Confessions

By John McCormack

Sunday, June 28, 2026

 

Vice President J.D. Vance has a confession to make in Communion, his new memoir about his adult conversion from atheism to Catholicism: He doesn’t fear eternal damnation—not now, not ever.

 

“I don’t worry about what I will find on the other side of eternal sleep,” Vance writes. “Even as a child,” when he was a low-church Protestant, “I never feared hell.”

 

Vance observes that this is a “particularly odd part of my own theology” that “wasn’t just inconsistent with common sense. It was inconsistent with Christian doctrine.”

 

Catholics, after all, believe that humans are saved by God’s grace but have been given the free will to accept or reject that gift. According to Catholic teaching, mortal sin—that is, a sin about a serious matter committed with knowledge and free will—severs one’s relationship with God. The sacrament of penance and reconciliation—a.k.a. confession—is the usual means by which Catholics receive God’s forgiveness.

 

Vance writes that his lack of fear of hell is especially odd given that such fear is explicitly mentioned in a common version of the Act of Contrition that a Catholic prays after confessing his sins:

 

O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell, but most of all because I offend Thee, my God, Who art all good and deserving of all my love.

 

I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to sin no more and to avoid the near occasion of sin.

 

Trying to square his own theology with Catholic teaching, Vance concludes in the book that one possibility is that Catholic teaching is wrong and John Calvin was right about predestination:

 

John Calvin, the great Reformation theologian, argued that our destinies are decided by God before we’re even born. From a Reformed perspective, this concept of “predestination” affirms a paradox: God is sovereign, but man also has free will. For my own part, the idea makes my head spin. But who knows—perhaps Calvin was on to something, and the concept of predestination helps to explain my own relatively untroubled perspective on the afterlife.

 

Vance reports he also reached out to the Dominican priest who baptized him in 2019 to ask: “Is it possible for a Christian to believe in the concept of hell without being particularly afraid of it?”

 

The priest, Father Henry Stephan, responded, as recounted in the book:

 

“Hell is real, but it’s also difficult to fathom. The more one cultivates a friendship with God, however imperfect, the more it seems unthinkable to choose separation from Him.” We spoke a bit about the Act of Contrition and how the prayer explicitly invokes the pains of hell. “Remember, the prayer doesn’t stop there,” Father Henry reminded me. “We detest our sins, according to the prayer, ‘most of all, because I have offended Thee, Who art all good and deserving of all my love.’ ” He continued: “Fear of hell is good enough to avoid presumption and a license to sin. But to stay there, psychologically or spiritually, is to remain stunted. It’s totally inadequate in the grand scheme of things. God’s goal isn’t only to motivate us to fear punishment; it’s also to enter into friendship with Him.

 

Vance’s musings about hell tell us a few things about him.

 

First, they count as a mark of sincerity about his religious views. Why publicly admit and grapple with these ideas if he were simply pretending to be a devout Catholic for political gain?

 

Second, they suggest there’s plenty of room for Vance to grow in the Catholic faith. With respect to Father Stephan’s counsel, I don’t think anyone, including Vance, would say Vance has never feared hell because he has always loved God so much that it has always been “unthinkable to choose separation from Him.”

 

Third, they serve as an answer to a question that has troubled me for several years: How does a man who publicly presents himself as a serious pro-life Catholic seem to find it so easy to deliberately lie in public after converting to faith? Part of the answer may be that Vance feels he has nothing to lose.

 

The line between non-sinful political spin and bearing false witness isn’t always clear, but Vance has delivered some statements that count as the latter. In 2021, as he was angling for Donald Trump’s endorsement in the Ohio Senate race, Vance said that there was massive voter fraud that occurred in the 2020 elections. “There were certainly people voting illegally on a large-scale basis,” Vance said. A retiree addicted to Fox News might sincerely believe such a false claim, but there’s no way that the Yale Law-educated former Never Trumper Vance believed there was voter fraud “on a large-scale basis.” Six years of investigations by Republican-controlled states—and a year and a half of federal investigations in Trump’s second term—have not yielded evidence of widespread illegal voting in 2020.

 

As the GOP vice presidential nominee, Vance wrote in September 2024 on social media of Haitian migrants living in Springfield, Ohio: “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.” These “reports” were in fact baseless rumors—quickly debunked by the Springfield Police Department—that smeared an entire community of people. It turned out a woman living in Canton had been arrested for torturing and eating a cat, but she was not Haitian—she was a U.S. citizen born in Ohio.

 

Vance never apologized. “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance told CNN’s Dana Bash at the time.

 

“You just said that this is a story that you created,” Bash replied.

 

“It comes from firsthand accounts from my constituents. I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it.”

 

The “cat memes” were a calumny, but they served the greater good in Vance’s view.

