reckon with how he’s applied his principles during his service to Trump. Ingratiating himself with the man who has dominated Republican politics for the past decade once seemed an expedient political bet—but not anymore, as Trump’s popularity falters. The vice president will soon need to decide how loyal he can afford to be. His latest conversions may not be his last.
Vivian Salama
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