The first chapter of JD Vance’s Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, is titled “What’s the Matter with JD Vance?” It’s a reference to Thomas Frank’s 2004 What’s the Matter With Kansas?, but it’s also a fine question in and of itself, a question one asks with increasing urgency the further one gets in the book. On its face, Communion has all the hallmarks of the standard Politician Book: the kind of thing one writes in preparation for a presidential run, where one tells (or retells) one’s life story, confesses some flaws and puts one’s heart on one’s sleeve, while also making a case for why America is the greatest country on earth and offering a bold vision for its future alongside a smattering of policy proposals.
And yet. There is something deeply the matter here with JD Vance, and with this book. Reading Communion requires a strange leap of faith, a leap across a chasm into some alternate universe—several, actually. For in order to make sense of this book, one must be able to pitch one’s mind into a world where the Donald Trump of the past six years somehow doesn’t exist, a world where Christianity is somehow an entirely different religion than is generally manifested in American culture and politics, and a world where JD Vance himself is another person entirely. At times one feels as though one is actually reading Whitney Streiber’s Communion, the 1987 blockbuster about extraterrestrial contact, the content here so entirely alien to the world we now inhabit.
On its surface, the story Vance wants to tell is a familiar one, and a simple one, about “how a guy like me, who was raised Christian but considered himself an atheist for a time, came back to the faith.” Raised in Appalachia, he was surrounded by Christians for whom faith was simply a way of life. Poor, socially conservative, the adults of Vance’s childhood found community and kinship here; as a child, he came to see that “God loved us, that He demanded our best but would forgive our worst.” What’s clear is that from an early age, he saw religion not just in terms of faith but in terms of community, and as a way of bringing people together by creating structure to one’s life and forging bonds. “Christianity wasn’t just a ‘belief’ to us. It wasn’t a judgment we arrived at after evaluating the evidence. It was a practice, a way of life.” There’s a fair amount of nostalgia here, but such is memory.
By the late 1990s, however, the community was deep in the Left Behind era of eschatological fundamentalism that Vance saw as increasingly irrelevant to the poverty and need around him. At the same time, social issues like abortion that had always been present began to take a bigger prominence. His turn to atheism, he writes, was fueled in no small part by the Terry Schiavo case of the early 2000s, when social conservatives across the country rallied to keep a functionally brain-dead woman in Florida from being taken off life support despite her husband’s wishes. “As tragic as Schiavo’s case was,” he writes, “it seemed like a genuinely freak occurrence in a world filled with overlooked tragedy. It felt to me like our pastors spoke in abstractions about family values, while glossing over the divorce and family instability that had wrecked my family and community. They worried about the unborn, but ignored the abuse, neglect, and struggles in homes like mine.”
That growing sense of disconnect, along with losing his grandmother and joining the Army, led to his break: “What paved my path to atheism wasn’t books or ideas, it was sadness and a sense of betrayal.” What characterizes these pages, though, is less sadness than an emotion that comes to define Vance in these pages: rage. He comes to see expressions of religion as increasingly hypocritical and phony, performative and insulting. “All the fervor, all the overwrought emotion, infuriated me,” he writes. “I was sick of it and skeptical that it did a bit of good.” He is “furious,” “enraged”; like his 2016 book, Hillbilly Elegy, this is a story of an angry young man.
From there, Vance tells the story of his rise, through the military, and then on to Ohio State University and Yale Law School. It’s a period in which, as Vance describes it, he cared little for religion and was focused entirely on escaping the economic precarity of his youth and of reaching the brass ring. “I didn’t care about God’s will. I cared about my own. I cared about winning, about never having to worry about money again, and having the type of job that commanded respect.” It’s another theme he returns to over and over again: “I wanted to win for winning’s sake,” he says later. When he was an atheist he was mercenary, empty inside, determined to get ahead at all costs. Striving.
Two people at Yale will change his life. The first is Peter Thiel, who is described here primarily in terms of his religion—openly Christian, a rarity in the elite worlds Vance now finds himself in. Through Thiel, Vance finds the ideas of philosopher René Girard, including the idea of “mimetic desire.” As Vance explains the term, “We are such social creatures that we instinctively want what other people around us want: the same jobs, the same women (or men), the same university degrees.” In addition to his rage and his striving, mimetic desire is the third thing that will come to define Vance: finding himself in situations where everyone seems to believe and think and act in the same way, a predicament from which he seems desperate to escape. At Yale, the “groupthink pressure was incredibly powerful,” and he’ll later learn that “the intensity of social control was far greater among our elites than anything I’d seen in a Pentecostal or Southern Baptist church back home.”
