The Vice President Is Playing With Fire (and Brimstone)

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, June 19, 2026

 

J.D. Vance’s conversion story is bulls–t.

 

No surprise there: His last conversion story was bulls–t, too.

 

The only halfway interesting part is that both stories turn out to be the same bulls–t: Vance’s story—once again—is that he put his faith in the wrong people and institutions and discovered the error of his ways at precisely the moment when doing so would do the most to advance his career.

 

Saul had his great convulsion on the road to Damascus, but Vance, that knee-walking sycophant, had his somewhere in the Cincinnati suburbs on his way to Washington, where he decided to take up the cause of Donald Trump, a man he had once described—accurately—as unfit for office, bag-of-hammers dumb, and an aspiring American Hitler, further insisting that at least some of Trump’s followers belonged in prison after the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, a view of which he has lately repented. One could almost—almost—understand those who saw something in Trump back in 2016, but Vance saw the light only after the attempted coup d’état that crowned Trump’s four years of incompetence, cruelty, stupidity, venality, corruption, cowardice, laziness, pettiness, and dishonesty the first time around. One could imagine Vance concluding, circa A.D. 33, “You know, I didn’t think much of that Pontius Pilate guy at first, but he really showed me something with the way he crucified that troublemaker from Galilee while pretending to wash his hands of the matter—real shrewd politics, there.”

 

Vance would later insist that he had been misled about Trump by “some of the media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record,” as though the actual, plain, undisputed facts of Trump’s record in office were insufficient to speak for themselves, and as if Vance had for those critical years had nothing but Salon and MSNBC to inform him about the world. Vance sliced the baloney pretty thin, but it didn’t matter: If there is one thing we have learned from his public life, it is that J.D. Vance is very, very good at telling people who can give him what he wants whatever they want to hear, whether that’s Peter Thiel or Chamber of Commerce-type Republicans or, in turn, right-wing conspiracy-kook podcast jabroneys and Donald Trump.

 

(Which raises an issue: When I was an editor at National Review, Vance was very much part of our little world. We had friends—and interests—in common, and I made excuses for him for a lot longer than I should have. I should have known better. Hell, I did know better, and I had self-interested reasons for wanting to see Vance succeed and for wanting to believe that he was a better kind of man than he is. Mea most maxima culpa, etc.)

 

Hillbilly Elegy is a pretty good book, but it is not an entirely honest one. It sometimes pretends to be a book about white poverty in rural Appalachia, but Vance has only secondhand connections to that: He grew up in the outskirts of greater Cincinnati in a household with an income that exceeded $100,000 a year at times—back in the 20^th century, when six figures meant something—though he visited eastern Kentucky from time to time as a child. Vance’s troubles—and they were genuinely horrifying at times—were more Midwestern and exurban in character than hillbilly stuff: the junkie mother, the deadbeat father, the belligerent and ignorant grandmother who raised him when his mother couldn’t and his father wouldn’t. Vance rose through the great American meritocracy and landed in the Ivy League elite at precisely the wrong moment for his aspirations—right as the class into which he had clawed his way was losing its credibility and its prestige as the digitally amplified waves of 21^st-century populism rolled over the cultural and political worlds, democratizing, vulgarizing, and disfiguring everything they subsumed.

 

Once again, J.D. Vance needed to find a way out of his social circumstances. And he did.

 

And now J.D. Vance has found Jesus the same way he found Donald Trump: at the moment when doing so best served his immediate material interests. St. Peter’s, Mar-a-Lago: One gilded and gaudy old pile full of relics is the same as another to such a creature as the vice president of these United States. J.D. Vance’s new Catholic sensibility is something like Caravaggio painted on velvet: It alludes to the fine forms of fine things, but it is phony, tacky, and cheap.

 

Naturally, in Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, Vance tells the same half-baked story about his religious wanderings that he has told about his political conversion: He was misled after putting his faith in the wrong people. “To believe, as I once claimed, that the theory of evolution disproved the Christian creation story, I had to accept a couple of things on, well, faith. I had to accept that the theory of evolution was true. And I had to believe that the Christian Bible was incompatible with evolution. I did believe these things, but I believed them because of whom I trusted. I trusted that the Christians in my orbit had instructed me well in the tenets of Christianity. And I trusted the many biologists, paleontologists, anthropologists, and geneticists I had read—almost all secular—in their views on evolution.”

 

Once again, Vance was led astray. So the story goes.

