Say what you want about US Vice-president J.D. Vance’s politics, his 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy was a genuinely compelling and insightful contribution to contemporary social analysis: it offered a vivid, semi-ethnographic account of the American white working class, helped illuminate the cultural and psychological underpinnings of support for Trump, and did not shy away from addressing patterns of dysfunction, fatalism, and class dislocation within that milieu.
By contrast, his recently released book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, which narrates his conversion to Catholicism, is a huge disappointment.
Vance begins by describing his earlier identification as an atheist, but later suggests that this was not the result of serious philosophical reflection so much as a form of intellectual conformity – an uncritical adoption of what he sees as the default stance among liberal elites. He is probably right that, in some circles, atheism can function as a marker of cultural belonging or sophistication, embraced without much thought about the underlying metaphysical questions. But this point cuts both ways. It raises the possibility that Vance’s later turn to Catholicism may reflect a similar dynamic in reverse. Now situated within a populist political movement where religious affiliation carries symbolic weight, atheism may no longer be a comfortable or advantageous position for him.
This concern is reinforced by Vance’s broader pattern of ideological shifts, most notably his well-known move from sharply criticising Trump – at one point comparing him to Hitler – to becoming a loyal ally and ultimately vice president. It is at least plausible that comparable social and political incentives shaped his religious trajectory. Even so, the memoir reads as genuinely earnest, and if such influences are present, they likely operate at an unconscious level; taken at face value, his account of conversion appears sincere and personally meaningful.
As Vance presents it, the main impetus for his conversion lies in Catholicism’s moral psychology – its centring of guilt and the institutionalised practice of confession as a means of confronting and alleviating it. He describes carrying a diffuse sense of guilt, not only over minor personal failings but also a deeper, more existential burden tied to being, in effect, a survivor amid his mother’s prolonged struggles with addiction.
All of this is understandable, and there is no doubt that Catholicism, with its structured rituals of acknowledgment, absolution, and moral repair, can provide genuine psychological relief. Yet Catholicism is not merely a therapeutic framework for managing guilt; it entails assent to a wide array of substantive doctrinal claims that are far more difficult to defend on rational grounds – virgin births, bodily resurrections, papal infallibility, and so forth. One might reasonably ask whether the psychological benefits suffice to justify commitment to such claims. After all, other religious systems – Scientology, for instance – also offer adherents a sense of meaning and emotional relief, while asking them to accept absurd propositions, such as the story of Xenu and the role of disembodied thetans in shaping human distress. This underscores the broader question Vance largely sidesteps: whether the comfort a belief system provides can adequately compensate for the epistemic costs it imposes.
Vance is willing, at some level, to bite the bullet and embrace some of the more hardcore elements of Catholic doctrine. For example, he endorses transubstantiation – surely one of the most extravagant claims in the Catholic arsenal. Yet even here, he tries to come at it sideways, emphasising that it:
unifies the faithful… For Catholics, Communion means not only to personally encounter Christ but to unite us as a single worshiping body.
All of this kumbaya-style talk about unity and shared experience is very nice. But Vance ultimately refuses to face the absurdity of the doctrine. The core claim of the Eucharist remains stark: one is asked to believe that the creator of the universe quite literally becomes a piece of bread – not as a symbol or metaphor, but as a matter of fact. Stripped of its theological vocabulary, this begins to resemble the logic of a fairy tale, where magical transformations via the recitation of words are simply asserted and then solemnly believed: the frog turns into a prince, God turns into bread.
At other points, Vance seems more inclined to sidestep the less convenient implications of Catholic doctrine. Consider the question of salvation. The Catechism does not crudely declare that all non-Catholics are damned, but it does affirm that “outside the Church there is no salvation” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §846). To soften this, it adds that those who are ignorant of the Gospel through no fault of their own may still be saved. But this caveat is of limited help in Vance’s own domestic context. His wife, Usha, is not an uncontacted tribeswoman unfamiliar with Christianity; she has heard of Jesus and yet remains a practising Hindu. Indeed, as Vance himself recounts, when he goes to church:
Usha is the anchor, managing the mayhem and packing our kids off to the car. She gives me a look as if to say, I’m not even Catholic, I just do this because I love you.
It is, on one level, an endearing portrait of marital support. But the theological implications are harder to sentimentalise away: if one follows the internal logic of the doctrine Vance professes to accept, the conclusion regarding Usha’s ultimate fate – she will fry in Hell – is difficult to avoid.
Ultimately, one might say that these tensions and inconsistencies pertain to Vance’s private life, and could be left at that. The more troubling issue arises when there is a risk that this kind of thinking spills over into the public sphere and begins to shape policy. Vance himself signals that he is uncomfortable with a purely privatised faith, lamenting that “we confine Christianity to the most private of questions” and suggesting that it ought to play a more visible public role.
Herein lies the real danger. Consider, for instance, his treatment of sexual abuse within the Church. Vance does not excuse it, but he frames it within a theological narrative in which God works through deeply flawed, even wicked individuals. As he puts it:
there was a mystery to why God would do this—why He’d introduce Himself through corrupt and corrupted people. But who could look at human history and believe a straightforward tale of good and evil could explain the human condition?
This is a hazardous line of reasoning. The moment one grants that politicians may be instruments of divine design regardless of their moral failings, one risks becoming much softer on them when they are perceived as serving a higher purpose. In the current political context, this is especially concerning, as many Christians have come to view Trump in precisely these terms: a deeply flawed figure who is nonetheless chosen by God for a higher calling, and therefore deserving of continued allegiance. That the Vice President of the United States appears sympathetic to this theological framework is, at the very least, cause for concern.
Throughout the book, Vance returns repeatedly to a familiar and, in many ways, legitimate concern: that modern life has become increasingly devoid of meaning. He laments a world of overwork and undernourished family life, of alienation, technological isolation, relentless competition, and shallow consumerism. Fair enough – these are real problems, and the search for meaning in contemporary society is not something to be dismissed. But the solution cannot be to embrace a set of doctrines that simply do not withstand rational scrutiny.
Consider, once again, what commitment to Catholicism actually entails: assent to the proposition that a man was born of a virgin, was in some sense identical with – or at least inseparable from – his own divine father, and entered the world on a mission that culminated in a sacrificial death seemingly required by that same father to atone for human wrongdoing. In other words, a theological framework in which God demands a blood sacrifice from himself, to himself, in order to forgive the very beings he created.
The narrative continues with his literal resurrection and bodily ascent into heaven, followed by the establishment of an earthly representative vested – quite extraordinarily – with the authority to issue infallible pronouncements that the faithful are expected to accept without question.
The United States has, in part, flourished not because such beliefs are absent, but because they have largely been confined to the private sphere. The separation of church and state remains one of its most important institutional achievements. Vance does not explicitly call for its dismantling, but his discomfort with the privatisation of religion suggests a willingness to blur that boundary. American life may well require reform, but a turn toward public policymaking grounded in theological commitments of this sort is unlikely to provide it. For readers of a skeptical bent, the more pressing task remains the same: to confront modernity’s crises without surrendering intellectual standards in the process.
