JD Vance can tell a story of conversion. But of communion

In April 2025, JD Vance went to Rome. By his own account in Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, his new memoir, the visit disappointed him. Vance, the most senior Catholic in the United States government, met with officials of the Roman Curia and pressed them on the question then dividing his administration from his church: immigration. What he heard on immigration struck him as platitudinous and clichéd, moral counsel that never advanced past the injunction to treat migrants humanely. The next morning, he was received briefly by Pope Francis, who was too sick for much conversation. Francis died the following day. It is a remarkable scene to place near the center of a conversion memoir, and Vance appears not to notice the import of what he has written. A dying pope spent some of his last hours receiving an emissary of the government then assembling the machinery of mass deportation, and the emissary’s recorded emotion is irritation. Vance offers the scene as evidence of Vatican evasion. His telling of this episode reads instead as the confession of a man who came to Rome to be agreed with, and who mistook the refusal for emptiness. That Pope Francis, as sick and weak as he was in the final hours of his life, took the time to meet with him seems completely lost on Vance. It is a scene that in many ways encapsulates Communion. At the same time, Vance’s book deserves a more serious hearing as a religious testimony than it has generally received. The secular press has treated the book as little more than a campaign document with incense—in large part because the book arrived five months before the midterms from a man widely expected to seek the presidency in 2028—and the reviews have been mostly brutal. But a book that offers a convert’s testimony deserves the courtesy of being read as testimony first. Read that way, the book divides less between memoir and politics than between two theologies: a theology of the soul—which Vance has genuinely absorbed—and a theology of the corporate body of the church, which he has not. One oddity of this memoir is how little Vance uses the term Catholic in the story of his conversion. He instead deploys the more generic term Christian. It reads at times like a political device to attract evangelical Christian votes. Vance describes the erratic Baptist and Pentecostal churchgoing of his Ohio boyhood, in congregations where Republican politics had fused with the faith: sermons on abortion and homosexuality, alarms about Bill Clinton’s morals, family values preached in the abstract while divorce and addiction wrecked the actual families in the pews. The Terri Schiavo spectacle stands out for Vance and seemed to help move him away from those expressions of faith. Schiavo was a 26-year-old who in 1990 fell into a vegetative state after a heart attack. Her husband Michael wanted to “pull the plug,” claiming his wife would not want to live this way. Her parents fought him in court. A long, drawn-out court fight and much discussion by religious groups followed. Watching his church pour its moral energy into a single tragic case in Florida, he concluded that even if Schiavo’s situation was indeed a tragedy, his pastors had little to say about the tragedies visible from his grandmother’s porch. A Marine deployment to Iraq cut the last threads. By the time he reached Yale Law School, he called himself an atheist, and a comfortable one. The memoir suggests that Vance’s childhood instability pushed him, as it does many who grew up poor, to succeed. Those sections where he discusses the guilt he felt for getting out and the responsibility he felt for his sister and mother are the most powerful—and most reminiscent of many notable Catholic memoirs. He writes, “at some point in my university career, my desire for stability morphed into a craving for conquest. I didn’t just want a nice car, a house, and a decent vacation. I wanted to win for the sake of winning’s sake.” This drive was all-consuming and, he writes, unfulfilling and endless. He writes about the emptiness he felt even as he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. He was, in his own telling, searching for meaning. What unsettled Vance’s atheism was not an argument but a person: Peter Thiel, of all people. Thiel, then lecturing at Yale, struck Vance as the smartest man he had ever met and an open Christian; Thiel “defied the simple social template I had constructed,” the template holding that intelligent people do not believe in God. The undoing completed itself in 2018 in a French cathedral, where Vance, standing with his wife Usha and their son Ewan, thinking about the sheer endurance of the institution around him, felt “a distinct sense of belonging and presence.” Private instruction with Dominican priests followed, then baptism in 2019. The strongest pages in the book concern what Catholicism gave him. The sociology of trauma, the literature of inescapable childhood experiences that made his first book a must-read for policy audiences, had also imprisoned him. They told him he was a statistical outcome, and he felt, in his own words, “debilitated” by the telling. Catholic teaching on sin and grace offered what the regression tables could not: an account in which the forces beyond the individual are real, and the individual remains a soul with agency. That is a genuine theological insight, honestly arrived at. It is the same question that animated Hillbilly Elegy: How much of a life is fate? It is worth noting, as Slate first reported, that a portion of this material dates to 2020, adapted nearly verbatim from the conversion essay Vance published in The Lamp before he successfully ran for a U.S. Senate seat. The observation explains the quality of these chapters without impugning them. They were written by a man who was not yet running for anything. Had he never run, they might have earned a modest place on the long American shelf of conversion literature. But conversion is not only a turning toward God. It is enrollment in a body or community of believers, and the body Vance describes joining is curiously depopulated. What drew him, on his own telling, was structure after chaos, order after instability, intellect over emotion, an institution old enough to have outlasted every fashion and human tragedy that ever was. His Catholic intellectual references run to St. Augustine, to C. S. Lewis (an Anglican, as it happens) and to the Girardian Christianity of Thiel’s Silicon Valley. He announces early that he is not a sectarian person and has not written a sectarian book, and he means it generously; the Protestant churches of his youth get real credit as part of the foundation of his return. What is nearly absent is the church’s social tradition and its social teaching—and the centrality of the relationship between the believer and the community of believers. Yes, every believer