Communion

JD Vance, the Vice President of the United States and author of the bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, writes to trace his spiritual journey: how he was raised Christian in working-class Ohio, lost his faith as a young man, and eventually returned to it by converting to Catholicism.

Vance opens with a scene of taking his three young children to church during his vice presidency, with his wife, Usha Chilukuri, who was raised Hindu, managing the weekly chaos despite not being Catholic herself. He frames the book around a passage from Matthew 7:16–20, "By their fruits ye shall know them," arguing that Christianity produces the most good, truth, and beauty of anything he has encountered. He clarifies that the book is not Christian apologetics but one man's story of losing and regaining faith.

Vance's childhood faith took shape under the influence of his maternal grandmother, Mamaw, a profane, gun-owning woman who loved Jesus, read the Bible daily, and scribbled prayers on napkins. The family rarely attended church, and their faith was informal, rooted in oral tradition rather than institutional orthodoxy. When Vance's biological father reentered his life around the time his maternal grandfather, Papaw, died, his father's evangelical church offered Vance his first real faith community, complete with charity drives and multicultural worship. It also introduced him to apocalyptic prophecy, Young Earth Creationism, and a culture-war mentality suspicious of mainstream science and secular culture. By the time he enlisted in the Marines in 2003, his Christianity and conservative politics felt inseparable.

The first seeds of doubt appeared in 2005 as Vance prepared to deploy to Iraq. Mamaw's death, the family's financial desperation, and his mother's renewed addiction contrasted sharply with what he perceived as the church's fixation on the Terri Schiavo case, a controversy over removing the feeding tube of a woman in a persistent vegetative state. After Mamaw's funeral, his car inexplicably stopped just before hitting a guardrail on a Virginia mountain road, an experience he still cannot explain. He attended a final church service before deploying, but a sermon about the end times filled him with silent rage. He left for Iraq without feeling God's presence.

In Iraq, Vance read C. S. Lewis extensively and found Lewis's Christianity richer than anything he had encountered in church. Yet Lewis's faith seemed as alien as atheism compared to what Vance had known growing up, leaving him jaded rather than inspired. Interactions with Iraqi poll workers, many only nominally religious, offered a surprising critique of American consumerism and hypersexualization. When Vance returned home in 2006, he was no longer a Christian in any meaningful sense. A friend introduced him to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, whose celebration of achievement and self-reliance filled the void left by discarded faith. Vance became a self-professed atheist.

At Ohio State University, where he enrolled in 2007 as the first in his family to attend a four-year college, Vance drifted further from his roots. Atheism severed the last social bond connecting him to his family; religion had been their shared vocabulary. He immersed himself in philosophy, absorbed the biases of the educated class, and treated marriage as a capstone achievement to pursue only after professional success. At Yale Law School, prestige culture intensified. Students obsessed over Supreme Court clerkships and elite firm placements without examining why. Vance recognized his susceptibility to what French philosopher René Girard called mimetic desire: the tendency to want what others want simply because they want it.

Several intellectual encounters cracked his atheist certainty. A parable by philosopher Basil Mitchell presented faith as something that acknowledges doubt rather than suppressing it. A passage from Saint Augustine, written sixteen hundred years earlier, warned Christians against making foolish scientific claims, revealing that debates Vance thought were modern were as old as the Church itself. A talk by Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel, who openly identified as Christian, defied Vance's assumption that intelligence and faith were incompatible. Through Thiel, Vance discovered Girard's theory of the scapegoat, which argued that Christ is the perfectly innocent victim whose sacrifice exposes humanity's tendency to project its failures onto others.

The most transformative force in Vance's life was Usha, whom he met in his small group at Yale. He fell for her instantly and completely. Raised Hindu, Usha was fiercely intelligent yet indifferent to conventional prestige, with a dream of running the Sesame Workshop. She encouraged Vance to confront his traumatic childhood and recognized that church worked better for him than therapy: It anchored him, connected him to Mamaw, and forced productive reflection on virtue and vice.

After their engagement, the couple moved to Cincinnati for a year of clerkships and wedding planning. Vance took an online course on the Hebrew Bible and encountered Genesis and the Book of Job not as texts to prove or debunk but as ancient accounts of humanity's relationship with God. He found God's refusal to explain suffering to Job unsatisfying yet truer to reality than any fairy tale. He began attending church again, drawn to the Christian concept of guilt and forgiveness existing side by side. They married in June 2014.

The birth of their first son, Ewan, in 2017 accelerated Vance's faith journey. For the first time in years, he prayed and meant it. Fatherhood forced him to confront what he truly valued: not credentials but character. He became drawn to Catholicism through its social teaching, especially Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which envisioned a society built on subsidiarity, the principle that each sphere of life, from family to community to nation, depends on the others. Conversations with Father Henry Stephan, a priest in Cincinnati, proved pivotal. Father Henry observed that Vance was treating Usha as a savior when only Jesus could fill that role and described grace not as an instant transformation but as a process sustained through church attendance, Communion, and confession.

In the summer of 2018, the Catholic Church was rocked by sexual abuse scandals, including the McCarrick case and an exhaustive Pennsylvania grand jury report. Vance was furious but continued his journey toward the faith. During a trip to France, he experienced a genuine epiphany in an empty cathedral in Burgundy. Alone with his sleeping toddler in the sunlit nave, he felt an overwhelming sense of belonging. The problems with Christianity, he realized, were caused by imperfect human beings; the beauty of the cathedral testified to what humans could create when they tried to reconcile with Christ. He was baptized Catholic in August 2019.

The later chapters extend Vance's faith into public life. His political evolution from Trump critic to Trump supporter, he argues, was downstream of his broader rejection of elite institutions he found spiritually and intellectually broken. At the Munich Security Conference in 2024, he cites German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's removal of God from his oath of office as emblematic of Western secularization. As Vice President, he visits Rome for Easter 2025, meets Pope Francis shortly before the Pope's death, and reflects on immigration and abortion as case studies in applying Christian principles to governance. He devotes an extended critique to the dominance of economic thinking in American life, arguing that GDP-obsessed policy has eroded families and communities by treating time with children as unproductive and work as a quasi-religion.

The book's final movement reckons with loss and hope. Vance's father died of esophageal cancer, certain to the end that God would heal him. God did not. His close friend, conservative radio host Charlie Kirk, was assassinated at age 30, leaving behind a wife and two small children. Sitting with Kirk's devastated widow, Vance realized that nothing worldly matters beside family. Yet he also finds signs of redemption: His mother has been sober for 11 years and is beloved by her grandchildren. Not long after Kirk's death, Usha, who had said she was done having children, became pregnant with their fourth child. Vance views this as an act of grace: one life stolen, another given. He closes with a prayer of gratitude and an affirmation that God's Church will endure because Christ and His truths endure.