Artículo London Review of Books, vol. 48 (14) August 2026 James Butler, editor
Almost no politician writes his own books, and few people actually read them. J.D. Vance is different. Trump’s vice president was a writer before he was a politician, and brought a writer’s vices with him: a titanic but fragile ego, limitless self-interest and thirst for adulation, an unsleeping vigilance for any slight. Hillbilly Elegy, Vance’s first book, published in 2016, described his childhood poverty and rise out of it, and made him the liberal media’s favourite hick- whisperer. Communion (Collins, £20), its sequel, purports to be a memoir of Vance’s disillusionment with a series of creeds – evangelical fundamentalism, Randian libertarianism, chattering-class liberalism – and his subsequent conversion to Catholicism in 2019. It is an obvious, if nebulous, manifesto for a presidential run. His publishers assure us that he wrote it himself.
Communion is a bad book. It is sloppy, unfocused, stylistically uneven, ethically vacuous, intellectually tendentious and politically cynical. Hillbilly Elegy indicted an Appalachian culture degraded through addiction, indolence and despair. Communion mounts a much wider and more diffuse attack on the values and motivations of liberal and professional America, represented by Yale University and the media. That Vance’s critique proceeds by caricature and supposition does not make it worthless, though he is hardly the first person to discover that members of the elite are inward-looking or self-congratulatory.
It is poor form to raise questions about a convert’s sincerity. But the conversions described in Communion are sleight-of-hand substitutions for the one he does not wish to discuss – to Trumpism. In 2016 Vance was a Never Trumper, describing him in an extended metaphor as ‘cultural heroin’ promising ‘an easy escape from the pain’. ‘He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realise it.’ In private he said Trump could be ‘America’s Hitler’. But all criticism had vanished by the time he launched his 2022 Senate bid. So significant a reversal might prompt soul-searching or reflection in a lesser man, but Vance simply tells us that Trump’s record ‘proved me wrong’. He claims this change was ‘downstream’ of the realisation that elite institutions were ‘intellectually and spiritually broken’. Presenting his embrace of Trump as a side effect of a more fundamental change in his worldview allows Vance to evade difficult questions about Trump’s corruption and his own flagrant opportunism.
Vance is fond of quoting Matthew’s gospel: ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’ He means that the current state of the world proves that the experiment of secular modernity has been a miserable disaster. Which fruits of the first Trump term won him over? Perhaps it was the shattered families at the border, the slashed health and science funding, the undermining of international climate agreements, the race riots, arms deals or assaults on democracy. He doesn’t tell us. The fruits of Trump’s second term, now with Vance at his side, have been even more bitter.
Vance’s conversion might seem surprising given the long and violent history of anti-Catholicism among American reactionaries. The prejudice mingled theology with xenophobia – part Puritan invective against Babylon, part fear of migrants’ divided loyalty (Rome, in turn, has not always been fond of the world’s first durable secular republic). Postwar integration, the success of the Kennedy presidency and American Catholicism’s enthusiastic participation in the anti-choice crusades of the religious right have dulled those sectarian prejudices, though not eradicated them. Even so, Catholicism might seem an uncongenial choice, and thus a sincere one.
In his own telling, Vance’s conversion was first intellectual. When at Yale Law School, a place of empty ambition and groupthink, he saw Peter Thiel speak. Thiel was ‘possibly the smartest person I’d ever met’, and openly Christian, confounding his prejudice that ‘Christians are rubes.’ He found in René Girard, Thiel’s favourite thinker, a convincing explanation for the hollowness of elite ambition as acculturation through mimesis – you end up believing you want a Supreme Court clerkship only because other people want it. Thiel is a curious kind of Christian. Fanatically hostile to the current pope and his predecessor, he describes himself as ‘small-o orthodox’, and is obsessed with the Antichrist (often used as a synonym for the regulatory state). Thiel appears in Communion only briefly, but the association runs deep: Vance worked at Thiel’s Mithril Capital, and Thiel invested in Vance’s firm, Narya Capital, in 2019. (Both names are drawn from Tolkien, whose work possesses near scriptural status for Thiel.) Thiel ploughed $15 million into Vance’s Senate campaign, the largest ever disclosed donation to any Senate candidate. None of this is mentioned in the book.
