100% America First: On Vance’s Communion

In J. D. Vance’s road to Damascus story, it’s not Jesus that he encounters, it’s Trump. The Vice President and Hillbilly Elegy author’s new memoir, Communion, is about “how a guy like me, who was raised Christian but considered himself an atheist for a time, came back to the faith.” It is Trump, not God, that plucked him out of Appalachia and turned him into a Catholic convert. But Vance’s book doesn’t just talk about religion — it’s a moral defense of his politics, his turn from conservative to ambiguous liberal to New Right steward mirroring his spiritual journey. Along the way he likens himself to other Christians like Charlie Kirk, Pope Francis, and Saint Augustine. (Vance does not, however, like the current Pope, who he has effectively told to watch it.) As Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes, he makes “elisions to his persona, pruning off the inconvenient biographical details so what remains is as unnatural as a bonsai.”

In Communion, Vance repeatedly worries about the decline of Christianity in America. The pews weren’t always so political, he claims, but now 90% of white American Evangelicals voted for Trump. Vance argues that if the church doesn’t fill the gaps left in our fractured culture, then leftist economic policies will. For Vance and the right, that’s a problem. While Vance recently told The View the book is far less about politics than people might think, it is clear the two are inseparable to him. The problem with how we talk about American society, Vance writes, is that GDP isn’t an accurate indicator of happiness. Some women just want to raise their kids, no matter the income bracket! Who cares if they hit a glass ceiling?

Vance’s literary and theoretical musings on religion are the most salient passages in the book. At times, his references to C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton border on actual insight. Turning his back on Ayn Rand, he finds René Girard and the idea of “mimetic desire” — that we model our wants after what other people want — as a way to explain the hypocrisy of the elite. For all that worry about posturing, Vance’s own book is blatantly hypocritical: “When national politicians invoke God that much today, we’re warned that The Handmaid’s Tale has come to life.” As if the Right doesn’t also invoke its own images of apocalypse drawn from, as Vance himself notes, the Left Behind series. 

The hypocrisy is most devious in his discussions of immigration. He writes: “What did they take issue with, exactly? The diplomats never specified. Did they object to deportations? Just to deportations of certain populations? Were they entirely fine with deportations so long as we didn’t say mean things about illegal immigrants?” But as The View noted, it’s pretty clear what Democrats object to: Children in cages. Vance, meanwhile, peddles conspiracy theories that frame immigrants as rapists and killers rather than actually caring about the children he claims to in his anti-abortion, anti-cat mom natalist platform.

The women on The View also pushed Vance on the Epstein files, pointing out that his boss was frequently found in pictures with the late pedophile. Who actually cares about the children? “I do have to defend my boss,” Vance said weakly. “Are you his interpreter or are you his Vice President?” Joy Behar asked. This is the fundamental problem: Vance is too pliable. No one knows what he wants. Trump is the one with political acumen, the Vice President is just the puppet left to pick up the pieces. While Trump enjoys foreign intervention — the Iran War, Greenland, Israel — Vance does not, feeling that such action betrays his paleocon America First values. Rarely does he put forth these differences with conviction. Instead he withers behind his superiors, only privately discussing his objections to the President.

It may be easy for atheists, socialists, and lefties to dismiss this book as a work of religious “woo woo,” something Vance himself once did to others peddling Catholicism. But the fact that the VP takes his cues from C.S. Lewis, “craving Aslan’s appearance” and loving The Magician’s Nephew, is not a sign of his beliefs being “stupid, totally unpersuasive.” As Vance wonders, “what did it say about my faith that the version of Christianity that intellectually resonated most with me was found in a kids’ book? Didn’t this count against the truth of Christianity?” Yet Christ too asked that we become like children to seek divine grace. The real power of Lewis’s work, which Vance alludes to but never quite grasps, is his complexity. He holds contradiction with equanimity. Even if Lewis’s work does not convince me, at least his work is compelling — even convincing at times. He knows that grief and destruction are real. Books like The Problem with Pain and The Screwtape Letters are books for adults. Communion is not. 

Here is Vance’s reasoning for making America Christian again: “I’m proposing that we have now run an experiment of replacing a Christian culture with something else for decades. And the fruit of that experiment includes rising racial strife, a gender gap among our young people, falling rates of love and partnership, and a society with a declining population.” This from the man who felt Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking lacked the moral imperative of hell. Empty churches seem to haunt him more than children dying in Palestine or in detention facilities. 

“The final horrors, as modern society has come to realize, are neither gods nor demons, but intimate aspects of our own minds,” Leslie A. Fielder wrote in Love and Death in the American Novel. Perhaps Vance’s problems are less theological than individual: His tortured path to power betrays an inability to grasp larger social dynamics. It might help to focus more on his personal accountability in the confession booth and spend less time bemoaning declining birth rates. Recent polls have him neck and neck with Marco Rubio for the 2028 Republican Presidential primary. —Grace Byron