 

***

 

In Communion, Vance presents himself as a “Christian statesman” who decided in 2021 to run for Senate in order “to make what I thought were more explicitly Christian arguments about the economy.”

 

“If Christianity is true, it must be true for the whole human person at all times of life,” Vance writes. “We are not merely private moral actors but also public ones.”

 

But holding himself up as a Catholic role model creates the very real risk that he will lead others astray when he flouts Catholic teaching. Consider, for example, Vance’s enthusiastic support for killing instead of capturing suspected drug runners—killings that are contrary to the principles of just war, according to leading Catholic scholars.

 

“Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military,” Vance wrote on Twitter on September 6, 2025, shortly after the initial U.S. strike that killed 11 people on a boat in the Caribbean Sea. In response to a post that said “killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime,” Vance replied: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.” Since Vance made those comments, we have learned that two of the 11 people were killed in a follow-on strike while they were clinging to wreckage from the first strike, and some of the 11 people killed may have had nothing to do with drug running.

 

Another way in which Vance seems to be failing to live up to the calling of a Catholic statesman is his willingness to coddle antisemites in his political coalition.

 

In 2022, when then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke at a conference organized by the Hitler-loving white nationalist Nick Fuentes, Vance said Greene, who had endorsed Vance’s Senate campaign, “did nothing wrong.” In the fall of 2025, Tucker Carlson, the top-rated podcaster and Vance cheerleader, roiled the conservative movement when he hosted Fuentes for a two-hour interview in which Carlson posed no challenging questions to the neo-Nazi influencer. The writer Rod Dreher, a friend of Vance’s who attended Vance’s baptism, described the Carlson-Fuentes podcast as a “Two-Man Unite The Right Rally.”

 

In December 2025, Vance rebuked Fuentes for using a racist epithet against Vance’s Indian-American wife Usha. He also condemned antisemitism “and all forms of ethnic hatred” as having “no place in the conservative movement” while simultaneously white-washing Carlson, who has done more to mainstream antisemitism on the right than anyone.

 

“Tucker’s a friend of mine,” Vance told Unherd editor Sohrab Ahmari. “And do I have disagreements with Tucker Carlson? Sure. I have disagreements with most of my friends,” Vance added, without specifying what his disagreements are.

 

“The idea that Tucker Carlson—who has one of the largest podcasts in the world, who has millions of listeners, who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election, who supported me in the 2024 election—the idea that his views are somehow completely anathema to conservatism, that he has no place in the conservative movement, is frankly absurd,” Vance continued. “And I don’t think anybody actually believes it.”

 

In addition to Carlson’s softball interviews with neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes and a Nazi revisionist historian, Carlson released a 9/11 truther documentary in September 2025 in which he suggested the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were a “false flag” operation of which Israel had advance knowledge. And just last week, Carlson endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory about the assassination of political activist Charlie Kirk. Kirk “was not murdered for his opinion on transgenderism, obviously,” Carlson said. “I believe, and most people who knew him well … believe he was most likely murdered for his evolving views on Israel.”

 

Does Vance actually believe that Carlson’s 9/11 and Kirk conspiracy theories don’t amount to antisemitism?

 

***

 

Vance certainly isn’t the first Catholic politician to lie, to flout church teaching, or otherwise fall short of the duties of a Catholic statesman. Nearly every Catholic Democratic politician and more than a few Republicans favor laws that permit lethal violence against an entire class of human beings—unborn children.

 

But Vance’s unstated but practical approach to politics—that good ends justify illicit means—is still pernicious. It’s an approach to politics that is rooted, in part, by what he fears and what he does not.

 

While visiting a church in England that had fallen into disrepair, Vance writes, he “discovered something like the fear of death: not of my own physical death, or of the spiritual death of hell, but of civilizational death.”

 

If one fears the death of Western civilization—but not the death of one’s own soul—certain moral shortcuts become easier to take. Calumnies against Haitian migrants can be spread in the service of opposing mass migration. The slaughter of unarmed people on boats, who may or may not be transporting cocaine, might put a dent in the drug trade.

 

The verse in the Bible to which Vance keeps returning in his book are words spoken by Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew: “Ye shall know them by their fruits. ... A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.” That is undoubtedly true, but it does not mean that a good end can justify illicit means. In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul explicitly condemns the idea that we may do evil so that good may come of it. Another Catholic convert, St. John Henry Newman, put it more starkly: “The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.”

 

This is the true radicalism of the religion to which Vance has converted—the religion in which he is, like all practicing Catholics, still growing. Some of the wisest words in Communion are spoken by Father Henry Stephan, the Dominican priest who baptized Vance. “For most of us, grace is not something that happens in a moment,” Father Stephan told Vance. “You don’t feel God’s presence and then change in an instant. Real grace comes through practice. This is why we demand that you live a sacramental life: going to church, taking Communion, doing confession. This is a process.”