The sophistication of Catholic intellectual tradition moves Vance. Its subtle scriptural approach eclipses the fundamentalist literalism of his evangelical youth, and its social doctrine is richer – and more interested in the lives of ordinary people – than the hucksterism of the megachurches. The intellectual suicide of American Protestantism, rotting in the conspiracy pulp of Left Behind novels about the Rapture and the get-rich-quick prosperity gospel of carnival barkers like Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White, leaves Catholicism as one of few options for the self-respecting Christian. The prominent reactionary stream of American Catholicism also nurtures anti-liberal and anti-democratic thinkers like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule. Its influence is strongest in judicial circles: two of the three Supreme Court justices appointed by Trump are Catholics (Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett), and the third was raised Catholic (Neil Gorsuch). The court’s two other reliable conservatives, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, are both Catholics. (Chief Justice Roberts is also Catholic, and Sonia Sotomayor, a progressive Obama appointee, describes herself as lapsed.) Most of these appointees were sponsored by Leonard Leo, a conservative Catholic and leader of the Federalist Society, who runs dark money funds worth billions. Far from an alien creed, Catholicism is now a religion from which social, political and professional elevation can follow. It would have complicated his caricature of Yale’s campus politics to mention it, but Vance joined the university’s thriving chapter of the Federalist Society, and it was at one of its meetings that he heard Thiel speak.
Vance needs to retain the politically essential Protestant vote and so speaks more often of Christianity than Catholicism, of a generic ‘return to faith’ rather than its specific form, and ventriloquises evangelical confusions about praying to ‘dead people’ and the weirdness of the sacraments. The church on the cover of the book is Methodist. As in Hillbilly Elegy, Vance memorialises the down-home commonsense faith of Mamaw and Papaw, his grandparents, favourably contrasting his family’s simple moral patriotism with histrionic anti-Trumpism. ‘If Hillary Clinton had won,’ he writes of the 2016 election, ‘my evangelical, Trump-loving father would have turned off the TV, prayed and said, “Well, I hope she ain’t as bad as I feared.”’
There is no need for a counterfactual here. Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. His supporters attempted, however ineptly, to mount an anti-democratic coup with his encouragement, and spent the entire Biden presidency spinning the loss into a baroque conspiracy theory; it is now being used as a pretext for the subversion of future elections. Denying the 2020 election result is a prerequisite for elevation in the Trump administration – intellectual self-mutilation as proof of fealty. Both Vance and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, have enthusiastically endorsed the lie, competing for Trump’s blessing as his successor.
It’s possible that Vance included his father’s hypothetical response to a Hillary Clinton victory in the first draft of Communion, which he claims to have finished in 2019, and failed to update it. It doesn’t really matter. Political lying degrades both individual and system. Perhaps this accounts for Communion’s acreage of strawmen. During the 2024 campaign Vance peddled the racist lie that Haitian migrants were stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. Confronted, he admitted to ‘creating stories’ to advance his cause. He also likes a conspiracy theory, claiming that a 2024 aid package for Ukraine contained ‘a hidden impeachment clause’ against Trump. In January this year, after an ICE agent shot the protester Renée Good in her car in Minneapolis, Vance called her ‘brainwashed’, a ‘deranged leftist’ complicit in ‘a tragedy of her own making’. When ICE agents shot the ICU nurse Alex Pretti in the same city later that month, Vance claimed it was the result of ‘engineered chaos’ in local authorities compromised by the far left.
