“Read Hillbilly Elegy,” a friend messaged me a decade ago. “The author really gets it.” So I did, and indeed he did. The young and then obscure J.D. Vance showed, through his family travails in Appalachia, how both Republicans and Democrats had in their different ways screwed blue collar, just-about-working-class families like his. The book went platinum and launched his public career.
Three things saved the young Vance from the fate that awaited people like him: a fiercely defensive and religious grandmother (“Mamaw”), enlisting in the Marines, and evangelical Christianity. He fell away from this last, however, as he discovered that his fundamentalist faith may have had community love in spades but was very short on good answers to big questions.
The same man who obsesses about virtue is happy to work as chief henchman for a venal moral gargoyle
Communion is the story of his return to faith, this time in the form of Catholicism, a kind of Parable of the Prodigal Veep. It’s really two books in one. Vance reveals that he finished the initial draft seven years ago, when he was received into the church and not long after he considered running for the Senate. Accordingly, the first 175 pages tell the story of his journey in, from and back to faith, while the rest of the book focuses more, if not exclusively, on the public and political implications of that faith. The parts do cohere, however, as Vance’s meta-theme is how Christianity offers the redemptive structure and hope that can put a life (like his) and a civilization (like the West) back together again.
Some of the autobiography will be familiar to readers of Hillbilly Elegy. This particular prodigal did not reject his home with the vehemence of the original – he retained a deep affection for family and community throughout – but he did develop a kind of intellectual contempt for the “wishy-washy” theological banalities in which he was nurtured. Nor did the Prodigal Veep squander his wealth on wild living. On the contrary, his rebellion saw him striving soullessly for wealth and recognition like so many other law graduates of Yale. However, falling in love (his Hindu wife Usha is a constant presence and the heroine of the book), befriending Peter Thiel, reading René Girard and other serious thinkers and finding some intelligent priests to talk to brought him back.
If you have any sympathy with the idea that an encounter with God can reform a life – this reviewer does – reading about it when it happens is never a waste of time. But it is not an insult to say there is nothing especially penetrating or novel here. Vance is not the first person to have found C.S. Lewis an inspiration and he won’t be the last. This particular parable is of interest, and will be reviewed widely, primarily because it comes from the pen of the most prominent Catholic in the world, if you don’t include the Pope.
It would be a cheap shot to say at this point “and J.D. Vance doesn’t” – cheap and untrue. Vance takes the dogma and authority of his Church seriously. But Donald Trump’s recent attack on Leo XIV, and Vance’s hesitant but clear defense of his political boss, is just one of the stories that has brought the VP’s political Catholicism on to the front page. Does Vance really mean it, we wonder, or is he tacking to a helpful theological wind, just as he did to the political one, when, having once called himself a “never-Trump guy,” he forgot his principles just as the President came to him with a job offer.
Communion gives a firm and convincing answer to that question. Vance is a genuine believer, sincere and serious about both Christ and the Church. He wants to see fruits from this faith – “by their fruits shall ye know them” is a constant refrain in the book – and is clearly eager to be a good husband and father. Moreover, he wants to see such beliefs bear social fruits, and there is much in the book that echoes the post-liberal music of Hillbilly Elegy which excited so many pundits. Communion criticizes both Democrats for putting personal liberty over everything else and Republicans even more for putting profits above workers.
Yet, of course, the same man who obsesses about virtue and character is happy to work as chief henchman for a thin-skinned, venal, narcissistic, pussy-grabbing moral gargoyle; treat alleged allies like they’re recalcitrant children; and dismiss political opponents as “a bunch of childless cat ladies” (a comment for which he apologizes). Curiously, Trump himself is almost invisible in the memoir, despite having had as transformative an effect on the author as Mamaw or Usha. The book repeatedly refers to “the Trump Administration,” rarely to the President himself.
Perhaps Vance is subtly distancing himself from the Egotist-in-Chief, at least as far as his current job allows. Or maybe Trump doesn’t fit neatly into a book extolling the virtues of faith, character and Christianity. Or perhaps Vance doesn’t want us to dwell too long on how awkward a pairing his Catholic faith and some of the policies of the new administration – such as the hunting down of illegal migrants or the cutting of overseas aid – is. Towards the end he admits: “Politics is a dirty business sometimes, in which you have to make compromises.” Quite.
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