JD Vance’s convenient Catholicism

JD Vance was the first real writer to appear on a winning presidential ticket since Woodrow Wilson in 1912. Each embodied the fashions of his age. Wilson owed his cerebral reputation to dry academic essays in the Political Science Quarterly. Vance, meanwhile, is the master of the preferred medium of American millennials — the “personal essay”. His raw material is “lived experience”; his method is “autoethnography”. His life, even his inner life, is elevated to the status of data. Hillbilly Elegy, a personal essay in book form, was a phenomenon. It propelled its author to within a heartbeat of the presidency. Personal essays, it seems, have always been Vance’s bread and butter. Even at Yale Law School, he was busy writing personal essays instead of studying law. The first draft for what became Hillbilly Elegy was submitted as a 60-page paper for a class on international business transactions; what exactly it had to do with international business transactions remains unclear. He wanted to use his lived experience to do social-science analysis of the “ills befalling working-class white people”. Swap “white” for any other racial identity, or for “queer” or “trans”, and one is left with the sort of solipsistic, self-indulgent claptrap that conservative intellectuals, Vance’s modern-day cheerleaders, tend to castigate as “woke”. Hillbilly Elegy was not simply the narration of an exotic and unusual life — as was, say, the memoir of another politically-ambitious 30-something Ivy League graduate, Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father. Vance’s book aspired to be serious political science. It held the key, it was claimed in 2016, the year in which it had the good fortune to be published, to understanding the rise of Donald Trump. Even in Britain, where nobody had ever heard of Jackson, Kentucky or tasted Mountain Dew, the lived experience of this cherubic Ohioan was believed to say something meaningful about Brexit and the “Red Wall”. It is ironic that the people who most dislike the Vice President today, and whom he dislikes the most in return, were exactly the sorts who gave him his start. The Financial Times and the Economist were among Hillbilly Elegy’s biggest evangelists. His message, after all, appealed to them: the “autoethnography” was ultimately in service to an old-fashioned, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps liberalism. Some passages could have been written by Samuel Smiles or Margaret Thatcher. “We spend our way to the poorhouse”, Vance wrote of his hillbilly kinsfolk; “thrift is inimical to our being”. Vance has been on quite a journey since then, documented in a trickle of personal essays. At long last, he has treated us to a fully-fledged sequel to the book that made his name. Communion is, its subtitle says, about Vance’s return to faith. In fact, it is a broader Apologia pro vita sua, presenting a self-flattering account of his many conversions since 2016. It therefore considers his conversion to MAGA and his conversion to a kind of anti-liberalism and anti-capitalism, alongside his conversion to Roman Catholicism. All these, he makes clear, are closely linked. Communion is written in the same folksy, syrupy style as Hillbilly Elegy. Vance’s first book began with a faux-modest apology, and in Communion he likewise occasionally pleads for his readers’ clemency: “Keep reading”, he says amid one long-winded digression, “there’s a point here, I promise”. The main difference in style arises from Communion’s affected piety. The sweariness of Hillbilly Elegy is toned down. Mamaw, one of the great characters of modern American literature, used to curse like a sailor; at one point she asks a young JD, then questioning his sexuality, if he wants to suck dicks. In Communion, Mamaw has lost some of her edge: now she lamely refers to “effing crooks” and “effing perverts”. The word “bullshit” appears right at the beginning of Hillbilly Elegy. Clean-mouthed, Ned-Flanders Communion ends with a nauseating “Amen”. Much of Communion narrates Vance’s shifting relationship with Christianity. It retreads the relevant sections of Hillbilly Elegy, occasionally quoting them at length. After some adolescent Bible-thumping, Vance saw the light of atheism, and combined this in his student years with a love for Ayn Rand. In this, he was fairly typical of young men of this milieu, “freethinkers” who found refuge online from the superstitions that stifled them at home. He still shows a nostalgic familiarity with their main totems, notably Christopher Hitchens and Reddit. Why, then, did Vance convert? One of his reasons is that religious people are the most rational and sane. His evidence is his lived experience of the presidential election of 2016. He describes seeing people, elite media types, wailing and thrashing about as it became clear that Trump was on course to win. Quite understandably, he concluded that these people “need psychological help”. “If Hillary Clinton had won”, he continued, “my evangelical, Trump-loving father would have turned off the TV, prayed, and said, ‘Well, I hope she ain’t as bad as I feared’”. That comparison called into question his prior assumptions: “I had thought that my father was an irrational religious man…, and that these newsroom criers were sensible, logical people.” There is a glaring problem here, however. When Joe Biden beat Trump in the election of 2020, the prevailing attitude among Trump’s followers was a far cry from “I hope he ain’t as bad as I feared”. Nor was this the attitude of JD Vance himself, then freshly emerged from the baptismal font. In 2021, as his political ambition was brewing, he described Biden’s victory as “unfair”. He was picked as Trump’s running mate in 2024 in large part because he cleaves to