Vance’s inner world is glimpsed only rarely in Communion, but he writes of an encounter with a therapist that ‘the thought of being a victim made me want to puke.’ Instead, he finds liberation in guilt. To non-Catholic ears that sounds paradoxical, but guilt avoids both the trapped passivity he finds in psychological models of trauma, and the one-and-done Protestant model of God’s saving grace: for Catholics, grace is revealed through the texture of an individual life, its failures, repentances and attempts at repair. Generations of Catholic neurotics might protest against the utility of guilt, but at least Vance is unlikely to run out of raw material. More interesting is his violent reaction to being perceived as a victim. The scandal of Christianity, which prompted the ridicule and incomprehension of its pagan critics, was precisely its presentation of victimhood as triumph, the execution of God incarnate as a common criminal, humiliated and abandoned; two thousand years later, the liturgy Vance hears every Sunday praises ‘this pure victim, this holy victim, this spotless victim’. It is rare that any life is lived without a person finding himself a victim of forces beyond his control, something that should detain a Catholic politician at the top of the most powerful empire ever to exist.
The chief emotion of Communion, however, is fear. Vance fears he will jeopardise his relationship with his wife, Usha (whom he met at Yale), because his parents’ relationship imploded. When his first son was born, he writes, ‘I felt one emotion above all others: fear.’ His fear is both personal, that he will fail as a father, and social, that his country will fail his son. Vance is not alone in this feeling. Fear – of pollution, invasion, the enemy within, modernity – is endemic in the ultra-traditionalist wing of the Catholic Church and across a swathe of the US, bristling and vigilant behind its guns. Both desire their institutions to become punitive monocultures, bulwarks against the outside world.
Vance also fears civilisational death: ‘We inherited a great civilisation and are slowly letting it fall into disrepair.’ He claims to fear it much more than his personal death. His terror is spurred by the empty churches and unvisited graves of the British countryside. His sentiment is an increasingly common one on the Anglo-American right, which sees Western civilisation as menaced by a predictable cast of feminists, queers, socialists and foreigners. But the realisation that literate, democratic culture is fragile need not result in conservative conclusions, especially when the most significant threats – climate change, untouchable oligarchs, a poisoned public sphere and ransacked administrative state – are the preferred form of Trumpian government.
Against civilisational death, Vance sketches out a relatively predictable postliberal programme. It is most interesting for what it is not: neither the theocratic ‘integralism’ of Catholic reactionaries with which he is sometimes lazily associated, nor the paranoid nihilism of MAGA. It centres on a distinction between economic and public good familiar from Catholic social teaching. When he taps an anti-consumerist vein, or decries a life-sapping culture of work, or voices misgivings about social media, he can sound briefly socialistic, but he soon loops back to more comfortable complaints about demographic decline and the destruction of the traditional family. His readiness to subordinate the ‘gods of GDP’ to social good – and to criticise Republicans for having failed to do so in the past – is shared by the post-globalisation, protectionist, isolationist right. His final chapter, which reads like a revival meeting, makes explicit the link to a generic Christian nationalism: ‘Christianity is America’s creed.’
Why would anyone buy this? Vance has been a willing participant in a squalid government sunk in graft which has gutted the agencies that might restrain or regulate private avarice. The labour share of income is at a historic low. The most obvious question is not whether Vance believes what he claims to believe, but why, if he believes it, he acts as he does. Halfway through Communion he quotes, without irony, a recovering addict who passed on some homely advice: show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future. Perhaps Vance has forgotten who he’s been hanging out with.
Like many converts, Vance took Augustine as his patron saint. Few narratives of conversion can match the complex account of human and divine love in Confessions, or Augustine’s relentless probing of his own sin, portrayed as a disorder of love – ‘homo incurvatus in se’, man turned in on himself in a kind of auto-idolatry. In Augustine’s famous lyrical realisation of divine love, which overturns that state, he says that it ‘called and cried and shattered my deafness’; he burns and pants for his God. Including such a passage in a politician’s memoir might, of course, risk absurdity. Later in the same section, Augustine examines the most subtle and insidious desire: ‘the desire to be revered and loved by other people’, the hunger for praise. It is, he thinks, a particular vice of those in authority over others.
