By Emmett Rensin
Thursday, June 25, 2026
Histories have been written about the great political
conversions: Constantine to Orthodoxy for victory in battle; Henry VIII to
Anglicanism for a divorce; Henry IV, of France, to Catholicism in order to
ascend the throne in Paris. But J.D. Vance may be the only political leader in
the history of the known world to convert to Catholicism in order to become
Protestant.
J.D. Vance is running for president. Communion—notionally
a memoir of his journey from a vaguely Pentecostal nondenominational youth,
through the Randian atheism of his 20s, and ultimately into the present embrace
of the Catholic Church—is preparation. Despite being a relatively simple
book, it is susceptible to three distinct readings, none of them particularly
Catholic. The first is that Communion is a book animated, despite its
author’s conversion, by a particular kind of historical, political
Protestantism, the faith of petty kings and princes always eager to bend faith
in service of the crown. The second is that it is a book about Christianity as
a secular force, a thin gruel of moralizing talk disconnected in all but name
from the demands of real faith. The third, and perhaps most likely, is that it
is what it plainly is: a book about how J.D. Vance would like to be the
president of the United States.
The first reading comes, perhaps unavoidably, from J.D.
Vance’s most literal Protestant tendencies: Despite being, as he puts it, “the
most senior Catholic in the United States government,” Vance has spent a great
deal of time in office feuding with the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The month he
took office, he appeared on Fox News and insisted that ordo amoris—an old Augustinian concept
meaning, literally, the order of love—comported with administration
policy because it commanded believers to “love your family and then your
neighbor and then your community and then your fellow citizens and your own
country and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world”
before being rebuked by Pope Francis. The next month, Vance accused the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops of being
motivated by “the bottom line” before being rebuked by a sitting cardinal. When Leo XIV assumed the
papacy last year and condemned the U.S. invasion of Iran, it was Vance’s turn
to do the rebuking, advising the Vicar of Christ to “be careful” when opining
“on matters of theology.” But that was all “exaggerated” by the media “for
clicks and ratings,” Vance writes in Communion. He would like to be
known as a Catholic, despite the existence of a rich religious tradition
already available to those who profess Jesus Christ as their savior but who
believe that they possess a more direct and intimate understanding of God’s
will than the Romans and their priests.
Still: It is difficult to read Communion without
detecting, if not a crypto-evangelical still lurking in J.D. Vance’s heart,
then a kind of political Protestantism. Separate from the arguments of
theologians, the appeal of the Protestant churches to the various kings and
German princes who adopted it throughout the 16th and 17th
centuries was in its flexibility, in its usefulness to earthly power. It
became, in the hands of statesmen, a parochial Christianity, its protest not so
much against the theology of the Catholic Church but against its catholicism,
its universality. Rome imposed obligations toward the whole communion of
the faithful. This or that denomination of Protestant religion imposed only
those obligations it could assert within its small domain: a duchy, an island
kingdom, the Ohio backwoods town where some charismatic pastor built his
pulpit. Should the current denomination fail to meet the needs of a new leader,
it could be reformed or replaced.
It is in this sense of Protestantism—the cynical sense,
the political sense, the parochial sense—that Communion may be read as a
Protestant text, and J.D. Vance as a Protestant leader. There is no conflict
between his professed belief in what was once called the religion of women
and slaves and the needs of his own electoral ambitions that cannot be
squared in favor of the latter. The “job of a Christian statesman,” in Vance’s
telling, is to “preserve … social cohesion.” A “world of limited resources”
means that “those duties necessarily come up against other responsibilities.”
These are “thorny issues,” Vance writes. How convenient, then, that he is
always ultimately allowed to do precisely what his nation demands, what his
party expects. What a relief to discover there is little friction at all in
presiding over the Trump administration’s various terrors and calling it the
proper exercise of his Christian faith.
Vance tells us in Communion that what he misses
most about the family and religion of his youth is the way they “cared far less
about credentials … than about people and kin.” This, he writes, is “far more
Christian than anything I’ve encountered in the halls of power.” Elites, exchanging
God for “technocracy,” have “traded away the right of citizens to value their
own labor in favor of mass migration.” The immigrants are not among the parish
in J.D. Vance’s faith. His religion, whatever he may call it, or whatever we
may call it, is found in the boundary, in the limits of the enclave of the
faithful.