the dogma of his new faith: that the election was rigged. Vance offers the President more than just obsequiousness. His youth and intellectual vigor are supposed to balance out his boss’s dotage. Vance hopes to be the first millennial in the White House. Indeed, Communion is a millennial book, through and through, its themes springing straight from the generation’s roster. Aside from “work-life balance”, there’s a jab at something an author of a different bent would call “mansplaining”: those “insufferable tirades by above-average guys who think they’re brilliant”. Vance details his own sub-Seth-Rogenite college years: “Dude”, he asks a friend, “are you in love with this chick?” Once it has moved to more serious political terrain, many of the book’s barbs are aimed at the “Boomer leadership” — a group from which President Trump is curiously exempted. Communion, as a result, preaches a millennial faith. It is telling that Catholicism ends up, in Vance’s life, as a substitute for therapy, a way for him to “deal with his past”. Its politics are of a similar vintage: generic post-Crash progressivism. That may be a strange ideology to impute to a Republican, but there it is. “I’m uninterested in making people servants to the economy”, he says, as though shouting into a megaphone at Occupy Wall Street in 2011: “the economy ought to be serving us”. The part of the book which sets out his political vision — a foretaste, perhaps, of the presidential campaign to come — is awash with such Sandersesque bluster. He repeatedly criticizes his own party for being “far too willing to worship the market”. He anyway seems just as eager to abjure his past Randian libertarianism as his New Atheism. A Protestant ethic, the ethic of thrift, might have suited the liberalism of Hillbilly Elegy. His new Catholicism likewise suits this postliberal, anti-market shift. In Catholicism he has found some support for his semi-sarcastic, sophomoric suggestion that “maybe economics is just fake”. Vance extols the “skepticism of free market theory” which he finds in the “Catholic Church’s ancient social doctrine”. When he inveighs against the “gods of GDP”, he can cast himself as the inheritor to a venerable tradition of Catholic social thought, critical of “consumerism”, “individualism”, and other vices of modernity, in the mold of Pope Leo XIII, G.K. Chesterton, or Dorothy Day. One can believe that Vance is a sincere Catholic, and a sincere postliberal, while also considering some of the more cynical motivations at play. One theme of Communion is the author’s obsession with status. He knows that this used to inform his beliefs and ideas. His past criticism for Trump gave him “social immunity”, allowing him, as a conservative, to get invited to all the right dinner parties. His Ayn Rand phase used to have a similar effect: “tax breaks and Social Security cuts were socially acceptable ways to be conservative among the American elite”. What Vance never mentions is that Catholicism is a socially acceptable way to be conservative among the American elite — or, at least, that it grants entry to an elite of its own. At Yale Law School, even in its conservative circles, reversion to the hick evangelicalism in which he was reared would never have been an option. Evangelical churches, with their smoke machines and strobe lighting, their faith-healers and doomsday preachers, lack the gravitas that Vance was after. Protestants used to regard themselves as more serious, more intellectually rigorous, than those sensuous, emotional Papists. But now the stakes are reversed. Austere Presbyterianism isn’t really a thing anymore. Even where evangelicalism is on the up — as in Brazil — this is precisely because of its flashy aesthetics and “prosperity gospel”. Catholicism, on the other hand, provides its initiates with an intricate intellectual pedigree. It gives them the mantle of a storied tradition. It directs them to St Augustine (Vance’s patron) and Thomas Aquinas; it allows its adherents to seem “deep”. The leading minds on the American Right, especially those which attended to its postliberal and communitarian turn in the late 2010s, are Catholic, whether converts like Adrian Vermeule or cradle Catholics like Patrick Deneen. The same can be said of the robustly Right-wing justices on the Supreme Court: Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. As with any prestigious club, the Catholic Church sets some barriers for entry. Anyone and his dog can become an evangelical Christian. But to become a Catholic means that a suitably learned priest has decided that you are up to it. Vance acknowledges this directly: “I really liked that the Church required you to work a little to join”. Having cleared that hurdle, conversion to Catholicism brought Vance into this more refined set. If he was once drawn to atheism and libertarianism because they offered him a certain cachet, how do we know his Catholicism is any different? In America, Catholicism possesses another distinct advantage. It was never the dominant religion. It is separate from the elite WASP culture that Vance likes to spurn. In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance felt alienated from that culture on the grounds that he was “Scotch-Irish” rather than “Anglo-Saxon”; his conversion to Catholicism has since allowed him to also drop the P in that acronym. Catholicism gives him a certain fellow-feeling with other “white ethnic” hyphenated Americans, historically excluded from the WASP core — the Italians, the Irish, the Poles. Those groups used to be part of the Democratic coalition. The Catholic Al Smith ran for the presidency as a Democrat in 1928; anti-Catholic prejudice played a part in his defeat. Such prejudice was overcome in 1960, in the election of JFK, and had more or