{"id":423,"date":"2026-06-18T10:36:40","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T10:36:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=423"},"modified":"2026-06-18T10:36:40","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T10:36:40","slug":"i-read-jd-vances-new-book-it-reveals-more-than-he-realizes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=423","title":{"rendered":"I read JD Vance\u2019s new book. It reveals more than he realizes."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Every few years, presidential hopefuls go through certain rites of passage. They ramp up fundraising, start visiting early primary states, and bulk up their foreign or economic policy credentials.<\/p>\n

Read more The state that will tell us who\u2019s winning the Democratic civil war<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And, of course, they drop their memoirs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This week Vice President JD Vance released Communion<\/em>, a book tracing the arc of his faith and relationship with Christianity. It\u2019s a big, introspective effort to define what he believes, lay out the role he sees for religion in public life, and even offer some hints of what a President Vance might do in office.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For Americans wondering how \u2014 or if \u2014 Vance can reconcile his Christian faith with serving President Donald Trump and leading his unruly right-wing political movement, it\u2019s a revelatory read, and one that offers a telling look into the movement he may try to reform.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s always easy to dismiss a book like this as just another political PR effort (or, as Vanity Fair described his press tour, part of an effort to \u201csand off his rough edges\u201d), but in Vance\u2019s case there\u2019s reason to mine it for a bit more meaning. Books are part of his origin story as a public figure. His blockbuster 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy<\/em> was a thoughtful reckoning with the malaise in a wide swath of Middle America. As he acknowledges in Communion<\/em>, it was that book that established him as a serious political thinker.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Vance is a good writer \u2014 and reading it as a cradle Catholic myself, I found his faith journey moving. And indeed his book matters, not just because it helps us understand him, but also because it provides answers to some of the big questions about his future, and the future of American conservatism. Can an intellectual Christian really step in to lead a movement birthed by a very un-intellectual, un-Christian president? How sincere is Vance \u2014 already an accomplished shapeshifter \u2014 about anything<\/em> he purports to believe?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Spoiler alert: In Communion<\/em>, Vance doesn\u2019t really resolve the contradiction between his faith and his politics. Instead he lays bare a problem he shares with millions of Republican voters, including the young, drifting men he claims to speak for, and whose faith journeys in many cases mirror his own. In the course of explaining how he came to serve God, he also shows how easy, if not necessary in modern America, it is for him \u2014 and for them \u2014 to subordinate that faith to politics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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JD Vance\u2019s internal contradictions<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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If there\u2019s a thesis statement for Vance\u2019s memoir, it comes in a parable that the vice president returns to: In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells a story of how faith is shown through actions and behavior:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s that last line, by their fruits ye shall know them <\/em>\u2014 which he takes from the non-Catholic King James Version of the Bible \u2014 that he returns to over and over in the book. He uses it as a test for modern Christianity, for meritocracy, for liberalism in academia and elite business, for the secular West, for trade and economics, and for the liberal international order. He repeatedly asks: are these things bearing the fruit that we, or Christ, want?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And it\u2019s also how he tests himself. His conversion story follows an arc familiar to many converts, particularly young men who are feeding the cultural narrative of an American religious renewal: of feeling lost, hoodwinked, and betrayed by the establishment, the corporate rat race, and wokeness in America \u2014 and seeking purpose and meaning in the millennia-old Catholic Church. In this, he falls into a pattern for American Catholic converts \u2014 raised in a nondenominational, evangelical Protestant culture. Like many others in his cohort, he converted to a more politically and culturally conservative American version of the church \u2014 one that embraces ritual, and finds itself in tension with more \u201cliberal\u201d social teachings of the post-Vatican II church.