And then there’s Usha Chilukuri, his future wife. Falling deeply in love with her, Vance resolves to do anything he needs to do to keep her. She forces him to address unresolved issues from his past—at first he tries therapy, but he scoffs after a few sessions. Therapy, he complains, “was divorced from any sense of responsibility or guilt.” The therapist’s suggestion that his problems stemmed from intergenerational trauma “turned me into a victim rather than an actor. I’m sure that therapy helps many people, but it made me want to puke.” This seems a crude rendering of how therapy works, but Vance wants to be the author of his own destiny and quickly gives it up. Instead, he finds himself “searching for a more satisfying accounting of wrongdoing and responsibility. Of temptation and willpower. Of virtue and guilt.”
Ultimately he finds this in a return to religion, this time via the Catholic Church. What’s made clear in Communion is that one of the most important reasons Vance found God again was to keep from losing Usha, and when he found it, she encouraged him to stick with it—despite not being religious herself. “Therapy didn’t work for you,” she tells him. “But church does.”
And so Vance finds his way back to God; the redemption arc is completed and the narrative fulfilled. The second half of the book charts his course from there: the success of Hillbilly Elegy and his rise to fame as an interpreter of the disaffected Appalachian Donald Trump voter, becoming a father, his run for Senate, and ultimately the vice presidency. As a book unto itself, such a thing would be fine. But in 2026, reading this is one of the strangest experiences imaginable, simply because nearly every premise of the book defies any kind of known reality.
For one, Communion’s policy proposals and vision for a future America suggest throughout a move toward the center—the kind of thing you might expect for someone lining up for a presidential run, if that someone was anyone, anyone at all, who was not associated with the Trump administration. But Vance makes these statements as though completely unmoored from everything that’s been going on, unmoored from who he is and where he works, unmoored from the current political divide and the current realities of what’s happening every day—as though he’s a center-right Republican cryogenically unfrozen from 2010. “We’re fine telling a businessman he must go to church and tithe but not that he must pay his people a fair wage,” he writes at one point. And: “If it is sinful to abort a perfectly healthy human baby before birth, so, too, is it sinful to depress that baby’s chance of a living a good life afterward.” They’re the kind of lines that were once focus-tested to a high polish but have long since been left on the shelf and allowed to rust.
Why this strange attempt to tack suddenly to the center-right? Does Vance think his readers have the attention span of goldfishes? What’s the matter with him? Communion seems to telegraph that MAGA will not last beyond Trump, that the raw nativism and brutality that have defined the past 18 months have an expiration date, and that Vance himself may only be buying into it because he’s good at following orders. Certainly, Communion is not a full-throated, impassioned case for the righteousness of MAGA. (On the administration’s immigration policy, for instance, he writes “Of course, critics of the Trump administration say we’re too tough. The point is not to litigate this issue on these pages but to highlight that any application of moral principles in the real world requires a constant evaluation of trade-offs.”) Instead the book is a chickenshit attempt to have it both ways by appealing to some rational middle that hasn’t existed in this country since at least 2014.
It’s hard to say how he thinks this is going to work out for him, but Communion makes clear how he sees his path ahead—even if, by releasing this during Trump’s reign, he may be playing his hand a bit too soon.
Additionally, Vance’s understanding of Christianity is singular, to say the least. It’s certainly complex, at times deeply thoughtful and at other times frustratingly facile. His turn from faith seems genuinely rooted in matters of social justice, in the religious right’s refusal to deal with poverty and drug addiction in favor of abstract social issues, eschatological fervor, and political power. And his way back appears to have involved a great deal of serious study and consideration. Again and again throughout his life, Vance finds himself looking for something that will answer “the big questions,” and neither atheism nor therapy comes close for him. Religion does.
Reading Communion, the theme that emerges is that Vance sees Christianity as a force for social cohesion, one that binds the family, creating children, and the nation by providing a “shared moral language.” But when it comes to political prescriptions, the picture of Christianity he presents is so oddly one-sided that it boggles the mind. When he discusses racial tension, writing that on the left, “people worry about a rising tide of white supremacism,” and on the right, “people worry about rising anti-white rhetoric or anti-Semitism on college campuses,” he offers Christianity as the solution:
From the intermarriage of the Spanish and native populations in Mexico to the American melting pot of the nineteenth century to the Civil Rights Movement, Christianity has long brought people together. And yet, as our leaders have ushered in an unprecedented increase in demographic diversity through immigration, they have simultaneously discarded the most powerful force for cultural cohesion: Christianity. It is hardly any surprise that the fruits of their labor are rising racial conflict and gender division. Secularism has produced social strife despite its promises of enlightenment.
