JD Vance's Religious Journey

 

JD Vance first became a household name with his 2016 bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (Harper), which was widely hailed at that time across the political spectrum. Of course, that was before its author transformed himself into a major, polarizing player in our present political divide. Indeed, as he recalls in his latest book, in early 2017, he was part of a group that met with outgoing President Barack Obama for an off-the record conversation "about what was going on in the United States of America."

Meanwhile, in 2019, Vance was received into the Catholic Church after private instructions from Dominican Friars in Cincinnati. That means that he did not enter the Catholic Church the way most converts do, through the prescribed Order of Christian Initiation of Adults (OCIA), a process that highlights the communal character of the Church and immediately exposes the aspiring Catholic to multiple dimensions of ordinary Catholic experience, practice, and devotion. There is wisdom in the Church's rituals, from which this author - along with all other members of the Church - could have benefited.

Potential presidential candidates predictably prepare for their campaigns by publishing a book. This latest iteration of that genre, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith (Harper), is Vance's 286-page memoir, chronicling his journey from nominal Appalachian Evangelical Protestantism - “Our family attended church very rarely,” he writes. “Our faith was amorphous, tied to family and oral traditions and not to institutional orthodoxy” - followed by the predictable atheism of religion's elite cultural despisers (and Ayn Rand, whom he specifically references), finally to the Catholicism which he now enthusiastically embraces.‎

Converts make up only some 8% of U.S. Catholics, but for various complex historical and cultural reasons they seem to be playing an outsized role in our contemporary national discourse, both religious and political. For that reason alone, the conversion story of so prominent a person as the Vice President of the United States would seem to be worth reading. Inevitably, however, this will be a controversial book, given the pernicious politicization of religion in our country at this time. After all, the MAGA political movement in which Vance is a very important player sometimes seems to resemble a religion of its own - although perhaps not so much conventional Christianity, but something more like the cult of  King Nebuchadnezzar's golden statue. 

Controversy clings easily to Vance. It surrounds even the cover, let alone the contents, of this book. One might have expected the cover to feature Saint Peter's Basilica or perhaps Vance's own parish church. Instead, it portrays Mount Zion Church, a rural Methodist church in Virginia, which clearly has no connection with Roman Catholicism nor apparently with Vance's personal history. Is this perhaps a subtle hint that at least some of the religion we will find in this book might resonate better in a politicized American Evangelical church than at Saint Peter's Basilica or at a standard American Catholic parish? One cannot help but wonder what is going on here, even before opening the book itself and grappling with the intersection of Vance's personal spiritual journey and his confrontational public politics. 

On the other hand, the great Saint Ignatius of Loyola famously admonished us to be more eager to put a favorable interpretation on one's neighbor's words than to condemn them (Spiritual Exercises, Annotation 22). It is in that irenic spirit that one should try to approach this book, always mindful that religious conversion is a work of divine grace and that God's grace may be active and effective even in spite of political polarization.

Indeed, at various points in his account, Vance makes observations I can easily resonate with - for example, his critique of workism. Vance (referencing Derek Thompson) looks back on his law school and professional experience, which caused him to recognize "that work, for many elites, is not just about surviving or providing for your family. It is also a source of identity and passion, the thing that provides both community and purpose for a growing segment of American elites. It's a quasi-religion." For Vance, already at that early stage, "even if it works out for a few elites, it is not a healthy way to run a society." On this, he is certainly quite right. This theme, along with his extended critique of the reigning economic model of human nature and society, represent serious arguments against what modernity has wrought, arguments religion reinforces.

All that said, this book inevitably raises unavoidable questions and concerns.

He writes with apparently genuine feeling about his grandmother, already familiar to us from his previous book, and describes an apparent spiritual experience while he was still a Marine, when his car stopped short of a guardrail on a slippery wet road. He describes his growth into a “self-professed atheist and meritocrat,” when “I didn’t care about God’s will. I cared about my own.” He then recounts his gradual subsequent softening, some of which he ascribes to the influence of his wife Usha, to whom he appears obviously and genuinely very devoted.

His mentor and political patron Peter Thiel also figured in the process, challenging "the simple social template I had constructed, that dumb people were religious and smart people were atheists.” Thiel also led him to Rene Girard, whose "theory of mimetic rivalry - that we tend to compete over the things other people want - spoke directly to some of the competitive pressures I had experienced at Yale." Girard's theory of the "scapegoat" also made him "think about the Christian faith in a new light."

What this account ignores, of course, is Thiel's own expressed hostility to Catholicism and to the Pope in particular! And, whatever Thiel's personal posture towards Catholicism and the Pope, anyone who picks up this book will likely already be well aware of Vance's own very public problems with the papal magisterium. In his short time as a public Catholic intellectual (and even shorter time as U.S. Vice President), Vance has managed to appear to be publicly corrected by two Popes, first Francis, and then the first U.S. born Pope, Leo XIV. Unsurprisingly, he has also been publicly at odds with the U.S. Catholic Bishops, whom he has brazenly accused of caring about immigrants for the federal funds the USCCB received to help resettle refugees.

Of course, there is a lot of diversity in American Catholicism, and lots of Catholics can be found who are less than fully faithful to all the teachings of the magisterium. So some liberal Catholic pearl-clutching about Vance's apparent dissent from important magisterial teachings may perhaps seem somewhat hypocritical. Still, he is not just any American Catholic. He is the Vice President of the United States, and it is he who has elevated his adherence to Catholicism as at least partly constitutive of his public persona.