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In Vance\u2019s telling, it\u2019s an intellectual journey as much as an emotional one: a journey of discovering which church was \u201ctrue,\u201d while discovering that, as second lady Usha Vance told him, going to church was \u201cgood\u201d for him. \u201cTherapy didn\u2019t work for you,\u201d Vance recalls her telling him, \u201cbut church does.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Here is where the first emblematic contradiction jumps out. Vance spends the first two-thirds of his memoir not just talking about his early-life fall away from faith, but deriding the individualistic nature of a world in which organized religion has receded, replaced by egotism, workism, secularism, self-improvement advice, groupthink, and woke<\/em>. He spends another chunk of time praising the value of religion in creating community, a common language, and a common purpose. Yet, as with many young new converts, Vance ends up talking about faith in profoundly individualistic terms \u2014 how to be a good father, how to be a good husband, how to participate in church rituals, and how to understand doctrine at an intellectual level \u2014 while failing to seriously discuss the greater \u201cfruit\u201d that the church calls for.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The nearest he gets to acknowledging this disconnect is around his and Usha\u2019s move to Cincinnati in 2018, when he wonders about how to \u201cbuild a culture of virtue, within my own family, within my community, and within our entire society.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI found myself worrying over how to fuse a sense of social virtue with a personal one,\u201d he writes, but admits that \u201cat this stage, it was largely an intellectual exercise.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Part of that exercise is his introduction to Catholic social teaching: the principles and tradition the church developed over the last century to guide individuals, political and church leaders, and governments toward creating a more just world that creates the kingdom of Heaven on Earth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He recalls reading Pope Leo XIII\u2019s century-old encyclical Rerum Novarum, about the relationship between workers and market economies, about the dangers of absolute socialism or capitalism, and about the right of workers to create labor unions. Though that tradition started with Leo XIII back in the 19th century, it has continued building upon itself through consecutive papacies \u2014 including church teachings on climate change, migration, war, racism, economic justice, and most recently artificial intelligence. They are intellectual and practical instructions for how to turn faith into good works beyond the individual realm, how to grow the good fruit that Vance is so fixated on cultivating.<\/p>\n

Read more Why Trump is sabotaging his own nominee<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If those issues sound suspiciously progressive<\/em> in modern political terms\u2026well, then you\u2019ll understand why Vance is so shy about discussing actual achievements and results in his book. Many of those \u201cprogressive\u201d issues have been taken up by two consecutive popes: Francis and the current pontiff Leo XIV, who have both clashed with Trump and Vance \u2014 and faced criticism and dismissal from conservative American Catholics and Republican Christians.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And like many of those religious American conservatives, Vance mostly sidesteps these ideas. He explores the church\u2019s economic teaching \u2014 saying that he understands its starting point is the inherent and inviolable dignity of each human person \u2014 but he fails to engage with this, beyond using it to justify his vision for economic policies in a theoretical Vance presidency.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Instead his book becomes quite defensive. He doesn\u2019t actually say much about his actual works as part of the Trump administration, including defending a war in Iran that has killed at least 1,000 civilians, various blows to the social safety net, and harsh enforcement of immigration policy. Instead he does a lot of fingerpointing, blaming baby boomers for trying to prop up the liberal international order, woke CEOs and academics for trying to address racial inequality, and liberals for pushing secularism \u2014 really, blaming anyone but his patron Trump and his politics \u2014 for the lack of fruit that he has grown, or helped create.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Trump question<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Hanging over the whole book is Trump, the very secular strongman who chose Vance as his vice president, and whose legacy Vance is trying to claim.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Vance doesn\u2019t write much about Trump \u2014 which makes sense, since Trump is notably irreligious, and prone to picking fights with Catholic leaders like Pope Leo XIV. And similarly, when it comes to Vance\u2019s actual \u201cworks\u201d in the world \u2014 his accomplishments in Trump\u2019s White House, the fruit of his faith \u2014 the book goes notably light. So it\u2019s worth introducing just a bit of the material he seems to have left out.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He prefaces this in his reflection on Rerum Novarum by saying that he tries \u201cto stay humble about how little I know and how inadequate a Christian I really am\u2026I am most comfortable engaging with the intellectual elements of the faith.