 

Maybe Vance has read “many biologists, paleontologists, anthropologists, and geneticists” on the subject of evolution—though I doubt this—but you’ll understand at this point, if you know Vance’s supposed life story, that there is a considerable asymmetry there. Presumably, those biologists and geneticists and such were experts in their fields rather than … barstool paleontologists? … whereas Vance’s desultory Christian formation came via his opioid-abusing mother, his absentee “holy roller” (as Vance describes him) father, and from watching television evangelists with his Mamaw. Vance attempts to paint himself as a kind of curious seeker, but what he was, it is plain from his own telling, was simply a social Christian, a conventional conformist who attended some youth group meetings and things of that nature, the way many young people in his milieu did. He tries to inject a sense of urgency into the story, but there is no peep of a voice crying in the wilderness here. Vance is a smug striver writing smugly about what a smug striver he used to be, smug in the knowledge that he has come so far from that. “God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.”

 

Vance’s opportunistic turn to right-wing Catholicism came when a particular strain of right-wing Catholicism bubbled up as a revivified political current in the swamp that is Vance’s natural political home, “integralism” and “post-liberalism” and all that happy horsepucky. Vance saw a parade and ran to get in front of it, muttering a few “Hail Marys” along the way. Of course he had never done any religious reading heavier than The Screwtape Letters and the Narnia books: There was no juice in that for the future lawyer and finance bro. Judging by Communion, he still hasn’t bothered to read or think seriously about these things. To describe his religious thinking here as superficial would be to extend to Vance a degree of intellectual generosity he has not earned.

 

Vance’s insincerity is comically transparent at times. Some of you will remember the matter of Vance’s trying to capitalize on malicious fictions about (black) immigrants in his native Ohio rampaging through peaceful (white) neighborhoods eating up the cats and dogs. It never happened, and Vance knows it never happened, and Vance has at times halfway admitted that he knows it never happened but seized on the story, anyway, because it was politically useful. Perhaps his religious instructors somehow glossed over the part about “bearing false witness.”

 

As it turns out, a talent for bearing false witness—in the service of a president who has made a point of routinely violating nine out of the Ten Commandments—is really what Vance brings to the party. I do not write this lightly, but it seems to me that I have never in my lifetime seen a public man work so assiduously to prepare for himself a place in Hell. If Dante were working today, he’d break his protractor trying to sketch out an appropriate circle in the Inferno for Vance, the “George Babbitt of Elmer Gantrys™.”

 

I will admit feeling my faith a bit challenged at times when reading this imbecilic dreck. E.g.:“[T]o divorce political judgments from morality is to make yourself less human,” Vance writes. Somehow, he was not immediately turned into a pillar of salt after putting the period at the end of that sentence. Maybe God is dead, after all. Vance continues and laments when “conservatives backbite a Christian pastor for talking about taking care of the poor or treating immigrants with dignity.” J.D. Vance of the Trump administration—the Look-out-them-foreign-darkies-is-eating-the-cats! guy—wrote that: “treating immigrants with dignity.”

 

Maybe God has not received His review galley yet.

 

I feel embarrassed for Vance’s wife—a broadly secular Hindu, this surely is not what she signed up for, and if being vice president is “not worth a bucket of warm p–s” in the estimate of Vice President John Nance Garner, what can be said about being the vice president’s wife—and, especially, this vice president’s wife? I feel sorry for Vance’s children, who are deployed as moral props throughout Communion, with Vance fretting about his son’s character development even as he proudly serves as the most self-abasing henchman of would-be caudillo and quondam pornographer Donald Trump. I would write that I am embarrassed as a Catholic to share a church with this schmuck, but, of course, God’s house is a refuge for schmucks, and scoundrels, and worse. It is the sick who need a physician, and all that. To put things in terms of that tension that Vance once imagined to exist between Catholicism and biology: I am embarrassed to be a member of the same species as this despicable little gargoyle.

 

J.D. Vance rejoices (often) in being one of the youngest men elected to his office—and, at only 41 years of age, perhaps he believes that he has plenty of time to repent, that, as Thomas Becket never actually said, “one can always come to a sensible little arrangement with God.” No man knoweth the hour, Mr. Vice President.

 

If there is something supernatural at work here, I am not at all sure that it is the work of the God worshiped by the church that counts J.D. Vance among its members. I suspect that, if anything, it is the hand of the Other Guy at work here. In trying to shanghai the angels and saints into the service of whatever you want to call the grotesque and infernal political project that J.D. Vance and Donald Trump are undertaking, the vice president is playing with fire. And brimstone.