Communion is a pallid affair compared with this. Vance’s admitted errors (Randianism, post-Iraq atheism) are long past and defensible. His ambition prevents any more serious self-examination, and his ambition itself stays unconfessed. After Yale, things simply happen to him: ‘I found myself going on TV,’ or campaigning for the Senate (‘a quirky intellectual project’), or ending up as vice president. The sole apology in Communion concerns a trivial remark about ‘childless cat ladies’ being the cause of America’s downfall. ‘It was,’ he writes, ‘a boneheaded comment, intentionally (and successfully) provocative rather than illuminating.’ Self-admiration oozes through the brackets. ‘What a pitiful life is this,’ as Augustine put it, ‘and what a vile form of boasting.’
Pope Leo XIV used to be head of the Augustinian Order. Since his conversion, Vance has incurred irritated correction by two popes. In response to an attempt to justify cuts to US foreign aid using the medieval concept of ordo amoris – which, in Vance’s reading, endorses prioritising family and nation – Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, rebuked him in a letter to US bishops. ‘Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.’ The story of the Good Samaritan, whose love extends across every social taboo and caste marker, is ‘the true ordo amoris’.
Leo’s chief theme is dignity for everyone, including migrants, prisoners and outsiders, and his harshest criticism is reserved for the violent uses of the state. Christ is ‘never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs’. Vance has not been shy of telling the pope to ‘be careful when he talks about matters of theology’. He complained that senior diplomats at the Vatican gave him ‘trite platitudes’ on immigration, though when the dying Pope Francis then summoned him to plead for the deported, offering ‘specific exhortations’, he shrugged them off. ‘Mater si, magistra no,’ as conservative American Catholics have put it in the past, seeking to ignore papal teaching on economic justice. For much of the past two centuries, the Church has sought expedient support from reactionary governments, especially during the Cold War. Vance’s conversion coincided with a long incubated shift in the emphasis of Catholic leadership, away from the sexual and familial issues congenial to American politicians, and towards something like a global conscience.
Communion’s characteristic error is clearest when Vance dismisses criticisms that mass deportations are ‘too tough’, but thanks the Church for forcing a consideration of the ‘moral trade-offs’. Abstract strictness of policy is not the issue here, but wanton cruelty: the families fed maggot-infested food, the cells flooded with sewage, those beaten or asphyxiated by guards, or handed off to foreign torturers. Vance may desire ‘a more Christian economy’, but it is one ringed with razor wire.
Usha Vance is one of few people granted full reality in Communion’s otherwise solipsistic world and Vance credits her with much of his success. Speaking on TV about his conversion, she pointed out that she came from a ‘very stable’ household, and has not ‘felt the same need to seek something different’. The psychoanalytic reading is hard to resist, but in the book, Usha suggests a different interpretation: she supports Vance’s growing interest in the Church because it is good for him. ‘“Therapy didn’t work for you,” she admitted. “But church does.”’
Instrumentalism is a very common modern approach to religion: it matters as far as it makes me a better citizen, partner, member of society, or brings me pleasure or comfort. Some right-wing thinkers have revived the defence of faith as a ‘noble lie’. Is Christianity good because it is useful or because it is true? Early in the book, Vance says he believes ‘Jesus Christ’s teachings are true.’ But the programme he outlines is more interested in the social utility of faith as an institution: unlike secularism, which has produced ‘racial conflict and gender division’, Christianity is ‘the most powerful force for cultural cohesion’. Yet Christianity can be ethically difficult and politically unsettling, difficulties Communion mostly seeks to evade. Should it cease to be useful, or if evasion is no longer possible, perhaps Vance will find his way to another conversion.
