Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith - JD Vance

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JD Vance: Faith, Family and Power

JD Vance is Vice-President of the United States and one of the more controversial figures in the Trump administration. Strong feelings about that administration make dispassionate judgement difficult. His new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, must therefore be read both as a personal account of his Catholic conversion and as a public declaration by a politician who may eventually seek the presidency.

Vance first became famous through his autobiographical book Hillbilly Elegy. Raised in an unstable Ohio household with family roots in Appalachian Kentucky, he served in the Marine Corps, graduated from Ohio State University and attended Yale Law School. His memoir examined the poverty, addiction, fierce loyalties and chaotic family life of the community from which he came. Its publisher expected modest sales.

Then Donald Trump unexpectedly won the 2016 presidential election, forcing the American political and media establishment to ask how such an outcome had become possible. Vance, an educated member of the elite who understood Trump’s working-class supporters from within, was suddenly treated as their interpreter. Hillbilly Elegy became a guidebook to an America its readers had scarcely deigned to notice, and Vance its tour guide.

Communion follows a different journey. The evangelical Christianity of his childhood faded during his military service and gave way to atheism. Academic success, Yale and a lucrative career offered achievement which he came to see as without purpose. Influenced partly by Peter Thiel, Vance gradually returned to Christianity and was received into the Catholic Church in 2019.

His wife and children are central to this account. Vance writes with evident devotion to his wife, Usha, and presents their marriage as the foundation of his adult life. Family is not, for him, merely one source of personal happiness among others. Marriage, children, mutual obligation and continuity between generations are among the principal goods for which a society and an economy should exist.

Contemporary culture, he argues, tends to treat them as inconveniences - obstructing education, careers, mobility and personal autonomy. His own large and growing family can be understood as something almost countercultural.

Catholicism gave intellectual form to these convictions. Its teaching on human nature, family, work, duty and the common good offered an alternative both to progressive individualism and to the moral vacuum of market economics. Work must sustain families and communities; an economy which destroys stable employment cannot be justified merely because it produces cheaper goods. Marriage, children and unborn life are public goods, not simply private, disposable preferences.

The book is stronger on these moral intuitions than on political analysis. Vance is intelligent and widely read, but more a synthesiser than an original thinker. His criticisms of meritocracy, globalisation and economic abstraction often ring true, yet Catholic social teaching does not by itself determine policy. It identifies human ends and moral limits; government must still exercise prudential judgement among competing policies.

Communion is plainly intended to shape Vance’s public identity. Yet its Catholicism is too definite, too demanding and sometimes electorally inconvenient to dismiss as campaign packaging.

Vance insists that faith cannot be confined to Mass or purely private life but must be the foundation of everything you do. He expects to be judged not by whether Catholicism colours his rhetoric, but by whether the power he exercises is recognisably governed by it.

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