In his latest memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, Vice President JD Vance writes with the zeal of a convert. Christianity has transformed his life, he says, and he’s eager to share how it can transform yours, too.
Except Vance, who became Catholic in 2019, isn’t primarily interested in convincing others to become Christian on a personal level (“though I’d welcome it,” he writes). Instead, the vice president wants to make the case for Christianity on the national level: as the creedal ethos of American society, informing everything from our country’s social values to its economic policy.
Communion is built around an implicit analogy. Just as Vance returned from secular individualism to Christianity, America should undergo its own reversion — not simply through more people in the pews, but through a public life that is once again shaped by Christian belief.
This thesis is what connects the book’s first half, which recounts Vance’s journey away from and then back to faith, to the latter half, which lays out the prominent role that the 41-year-old vice president believes Christianity should play in American society going forward.
As such, Communion is neither a strictly spiritual memoir nor a political manifesto.
