The Spiritual Roots of JD Vance’s Populism

By Patrick T. Brown

Thursday, August 20, 2026

 

Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, by JD Vance (Harper, 304 pp., $35)

 

Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game (1985) follows a group of teenagers who grow up to influence the course of history. One posts under an alias on an online message board and ends up becoming a persuasive writer and an influential politician. Another, Ender Wiggin, is trained in the art of warfare through a series of immersive battlefield simulations — which are finally revealed to have not been simulations at all.

 

Vice President JD Vance has already run through the first path to influence. His trajectory from the downscale Cincinnati suburbs to the Naval Observatory would have been impossible without the power of his pen, which he used first as a pseudonymous blogger and then as a contributor for publications such as this one before writing his exceptionally successful memoir Hillbilly Elegy. His second book, Communion, is many things: a spiritual memoir, a tease at a likely presidential run, a reflection on how fatherhood can change a self-admitted “striver,” an apologia for his oft explored conversion from strident skeptic of President Donald Trump to his second-in-command. But perhaps above all, Communion captures the youthful “New Right,” of which the vice president is unquestionably the leader, at a crucial moment. Like Ender, the young and enthusiastic populists on the right are learning that there is no such thing as a dry run when it comes to governing. Podcasting and posting can’t achieve durable policy wins. It’s far easier to command attention in today’s media environment than to focus on the unglamorous work of changing policy and seeking converts. To defeat his adversaries, Ender had to learn to understand them; today’s right-wing populists may need to learn the same lesson.

 

In his book, Vance grapples with the difference between rhetoric and responsibility — though a glance at his X feed suggests the process is incomplete. Communion is a moving portrait of a Millennial atheist who rediscovers the personal and civilizational value of faith and family. How that discovery might shape a potential presidency makes Communion worth interrogating.

 

It’s not the first time we’ve read a version of this love story: A young, scrappy, and hungry lawyer’s pursuit of the brass ring is turned upside down by someone unexpected “I will marry this girl,” he remembers telling friends upon meeting Usha Chilukuri, “or I will be a lifelong bachelor.” The story of their courtship, marriage, and early life together is genuinely touching: “I didn’t deserve her. But still she stuck around.” One can sense her nudging her husband to get serious, settle down, and sand off his internet-sharpened edges. (His mea culpa for the “childless cat ladies” line that will haunt him for the rest of his political career is a welcome dose of contrition from Vance the author that Vance the politician can have a hard time expressing.) As was true of his friend Charlie Kirk, Vance seems to have taken on the weight of family and fatherhood in a way that changed him: Communion reveals a Vance different from the man favored by the very online crowd.

 

Vance’s unhesitating defense of devoted fatherhood, and his argument that conservatives must escape the gender roles of the 1950s as well as the hustle culture of the 2010s, constitutes one of his book’s most compelling chapters. He has thought a lot about how careerism is bad for men and women, and why the “having it all” debates feel hollow. He wants to see more husbands sharing “the burdens of household labor with their wives” and spending more time with their children. If he does succeed in leading the right, this version of Vance might prove the most attractive.

 

In an afterword, Vance says he worked on Communion intermittently over the course of his conversion. This on-again, off-again approach might explain the book’s occasional interludes on his gripes with modern economics, which can feel underbaked. But elsewhere, the writing is lyrical, even profound, capturing the grandeur of Europe’s empty, magnificent churches and the temptation to despair that there will be no generation to inherit them. The closest he has to a road-to-Emmaus moment is when he sits alone with a sleeping toddler in a Burgundy cathedral at dusk (italics in the original):

 

In that moment, I felt a strange sense of possession. This church, in a foreign country, empty but for me and my family, felt like it was mine. I owed something to it, and it owed something to me. Maybe it’s all decay and decline. Maybe I’ll raise my kid in this faith and he’ll think I’m a simpleton or an imbecile. But if the Titanic is going down I’d rather be on board than hop on a lifeboat. . . . Another realization hit me: Man is capable of creating astonishing beauty and real good in this world, when he tries, however imperfectly, to reconcile himself with Christ.

 

Only the reader without the merest instinct of conservatism can read such passages without sharing Vance’s fear of what we’ll lose if our patrimony disappears. Much of his political energy draws from his dread that we’ll hand on to our children a culturally lesser world than the one we were bestowed. At times, this urges him to place too much weight on organized religion as social glue or civilizational scaffolding rather than spiritual reality. It is inarguable that regular church attendance has pro-social benefits and helps preserve our cultural patrimony, but the ultimate question is not just whether a given religious tradition is useful, but whether it’s true.

 

Certain parts of Vance’s memoir foreshadow his political trajectory. He remembers his stepmother saying, “Republicans don’t care about working people. . . . But if you give me a choice between a party that stands for the rich and a party that refuses to stand for the unborn, I know my choice.” There will always be debate on whether populist policies meant to benefit working people end up doing so. And some in the pro-life movement, unable to vent their justifiable frustration against his boss, hold Vance to a standard that exceeds any vice president’s power. But Vance is clearly motivated to resolve this tension: to make the Republican Party economically populist and culturally conservative. When writing about a referendum that struck down Ohio’s abortion restrictions, Vance shows that his heart is in the pro-life fight in a way the current administration’s priorities don’t allow him to fully express. Similarly, Vance’s writing suggests his true-blue economic populism has had to be hidden under a bushel, as has his restraint-oriented foreign policy: “We confine Christianity to the most private of questions — relations between husbands and wives, reproductive decisions — and are then surprised when kids like me grow up in the faith and then discard it.” How well that approach to religion fits into the current administration’s politics is left for a future volume.

 

We need not take Vance’s word for it. In Regime Change, their behind-the-curtains look at the second Trump presidency, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan contrast Vance’s commitment to family affordability with Trump’s. Vance, they say, has been “obsessed with the challenge of making it easier, more affordable, for younger Americans to own homes and raise families.” Meanwhile, “Trump could be persuaded to talk about his affordability policies but as he read the lines with boredom from the teleprompter it was evidently not where his heart was.”

 

Still, if Vance’s evolution from “self-professed atheist and meritocrat” to champion of deeply held principles is to bear political fruit, it has one final stage to attain. He recognizes that, early in his career, he was animated by “the arrogant desire to rise above others,” and he points an accusing finger at other elite strivers for prizing “achievement over duty.” But in his eagerness to distance himself from the elite circles to which he once sought entry, he sometimes displays a similar lack of empathy. He is quick to scorn the achievement-obsessed types he met in New Haven and Silicon Valley. But while anti-elitism can build a political coalition, it cannot by itself form a governing agenda. Communion sometimes suggests that Vance is sure of the desired direction of policy but can be too quick to dismiss his opponents’ differences, implying that they are grounded in a different level of concern about the working class rather than in different ways of calculating trade-offs.

 

We know Vance can find common ground: He recalls feeling a surprising degree of empathy toward the elder statesmen with whom he disagrees at the Munich Security Conference. But judging by his social media behavior, he is often just as comfortable taking the low road. Whether Vance’s conversion taught him to see political adversaries differently — or mainly confirmed to him that his political instincts are right — remains an open question.

 

In Card’s novel, Ender eventually learns that the game is being played with real bullets: “In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.” The same realization awaits Vance and the movement he leads.