Anyone who tells you religion and politics don’t mix is either a fool or a knave. J.D. Vance is nobody’s fool. Early in his new book, Communion, he makes the politico-religious point very directly:
What I saw around me, and what started my journey back to my faith, was that Christianity bore the best fruit. It was the set of ideas and practices that generated the most good, the most truth, the most beauty of anything I’d encountered.
The author presents himself as a morally anchored family man and vice-president. He makes no mention of it explicitly, but he is very obviously running to remove the vice from his title in 2028. And this book is part of the job application. He proposes a politics of orthodox virtue theology, and if you think church and state should be separate he respectfully disagrees with you.
The United States is a testifying culture, and it’s beginning to look nowadays like you need at least two books of credentials to put before the public to be competitive. Like Barack Obama before him, Vance has now written a less impressive memoir to follow his first, really interesting, book, Hillbilly Elegy (2016). When it comes time for a new pope, the pundits discuss the cardinals who are papabile; Vance is in the tiny segment of the American population filtered by money, chance and gender to be considered “presidentabile.”
So what’s Vance up to?
He does have a real story to tell. He grew up poor in Middletown, Ohio, amid social and family disorder only just held together by his heroic, foul-mouthed, gun-toting, hillbilly grandmother. His first memoir tells a vivid story of serial father figures, a drug-addicted mother, and low expectations. He was nearly engulfed in the miserable life of those left behind in the rustbelt after the departure of regular factory work.
Through luck and determination he completed high school, spent a term of duty in the marines, then went to university — first Ohio State, then to do law at Yale. Was his application picked out of the pile because of his rough background, on DEI grounds? Vance doesn’t explore that possibility.
Writing about this miraculous and very American trajectory in Hillbilly Elegy made his name across the political spectrum. His Huck Finn persona was convincing and compelling to Democrats and Republicans alike.
But he is no longer a talented boy; he is vice-president to a signally divisive president. Cynics might jump to the conclusion that his second book is an entirely instrumental, possibly ghostwritten parading of personal Christian virtue in front of a predominantly Christian electorate.
It is more complicated than that. No merely ambitious man [sic] seeking the Republican nomination for president would come out as a Catholic. The long battle to reverse Roe v Wade has created an alliance between conservative Evangelicals and conservative Catholics, but America’s deep formation is as the great Protestant Republic. The second and largest coming of the Ku Klux Klan between the world wars was at least as hostile to Catholics (and Jews) as to African Americans.
It would have been much more convenient for Vance to rediscover the Evangelical Protestantism of his hillbilly childhood that he lost at university. To “cross the Tiber” to a form of Christianity the majority of American conservatives still suspect as a foreign and authoritarian religious force is risky.
He would have found more votes in something a bit like Scott Morrison’s Plans for Your Good rather than something distantly modelled on St Augustine’s Confessions. I’m sure he’d have written a better come-to-Jesus book than the former Australian prime minister and providentially guided man of God.
Vance really can write, and Communion is very clearly in the same voice as Hillbilly Elegy, albeit a voice now muted by the pontification proper for a public figure considerably older than Vance’s current forty-one years. I detect no ghost, and nothing obvious in the way of intervention by researchers. It is also broadcast through a general publisher, HarperCollins, not channelled through a Christian imprint, as Morrison’s book was.
So, what appeals to Vance in Catholicism? The angry young man wants us to hear him now as a wise patriarch. Writing as a liberal Anglican mindful of Elizabeth I’s sage advice, far be it from me to “make windows into men’s souls.” But Vance projects a deep and, so far as one can tell, sincere commitment to family and group identity. His people are the white working class once securely employed in middle America’s mid-twentieth-century factories, and he champions their interests in a way that chimes with Catholic tribalism. To translate it into Australian, it is a little like the B.A. Santamaria–DLP Catholicism of family and patriarchal order, still active in Tony Abbott’s worldview.