No serious student of history would deny that Christianity has produced its share of good in the world. But Christianity is not good simply because it’s Christianity. Being a good Christian does not make you good. That both the Civil Rights Movement and the Ku Klux Klan claimed God was on their side is an undeniable fact, and makes the central argument of Communion more or less a nonstarter. Is he really this naïve about Christianity’s shortcomings? Is he really suggesting that the solution to antisemitism is Christianity? Does he really think the relationship between the Spanish conquistadors and Indigenous Americans was one of happy communion? What’s the matter with him?
This is why the country’s Founders tried to structure the United States in such a way that our laws did not rely on God, so we wouldn’t have to get into the thorny question of Whose God? and Whose interpretation? Instead, Vance seems to think that injecting God into policy is itself a panacea. He notes that at the 2024 Munich Security Conference, there “were no mentions of God,” but there were “lots of appeals to vaguely defined shared values. ‘Putin is evil,’ I heard many times. ‘We are on the side of justice and truth, and our enemies seek to destroy these things,’ a French parliamentarian told me about the transatlantic alliance.” It’s unclear why “justice” is any more vague than “God.” Putin’s invasion of Ukraine violated international law, which seems to be a textbook definition of injustice. Why the need to bring God into it?
Because it suits him. Of his meeting with Pope Francis in 2025, Vance comments, “I preferred his specific exhortations to the vagueness I encountered during our Vatican meeting. Better to have an honest conversation than one masked by clichés.” But for Vance, his discussion of Christianity is too often itself nothing but a cliché, a shield invoked as a cover for his specific policy preferences, held up as a transcendental ideal and thus something that need not be argued for or substantiated with evidence.
But most of all, in order to read and make sense of this book one must pretend, somehow, that JD Vance is not JD Vance. The arc of the narrative here is an angry young man, striving for the sake of striving, who once succumbed to groupthink—but who, through the love of a good woman and the grace of God, has found the grace to work past all that.
Communion accomplishes this in the strangest of ways. Vance continually reminds you of his faults when recounting his early days as an atheist: his anger, his hollow pursuit of wealth and status, how again and again he found himself in places like Yale where he was subject to groupthink.
But once his conversion takes place, significant events in his life just sort of seem to happen, without the same kind of burning motivation he once felt—though they are the sort of accomplishments that do not just fall into one’s lap without serious effort. His decision to write Hillbilly Elegy is reduced to a sentence: “On the side, I worked on a book slated for publication in the summer of 2016.” And his political moves are likewise minimized. Here is his decision to run for Senate: “I went back and forth for awhile on whether to run before eventually deciding to do it.” He adds one paragraph about his platform, and then here is the race itself: “Much has been written about that Senate race, and I doubt I can offer much original here. But the most important thing to say is that I thought we’d lose but we didn’t.” The 2024 presidential campaign—from the phone call where he learned he was being vetted for vice president to moving into the Naval Observatory in January 2025—is covered in three pages.
A memoir in which the most significant moments of a person’s career fly by as nonevents makes for a truly baffling read. Is not running for Senate and vice president the ultimate expression of someone still striving for “having the type of job that commanded respect”? And are we to believe Vance has broken free of mimetic desire—with its tendency toward groupthink—now that he serves in an administration where no one is able to say publicly that Trump lost the 2020 election? If it was in Yale that he first discovered that he “was susceptible to intense pressure to believe certain things,” are we to believe that has changed, when he and Marco Rubio now sport the too-large shoes their boss bought for them? Are we to believe Vance has let go of his anger issues, despite the fact that he still talks elsewhere about how he loses his temper? What’s the matter with JD Vance? What are we even doing here? Communion seems to be trying to convince us of its redemption narrative simply by ignoring who Vance is, and who he shows us to be every single day.
What, finally, has Christianity done for Vance, other than gird his marriage and make him a father? Has it, for instance, given him the grace to offer forgiveness to his enemies? The same Vance who, according to a New York Times story published the day before the book came out, was urging Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to crush the protest movement in Minneapolis, claiming without evidence that the protesters were paid agitators; who spread the accusation that Alex Pretti was an “assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents” and subsequently refused to apologize?
In what reality does he expect anyone—even his supporters—to believe measured, conciliatory lines like this? “I can believe (as I do) that I owe a given immigrant—even an illegal one—duties of charity and grace, while accepting that in a world of limited resources those duties necessarily come up against other responsibilities.” These words ring insultingly hollow when his public persona betrays no hint that he feels any duty to provide charity or grace to those his administration has locked up in the most appalling and inhuman of conditions, and not a hint of remorse about it.
Throughout Communion, he returns to Matthew 7:20 as a refrain: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” So then. Know him by his fruits. Not this book.