Catholicism, however, has not been Vance's only conversion experience. The post-Hillbilly Elegy Vance had also been anti-Trump, whom he famously once called "cultural heroin." His personal political conversion to Trumpism seems to have paralleled his personal spiritual journey into Catholicism. By the time he ran for the Senate in 2022, he fully identified with Trump, whose essential endorsement he received. (The "Catholic vote" usually reflects larger national trends, and a majority of Catholic voters clearly embraced Trump in 2024. So, whatever Vance's differences with the Pope and the American Bishops, at least when it came to U.S. Catholics' voting behavior, he was somewhat in step politically with many of his American co-religionists.)

Vance the spiritual seeker seemed to be drawn to intellectual arguments about faith. Thus, he describes how he encountered and was much influenced by Saint Augustine's writings. "I began to see the world of the Christian faith as richer and more interesting than I realized. There was nothing. new under the sun after two thousand years of debate. That didn't make Christianity true. but it did make it more complicated than the twenty-first century atheists admitted."

Another important influence was Pope Leo XIII's famous encyclical Rerum Novarum, which "lays out a vision of society where the state protects the vulnerable, guarantees a just wage for laborers, and ensures that working people have sufficient 'rest from labor' - not for 'vicious indulgence,' but so they can focus on higher matters such as their religious and familial obligations." His section on Rerum Novarum sounds almost as if he were identifying as a Catholic Social Democrat, rather than a MAGA populist! All of which sadly highlights the untapped potential of populism, which in a different political context could have taken out country in a better direction than the MAGA version has!

"Catholic teachings," Vance came to believe, "touched the part of my heart and mind that demanded I focus on the things that actually matter." He realized he "needed to pray more, to participate in the sacramental life of the Church, to live more fully within the obligations of a community of believers, to confess and repent publicly." He needed "to live as a Christian," and he realized that "Catholicism was the right home in which to do that."

Meanwhile, however, his political journey that led to his becoming Trump's running mate was also going on. For many readers, it is how he reconciles the two journeys, the two conversions, that is what is so fundamentally problematic about this account. 

Some episodes are just jarring. For example, less than a year after his reception into the Church, in early 2020 when early reports of a new virus were emerging, he "drove to a sporting goods store and bought one thousand rounds of ammunition." 

More to the point, in terms of the overt intersection of Vance's two journeys - the one explicitly religious, the other political and ideological, was his trip to Rome in 2025, where he met with Pope Francis the day before he died. He found his conversation with Vatican diplomats "unsettling." On the contested issue of immigration, "the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes." Overall, he seems to want to present a surprisingly measured and balanced view of the Church's stances on various issues - certainly much more measured and balanced than the comments about the Pope famously expressed by his boss! Perhaps, Vance's most significant observation in this area is "that any application of moral principle sin the real world requires a constant evaluation of trade-offs. Undoubtedly, that's what the Christian faith demands of us." The first of those two sentences can plausibly be read as an expression of the classical and Christian cardinal virtue of prudence and its necessary application to political judgments. The second sentence, however, may fail to balance the admitted value and appropriateness of prudential judgment with the simultaneously radical character of Christian faith's demands. It is the tension between the two that makes politics such a challenge for Christianity, that for any political actor causes the two commitments to collide as much as to cooperate.

That tension highlights the problem inherent in any effort to revive or recreate some kind of Christendom. In its non-libertarian forms, what has traditionally passed for "conservatism" in America has often highlighted the valued inheritance of Christian civilization, which we have sadly been in the process of losing. In his partisan political persona, Vance is sometimes hard to peg ideologically, but here in this book he clearly identifies with the cause of salvaging some sort of Christian civilization. "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." Contrary to his partisan culture warrior posture, however, he recognizes that there is plenty of blame to go around. "Each of us, in our own weird way, is guilty of casting aside the Christian inheritance of our civilization. Republicans are far too wiling to worship the market and assume that free commercial transactions inevitably lead to good. Democrats are far too willing to idolize the self and assume that everything done in the name of self-discovery is good."

Would that Vance's new-found religious faith had also formed him to talk this way on the political campaign trail as well as in this memoir!

There is much in Vance's newly acquired Catholic sensibility that can resonate with Catholics and others of varied political persuasions and partisan commitments. As I observed above however, Vance's book inevitably raises unavoidable questions and concerns. Commenting favorably on his political ally and personal friend Charlie Kirk's memorial service, Vance writes that it "felt as much like an old-fashioned American revival as it did a funeral." Really? Indeed, Erika Kirk spoke movingly the Christian language of faith and forgiveness. But much of what transpired there barely reflected anything remotely resembling the Jesus of the Gospels and the Christianity of the New Testament. In fact, the public political movement with which Vance has identified himself seems more like its own version of "casting aside the Christian inheritance of our civilization" - replacing the Beatitudes, the Virtues, and the Gifts and Fruits of the Holy Spirit with a post-religious, anger and resentment-based cult of cruelty, constructed on the shifting secular sands of the pursuit of power, domination, and control. 

The Vice President has written a memoir about his two conversion stories that run on parallel tracks - one (a the book's title suggests) to true communion, the other (tragically for America) to its opposite.