There is of course no sin in a love of family, of
community, of kin. But a universal church imposes universal obligations, a
charity extending from the parish to cover the whole world. It is only the
German princeling or the ambitious vice president who finds true Christianity
in the fact that “any application of moral principles in the real world
requires a constant evaluation of trade-offs,” who believes that such
evaluations are “undoubtedly” what “the Christian faith demands of us.” These
trade-offs are not spiritual. They are political. The trade-offs demanded by
the faith of Vance’s Communion are matters of expediency, of what is
necessary and useful. In his telling, the “Christian faith” demands that J.D.
Vance cheer for an invasion in Venezuela and perform apologetics for the deal
with Iran. The “Christian faith” demands he vote to subsidize rum importers and
gambling companies while cutting SNAP. The “Christian faith” demands he call
the murder of an unarmed woman by federal agents a “tragedy of her own making.”
It never demands dissent. Vance performs his evaluations, makes his trade-offs,
and discovers, time and again, that for all the “thorniness” and “complexity,”
the demands of God are perfectly compatible with an attitude indistinguishable
from that of the Greek pagan: bound by sacred duty to his polis against
a world teeming with barbarians.
Communion is a book about some kind of Christian
faith; the Protestantism not of Martin Luther but of Henry VIII. It is the kind
that professes Jesus Christ as the savior of the world but discovers, after
great calculation, that His demands in no way limit what you must do to lead a
party that will murder anybody, as long as it puts America First. This is not
materially distinct from discovering, after great theological reflection, that
the Gospel in fact makes the king the head of the church in his own country, and
that means you’re free to chuck that Spanish nag they made you marry and try
for a son with Anne Boleyn.
***
The second possible reading of Communion arises
from the strange fact that for a book purportedly about Vance’s return to adult
faith, there is very little faith to be found in it. Vance writes of religion
more than he writes of faith. Religion, unlike faith, is not a set of
beliefs. It is only one sociological force among many, an ideological and
cultural matter that J.D. finds attractive. It is possible to read Communion
not as the story of a man who has found a form of Christianity that just
happens, at all times, to comport with the demands of earthly expediency, but
the story of a man who believes that the purpose of faith is to serve earthly,
social ends.
J.D Vance tells us that his deliberate return to
Christianity began with the birth of his first son. He needed, he said, a way
to talk about virtue, and “the most practical thing I could do to ensure that
he was taught the language of virtue and sin was to raise him in the faith.” He
begins to attend church because his wife believes it’s “good for him.” His
specific interest in Catholicism is born, by his own admission, of originally
“intellectual” interests (some of which are actually aesthetic): He likes Thomas
Aquinas, he likes Saint Augustine; he liked 19th-century Catholic
prayers that “sound medieval.” He is attracted to the “historical legitimacy”
of the church, to its durability and tradition; he is “drawn to the hierarchy
and sense of authority,” even if, like all reactionaries, he loves obedience
only until it is time to be obedient.
His final decision to convert occurs during a family trip
to France, when Vance comes upon a beautiful cathedral, largely abandoned by a
secularizing Europe, and feels a “sense of possession” over the legacy of
“Christian Western Civilization” that it represents. When he was an atheist,
“getting drunk and acting like a jerk” had filled a void in his heart. Now the
church could take its place: just another of many possible occupants of a
functional hole. The problems of the nation are similarly practical: the
“dismal science” of economics “stepped into the vacuum” left by “the decline of
Christianity” as a “shared moral language” in the West; professional striving
and ambition has “supplanted religion as the core source of meaning.” In
Munich, Vance marvels at the death of the postwar liberal order, an order he
says was once presided over by men beholden to “Western Christian Civilization
and the values particular to it”; now they made empty paeans to “liberalism”
and “democracy.” They “had taken God out of their postwar oaths and alliances,
and they wondered why so much else had been lost as well.”