has an individual relationship to God, but Catholic doctrine also stresses the responsibility believers have, both individually and as a community, to the world. This central aspect of Catholic social teaching is hard to find in Vance’s memoir. The absence is not incidental. It is the book’s glaring omission. The man who wrote the most widely read account of deindustrialized America in a generation is writing here about joining the church of “Rerum Novarum,” the church that confronted the factory system in 1891 and has spent 13 decades building a body of teaching on wages, work, migration and the poor. It is a church whose pontiff took the name Leo precisely to invoke that tradition, and who has framed the dignity of workers facing a new industrial revolution, this one algorithmic, as a defining concern of his pontificate. And yet that tradition cannot be found in Communion. A Catholicism assembled from liturgy, hierarchy, antiquity and metaphysics, with the rest unconsidered, is a strange inheritance for the elegist of Middletown, Ohio. The people Hillbilly Elegy mourned are the exact people with whom the Catholic social teaching tradition concerns itself. This church has been talking about them since before the mills closed. Vance never recognizes it. Then there is the ecclesiology. Vance mentions that “half the time these days, we attend Mass at home.” Security explains some of this, no doubt; no one begrudges a vice president his protective detail. But the detail is emblematic. The sacrament that gives the book its title is not a private consolation. It is the act by which the church becomes one body, taken shoulder to shoulder with people you did not choose and would not have chosen. A communion celebrated apart from the congregation, like a magisterium consulted only when it agrees, is no kind of belonging. It is a Catholicism with the burdens removed. Vance’s telling suggests he has taken from the church its beauty, its authority, its pedigree and its account of his own wounded soul, but the pews and the people in them he has largely left behind. The pattern sharpens whenever Catholic teaching touches or intrudes on his politics, and the record is consistent: In Communion, the politician outranks the church every time. In early 2025, Vance defended the administration’s immigration crackdown by invoking the “ordo amoris,” the ordered hierarchy of loves delineated by St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine many centuries ago, which Vance reads as the justification for favoring family over neighbor, neighbor over stranger. Pope Francis answered within weeks, in a letter to the American bishops early in President Trump’s second term that needed no name to identify its target. The true order of love, Francis wrote, is learned by meditating on the parable of the good Samaritan, whose love leaps every boundary of kin and nation. A Catholic of six years had offered the church a theology lesson, and the pope corrected the homework. This book shows no sign the correction landed. The Rome scene of April 2025 is its sequel: Vance criticizes what he sees as platitudes, clichés and a church unwilling to say anything about migrants beyond the injunction to treat them humanely—which is to say, unwilling to say what Vance’s government needed said. When the American bishops issued their special pastoral message on immigration in November 2025, the response Vance records in Communion is a small masterpiece of condescension. He calls the message “admirably measured. Or almost too measured,” praising his critics for the gentleness of their criticism while omitting, as OSV News observed, the message’s explicit condemnation of indiscriminate mass deportation. During a talk at the University of Georgia in April, he publicly advised Pope Leo XIV to “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” Again, we have here a new Catholic instructing the successor of Peter on theological prudence. A much-noticed apology in the book runs on the same grammar. Vance walks back his remark describing the Democrats as the party of “childless cat ladies,” and the retraction deserves exact quotation: The comment, he writes, was “intentionally (and successfully) provocative rather than illuminating.” Mark the parenthesis. The apology carries its own boast inside it, a stone packed in the snowball. It is the book’s method in miniature: the forms of piety, filled with the content of politics. None of this convicts Vance of insincerity, and readers should resist that verdict, common in the coverage, that the conversion was a career move. The evidence in the early chapters is that the faith is real; people do not fake the relief he describes at being told his childhood was not a sentence to which he was condemned. The problem is more American. Vance has converted to a Catholicism with an overtly individualistic inflection, as if it were a church whose teaching authority extends exactly to the boundary of his politics and stops there. Where the magisterium confirms him, it is ancient wisdom. Where it checks him, it is empty platitude. He did not invent the maneuver. Catholic politicians of the political left have performed the same amputation on abortion for half a century, and Vance would be within his rights to say so. But a precedent of this kind is an indictment, not a defense. And he has extended the amputation to the one region of teaching, the defense of the worker and the stranger, that his own biography should have made impossible to cut. The title, in the end, is the review: Communion names the one thing the book cannot imagine. The Eucharist does not signify finally feeling at home. It binds the believer into a body he or she does not get to curate. The migrant in the detention cell is in that body. The bishops are in it. The pope is in it. The childless woman (with or without a cat) in the back pew is in it. To receive the sacrament is to be connected to all of them, which is why the church keeps insisting, against every national and tribal instinct, that its teaching on the stranger is not a platitude. It is the corporate body examining its own wounds. At the same time, Vance found his way back to faith. Faith is not something final; it is evolutionary. So it is important for us to imagine Vance continuing his faith journey. The book is a credible record of that journey, and readers should receive it with more charity than the general press has managed. He has found something meaningful in the Catholic Church that was missing in his life. What he has not yet found, on this evidence, is the way into the communion his title invokes. That journey is harder. It is meant to be harder, and it cannot be made alone. It cannot be made on camera, and it runs directly through the people his politics requires him to hold at the border. Whether he arrives at this fuller communion is worth a prayer. He is, after all, a man with a history of conversions.