You may not always agree with Vice President JD Vance. But his book Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith will move you. It’s the story of his journey from a childhood faith to atheism, then to Catholic Christianity as an adult.
Vance loved the evangelical, charismatic faith of his childhood, built around community, songs, and the personal relationship with Jesus. When he first considered converting to Catholicism as an adult, the unfamiliar depictions of Jesus (either as holy babe or on a crucifix) left him missing the familiar, personal version he’d grown up with, as captured in the Warner Sallman painting hanging in his Meemaw’s house.
Vance fell away from his faith, not as many bright people do, by vainly regarding their intellect as their savior. Instead, the simplistic answers his church leaders and family gave to his questions left him unsatisfied. He struggled with a faith that promised prosperity as long as you had faith. He would see people fervently pray the sinner’s prayer, then go back to drinking and drugging. His childhood faith, as he perceived it, meant that God’s grace was to be accepted once, and then you’d be transformed forever.
“Sadness and misery and addiction and depression don’t just disappear when Jesus enters your heart. People aren’t like this,” he wrote. By the time he left the Marines, he’d shed what remained of his faith.
Through his young adulthood, Vance filled the God-shaped hole in his heart with partying and Objectivism. It’s hard to believe now, but he read Tucker Max’s I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell and lived the life, making fun of one college friend for falling in love early in school and staying committed. That’s not the JD Vance we think of today!
Vance reoriented his life by diving into the books and philosophy of Ayn Rand, particularly her celebration of human achievement. That drive, along with his love of Rand’s writing, turned him into a “self-professed atheist and a meritocrat.” His ambition led him to the most elite institution of the establishment: Yale Law School.
There he found that his classmates were just as messed up as the people back home. At New Haven, they were sick with overweening ambition, not the opioid addiction of Appalachia. Their god was financial security, to the detriment of their future families.
Vance became, as he called it, “Christian-curious” after leaving law school with his Hindu wife, Usha, during the first year they lived in Cincinnati. They both took an online course on the Old Testament. He focused on Genesis, this time as a skeptic. The pressure of proving every word was true was off, and he found “a richness that had previously been hidden from me.”
He credits part of his turn to Christianity to Usha. “Because she inspired me to be better, she forced me to follow a different path. And that, more than anything, is the path that led me to God.”
The most libertarian of PJ Media’s readers will not like parts of this book. The church’s teaching on duty to all members of society informs Vance’s Catholic faith. Vance cites extensively Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical about political economy. In it, he advocates for individuals and families, but also for the place of labor unions in ensuring the rights of all workers, and the obligations of capitalism to people.
But everyone on the right will appreciate Vance’s struggle to cope with the death of his friend, Charlie Kirk. He writes of his overwhelming desire to comfort Erika Kirk, and his inability to do anything except listen. He turned to Psalm 73, which describes Asaph’s wondering why good men suffer while the wicked prosper. He credits Erika’s telling Usha that she regretted having only two children with Charlie as a catalyst, changing Usha’s mind about having a fourth baby.
There’s so much more to this nearly 300-page book that I cannot cover in this review. But I think all conservatives, no matter their faith, will agree with Vance’s appreciation for the moral values Christianity has given to our nation. As he wrote:
I’m not saying you have to be a Christian to be an American. I’m saying something simpler and truer: Christianity is America’s creed, the shared moral language from the Revolution to the Civil War and beyond.
Editor’s Note: Hollywood, academia, and liberal elites are out of touch with the average American.
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