Vance may be correct that the “values” and “moral
language” of the West once held the world together, that without it,
civilization may begin “falling into disrepair,” but this has little to do with
the question of whether or not you believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead
and forgave the world its sins. Even when he discusses the sacrament of
confession—the only particular sacrament about which Communion has
anything to say—he understands it in practical terms: He found therapy too
permissive, and the culture of political correctness too unforgiving.
Confession was a “third way,” like therapy, “but with less whining and more
guilt.” Over and over, Vance returns to Matthew 7:20, “Wherefore by their
fruits ye shall know them.” Christianity, he writes, “bore the best fruit.” Its
“ideas and practices … generated the most good, the most truth, and the most
beauty of anything I’d encountered.” In Communion, Christianity—the
Catholicism in particular barely matters—is just good fruit.
If you are secular, you may imagine that nothing insults
the faithful like the spitting atheism of a Christopher Hitchens or a Sam
Harris. But no atheism, no matter how disdainful, can condescend like the man
who says that he does not believe in God, but that it would be good for
the rest of us to be persuaded. I believe J.D. Vance when he says that he is
not this man, but there is little in Communion to suggest that J.D.
Vance has ever felt God acting in the world, that he has ever felt Him doing
anything that the mere idea of God cannot accomplish, true or false.
***
The final and most cynical reading of Communion is
simple and it arises from a simple fact: Despite being marketed as a conversion
narrative, only about a third of the slim, 280-odd-page text is dedicated, even
in the broadest sense, to Vance’s actual conversion. He is still an atheist on
page 100; he is baptized on page 173, with 100 pages left to go. Communion otherwise
consists of what you might find in any light and sentimental memoir about
community and family, fused with a soft-launch campaign platform: the wonderful
wife, the wonderful kids, the promise of America, the values that guide this
particular man as he contemplates foreign policy, trade policy, and the culture
war issues of the day.
Vance replays the hits of Hillbilly Elegy: endless
sentimental glazing about dear departed “Mamaw,” who “loved to say the f-word,”
although Vance will only ever render it as “effin” (this is a family book). He
idealizes Usha, who is smarter and more ambitious than anybody he has ever
known, but who “found beauty everywhere, from the birds in the trees to the
shapes of leaves to the way the light fell on Yale’s Gothic halls at dusk” and
who otherwise has zero interiority and seems to exist exclusively as a
projection board for J.D.’s own neuroses. We hear about J.D.’s friendship with
Peter Thiel, and—in one of the very last chapters—how Charlie Kirk had become
“one of his best friends.” We are treated to more extended quotations from New
York Times opinion columns and Atlantic essays than from Saint
Augustine or Holy Scripture. We get the ordinary denunciation of “elites,” by
which he means woke college professors and media members, not the salt of the
Earth plutocrats who finance the Ohio GOP nor his sole example of a good immigrant,
Elon Musk. Even the apologetics here are flimsy: sophomoric musings about how,
like, you know, we take a lot on faith, really, such as the boiling
point of water (this is a real example), and how the “complex” knowledge of a
sacramental faith may take time and discernment to attain, which is also, he
says, how you might discover that raising the minimum wage is actually bad.
The most charitable thing that I can say of Communion is
that it is simply boring. It is an obligatory document in anticipation of a
presidential run. If there is anything to discern here, it is that Vance is
acutely aware that he must thread the needle between a largely Protestant GOP
primary base and a 2028 general electorate he believes will be looking for a
break from Trumpism. When he writes, near the end of the book, that “to believe
in God and His only begotten son is to have hope,” and immediately follows this
by waxing on about the hope he derives from the “dynamic” future of American
“innovation,” it is difficult not to imagine that one has awoken from a long
dream to discover that it is still the year 2004, and that while you slept,
George W. Bush was warming over his stump speech on a nearby television screen.
In the first third of Communion, Vance returns
over and over to the hollowness of careerism, ambition, and striving for
striving’s sake. He renounces his empty pursuit of Yale Law School, of judicial
clerkships, of an entire career in the law sought only because it was
prestigious, because it felt like “winning” a competition he barely understood.
One must remind oneself constantly that this is a book written by a man who
“found” his purpose in his family, put his faith in the Roman Catholic Church,
gave up all this empty “elite” striving, and then immediately ran for Senate.