Evangelical Christianity is all about the individual’s personal relationship with Jesus Christ as their lord and saviour. Sure, it happens in a congregation that provides support and guidance, but in the end all that matters is whether you personally have truly welcomed Jesus into your life. Vance, by contrast, needs a religious experience that gives him a sense of belonging with the people of God — the nation and the world over. He needs a big, overarching tribe, not “just” a congregation gathered around the Gospel, a charismatic preacher and a direct line to God. He’s a big fan of Pope Leo XIII — not the recently appointed liberal Leo XIV, but the nineteenth-century pope who sought a communitarian path for the church distinct from the two mainstreams of modernity, capitalism and socialism, in his encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891).
A fracture-point in MAGA and current conservative populisms lies between the loosely Catholic desire for protective and directive social order and the loosely Evangelical desire for individual freedom and salvation. Trump, like a founder-pastor of a televangelical corporation, manages to straddle the divide between liberty and belonging. Vance is banking on the group solidarity side to succeed. He presents himself as hardened by representative experience to be a good father to the nation.
Like the other populist insurgents around the planet, Trump offers an idiot answer to real socio-political questions. What do we do when the rise and rise of market economics has hollowed out all meaning and security in human relations? Vance is trying to put together a coherent answer whose core components are family, traditional morality, attachment to place, and fair wages for meaningful work.
As a Catholic leader Vance presents himself as wise and dispassionate, a Solomonic weigher of all viewpoints (yes, even the liberal ones) so he can discern the best way forward for the nation. There are two problems with this.
For one thing, this nowhere near as interesting a role as the Huck Finn made good of Hillbilly Elegy. Patriarch Vance is rather dull company.
More significant, however, is that his prose and persona edit out the often vicious politics of the Trump era. That amounts, in the end, to dishonesty. Sure, Vance makes a show of contrition for a handful of things. Of his “childless cat ladies” sledge during the election campaign, he confesses, “It was a bone-headed comment, intentionally (and successfully) provocative rather than illuminating.” But, overwhelmingly, he is silent about the noise and nastiness of politics, and his very active part in them.
For example, how do you become a vice-presidential candidate? Apparently, you come home from making a bit of a racket at a Munich conference vaguely aware that “Trump may be interested in having me join his ticket.” Then, in a scene that really needs an orchestra and animation of a dove descending from on high, “on the morning of the 2024 Republican National Convention, President Trump called me and asked me to join him.” That’s it.
As a reward for striving to be virtuous, good things just happen to him. He applies to Yale, and gets in. He works hard and well, but decides not to pursue a career as a lawyer. Instead, he works for a Californian venture capital firm bringing good things to middle America. (Does he mention that it is Peter Thiel’s controversial Mithril Capital? It must have slipped his mind.) He then flukes it into the Senate for Ohio and into the vice-presidency.
You need a book like Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump to get a sense of how this sausage was really made. Vance gives no account of his contribution to the public humiliation of Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House, for example, or of his hyperactive culture-warrior response to the assassination of his friend and supporter, Charlie Kirk. Inconvenient truths don’t rise to the surface.
He shows moral and intellectual depth, but tones down his inner mongrel. There is suspiciously little and inexplicit reference to the character of his boss, the mongrel-in-chief. Here the rules of genre come in handy. This is a political memoir using Christian apologia as a veil. But it amounts to a very partial public confession.
What if it works, and J.D. Vance succeeds Trump as candidate and president? He’d certainly be more orderly and coherent in the job — J.D. prefers control to riding chaos. He would probably run a more insular and tribal empire, and my guess is that he would make conscientious efforts to protect traditional industries and social institutions in middle America. He probably wouldn’t just announce tariffs as “magic bean” deals.
But the iron discipline brings with it an unsettling economy with the truth. Consider his “favourite parable,” which he refers to on at least five occasions, Matthew 7:16–20:
Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. By their fruits ye shall know them.
It’s a good parable, especially for politicians, as it allows them to align “outcomes” with “values” and create a sort of two-way street of justification. All Christians quote the Bible selectively, of course, so Vance is hardly alone.
I do wonder, however, why he did not include the arresting sentence in verse 15, just before his: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”
Too often, a gap exists between the benign and unifying prophet offered to readers of this apologia and the fruits of the regime he represents. He is, at the very least, running with the wolves. •
Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith
By J.D. Vance | HarperCollins | $36.99 | 304 pages