less evaporated completely 60 years later, when the Catholic Joe Biden beat Trump (fair and square). In 2024, buoyed perhaps by Vance’s presence on the Republican ticket, Catholics broke solidly for Trump. Latino Catholics still tend to vote Democratic, but even they are moving Rightwards. This growing alignment between Catholicism and American conservatism, along with its outsider status, doubtless eased Vance’s walk along his road to Damascus. In a similar vein, Vance seems to like Catholicism because it is an Old World religion — he says that it was “quite literally a foreign religion to me, rooted in Roman influences that I had very little exposure to”. It gives him and his faith a certain sun-baked sophistication. In Hillbilly Elegy, he describes his identity growing up as narrowly American; he lacked what many Americans possess, that feeling of being bound to a “mother country”. But the Catholic Vance has a real stake in Europe; so now he is better-placed to polemicize fervently about its declining fortunes. He describes himself in Communion feeling haunted by an empty cathedral in Burgundy, and “what that said about Europe’s cultural decline and Christianity’s slow evaporation from the continent”. He was overwhelmed by a similar feeling of “dread” in England — where, in a detail that hardly lends credence to the strength of his recollections, he claims that something in his full English breakfast was “oozing blood”. His general criticisms of Europe have much to do with his criticisms of European religion, or lack thereof: one of the causes célèbres in his famous Munich speech, after all, concerned the arrest of a British man for praying outside an abortion clinic. His criticism of Europe extends even to the Vatican: Communion makes ample room for the author’s frustrations with his Church. He gives an exasperated sigh over the Vatican’s “trite platitudes” about his administration’s immigration policy. The implication here is that Rome is currently doing a poor job of tending to her flock. The energetic Catholic sheepdogs of the New World are called to guide the listless, straying Catholics of the Old. JD Vance became a Catholic rather than a different type of Christian because Catholicism today is the thinking man’s Christianity. As Candace Owens — not, herself, much of a thinking woman — supposedly remarked to Charlie Kirk before he was murdered: “You’re too smart to be a Protestant”. In Communion, Vance describes a friend named Sam, another convert to Catholicism. He would go on “extended rants about the Reformation and immigration”, and thought America’s ills could all be traced to John Calvin. Here is a character familiar to anybody who has rubbed shoulders with young conservatives at elite institutions. The problem for Vance now, however, is that he cannot only speak for those high-brow Catholic Right-wingers. He may wish, no less fervently than Adrian Mole, to be a Malcolm Muggeridge; but he is also the Hillbilly Vice President, the tribune of the plebs. He cannot leave his own people behind. He has therefore had to fuse his two personas into one. This is why Communion, a book about Catholicism, shows on its front cover a Methodist church. It is why its subtitle talks generically about “finding my way back to faith” — rather than the faith. It is why he describes his 2022 Senate campaign in Ohio — whose population is 46% Protestant, 16% Catholic — as an effort to make “more explicitly Christian arguments about the economy”, even though he says these arguments are what attracted him to Catholicism specifically. He probably can’t even play up his Catholicism now too much, lest there be persistent traces, in Middle America, of Protestant chauvinism. He cannot, like his friend Sam, launch into diatribes about Calvin. His political ambition requires him to be ecumenical. What, then, does Communion mean for America, the country which, two-and-a-half years from now, its author may well be leading? Time and again, reading the book, it struck me that Vance’s ideal society, the America he hopes to build, is sleepy, southern, ancien régime Europe. He wants something like the Portugal of that other Catholic public intellectual turned statesman, Antonio Salazar: a country built on a foundation of Catholic social teaching, one sapped of prosperity and dynamism, but where everybody goes to church. He wants a society where people care less about work; he waxes nostalgic about the “blessings” of being raised in a “multigenerational household”. In Vance’s America, in his crusade against the Protestant Ethic, “GDP” is a dirty word, and the chief problem in Europe is declining church attendance rather than declining wealth. It is difficult to imagine such an America putting a man on Mars. It is also difficult to imagine such a schoolmarmish message resonating with most Americans. The seeds for Vance’s conversions — both from secularism to Catholicism, and from liberalism to post- or anti-liberalism — were, he suggests in Communion, sown before 2016 and even further from Rome. Revealingly, they first took root in a general denunciation of American culture. As a soldier in Iraq, among Christian and Muslim Arabs, he encountered a “genuinely compelling critique” of that culture in the fear that, if Iraq grew too “Americanized”, it would become too “consumerist and hypersexualized”. He then paints a picture of a contrast between one culture, pious, austere, morally upstanding, and another one, wayward and decadent. “A woman in a niqab was reading the Quran”, he quotes from some fellow Catholic intellectual, “and a man was rocking while praying, and on the TV was Britney Spears dancing in her underwear”. Which of these cultures does JD Vance prefer? Catholic his answer may in fact be; but it does not strike me as very American.