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In real life, though, Vance has taken a very<\/em> active role in trying to educate the world on his version of Catholicism, and energetically serving as Trump\u2019s go-to communicator to the various factions of MAGA and the religious right. Vance is a gifted debater and an agile thinker, and he has embraced this difficult job, arguing repeatedly about how Trump\u2019s immigration agenda is morally permissible, how Catholics are called to love hierarchically (they aren\u2019t, as Pope Francis responded), and why Pope Leo XIV should \u201cbe careful when he talks about matters of theology.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He has directly criticized the Catholic cardinals who raise the issue of immigration with him, saying he was \u201cunsettled\u201d by \u201chow generic\u201d the Vatican\u2019s skepticism of Trump\u2019s 2025 immigration policy was. \u201cWhat did they take issue with, exactly?\u201d he asks. \u201cDid they object to deportations? Just to deportations of certain populations? Were they entirely fine with deportations as long as we didn\u2019t say mean things about illegal immigrants?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He then derides the Vatican for seeming \u201cso afraid of saying something controversial that it chose, effectively, to say nothing at all.\u201d Perhaps because of publishing deadlines, Vance does not really mention Pope Leo XIV, or the wave of criticism that he and the Vatican have unleashed on Trump and Vance in 2026. When he does engage the more recent church criticism, it is to dismiss the criticizing Trump\u2019s mass deportation program in fall 2025 and calling for respect of migrant dignity, a more measured enforcement operation, and prioritizing the least well-off.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In all of this, he has co-led an administration waging a prolonged attack on refugees, immigrants who have lived in the United States for decades, and those seeking economic opportunity \u2014 precisely the people the institutional Catholic Church is committed to helping and speaking for.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Of course, one reason for blaming the Vatican is to make excuses for Trump. Vance had \u201choped for more out of the [2025] conversation with the Vatican diplomats,\u201d he wrote about the bishops\u2019 criticism of the White House\u2019s mass deportations. He calls immigration policy \u201cthorny,\u201d \u201cmessy,\u201d and requiring \u201ctrade-offs\u201d \u2014 while spinning arguments about why too much immigration is actually un-Christian, because of what it does to social cohesion, labor unions, wages, and public safety. There is no mention of violence by ICE agents, of migrants who have died in ICE detention, of Alex Pretti or Renee Good\u2019s killings, or of the general overreach of the administration. It took the ladies of The View<\/em> to coax a response out of him this week. His response? Enforcement is messy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And that speaks to the larger issue: Vance\u2019s unwillingness to admit any Christian errors in his service to Donald Trump, or in Trump\u2019s administration so far. He says he wants to infuse public service with Catholic charity and save the West from the \u201csecular global liberalism\u201d that has \u201cdestroyed\u201d Europe. Yet he speaks of this while standing proudly at the side of a president whose works have been definitively un-Christian in their effects.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Perhaps taking up the MAGA mantle and leading a Christian revival as president is, indeed, the best path he sees to yield good works \u2014 good fruit \u2014 in the future. But the book doesn\u2019t make that case, and his real-life track record looks a lot more like the non-apologetic backing of a man, and a movement, committed to dividing communities that once stood together, and punching down on the powerless.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Is it just Vance\u2019s ambition getting the better of his faith? Does he really know better? (\u201cI\u2019m a bad Catholic. That\u2019s why we need grace, as Christians, and we recognize there are things we have to work on,\u201d he said on The View <\/em>Tuesday.) Anyone who has followed Vance\u2019s career finds these questions frustratingly difficult to answer. It\u2019s hard not to wish he had grappled with the verse that precedes his favorite parable: \u201cBeware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep\u2019s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the biblical context, Christ is talking about both human nature and spiritual salvation. Judge a person\u2019s character by how he or she lives life and treats others; stand guard against those who push you off the path of grace, charity, and Christian virtue. The irony is obvious.<\/p>\n

Read more Trump\u2019s pitch to voters: \u201cI love the inflation\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

See More:<\/span><\/p>\n
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  • Life<\/li>\n
  • Politics<\/li>\n
  • Religion<\/li>\n
  • Trump Administration<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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