Then ran for vice president. Then published a book where the true subject is
how J.D. Vance would like to be the president of the United States at the
earliest possible convenience.
But it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a
needle than for a president to enter the kingdom of heaven. Vance may want to
keep the faith. He may want to fight the soulless elites, the rich, the empty
technocratic men of industry and economics. But he must please the base. He
must not say or do or promise anything that might seriously displease the men
who will finance his presidential campaign. He must not lose the favor of the
most selfish venal idiot to ever hold high office in the United States—a man
whose sole contemplation of God came when he could indulge the narcissistic
fantasy that he was saved from an assassin’s bullet by divine intervention—and
claim, in print, that “in the Trump administration … we care about wages and
how many people are dying of drug overdoses,” and that’s why they need to
assassinate people on rafts in international waters. Instead, he must find,
over and over, how useful the “values” of “Christianity” turn out to be,
particularly when he needs a sensible argument against handouts. He must
discover, over and over, how the “tough trade-offs” demanded by the “Christian
faith” always fall within the acceptable politics of the very avaricious
“elites” that J.D. Vance claims he turned his back on just before he ascended
up their ranks in record time.
The most moving passages of Communion—the ones
where one feels that Vance is not being utterly cynical—concern the difficulty
of Christian life. The Gospel, he writes, is an “inconvenient message.” It
“demands … so much, in fact, that it tells us up front that every single living
person will fail in some profound way.” He is right. For every believer, the
demands of Jesus Christ are impossible. The Lord our God does not command us to
love our families and then our countries and then see if there is any love left
over for the rest. He does not command us, in other words, to do what we want
to do anyway.
The God of the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church
and Protestant churches commands you to give everything: to deny yourself, take
up your cross, and follow Him. He commands you to love totally and
unconditionally every person on Earth. He commands you to forgive your
persecutors and your enemies, to show meekness and mercy even when you are
certain that your tormentors will take advantage of your softness. He commands
you to abandon every earthly thing, to attain perfection by selling everything
you own and giving to the poor, to tend to the foreigner and the prisoner as if
you attended to the Son of God himself. Critics of American immigration like to
say that if you love immigrants so much, you should let them all move into your
house. God commands you to do precisely that. God commands you to know that you
owe everything to everybody with no expectation of return. He commands you to
annihilate yourself, to pluck out your own eye, to burn in righteousness even
to the point of death and to do all of this for no reward on this Earth or in
this life. It is an inconvenient message. Everybody will fail.
I do not expect J.D. Vance to abandon everything and
become a saintly desert hermit, nude and preaching under the hot sun outside
Antioch. But the extent of his particular failure is not inevitable. It is not
unavoidable, in the practice of a Catholic life, to fail to ever say or do
anything that would leave you living out your days as a famous rich guy who did
not get to be the president. Vance writes over and over about how he misses the
simple community and Christianity and spirit of his Ohio childhood, and sure,
you can’t go home again. But you do not have to go to the White House.
A very long time ago, a fisherman called Simon was
casting his net in the Sea of Galilee, when Jesus Christ appeared upon the
shore and commanded Simon to give up his life and follow Him. Simon, who was
called Peter, was the first to know the truth. At Caesarea Philippi, when Jesus
asked Peter who He was, the disciple replied that Jesus was “the Christ, the
Son of the living God.” But even Peter could not accept Christ’s insistence
that He would suffer terribly and die at the hands of the Romans. He wanted a
victorious king, a messiah who conquers and rules in this world. Christ rebuked
him. You are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things
of men, he said. And then he asked: For what shall it profit a man, if
he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
At the end of Communion, J.D. Vance contemplates
Saint Peter as he stands in Rome: The Roman Empire had long collapsed, but the
church and the Gospel “endured.” In Rome, Vance writes, “it was obvious: Caesar
was dead. Christ still lived.” Saint Peter kept his soul and founded the church
professed by J.D. Vance. But J.D. Vance has not yet decided, not yet shown,
whether he will follow him, or if he prefers the profits that come to an
ambitious man by gaining the whole world.
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