Two Popes Already Corrected JD Vance. Now He’s Written 304 Pages About Finding God.
“Communion” arrives from Harper this week — and the convert who lectured Francis and Leo XIV is underwater with the very Catholics the GOP sent him to win.
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Anyone who has read me for a while knows that JD Vance and I are not friends — at least not right now.
We got into a public spat back in November that made national headlines, after I called out the White House for dismissing Pope Leo’s plea for migrants and the vice president came after me on X.
So I picked up his new book braced for the worst and read it with as much good faith as I could muster. I came away with a few things the book gets right and a long ledger of things it gets wrong.
Vice President JD Vance did not enter the Catholic Church the way most converts do. He bypassed the OCIA process most parishes run and was received in 2019 under the private direction of two conservative Dominican priests — a route as bespoke as the political identity he would later build on it.
His new memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, is the account he wants the country to have of that journey. The men who guard the faith he joined keep telling him he has it wrong.
The book arrives from Harper this week, 304 pages tracing his path from the Protestantism of his Appalachian childhood, through an atheism he built on Ayn Rand, and into Rome. Candidates publish these before they run, and Vance — the presumptive front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2028 — has given his the shape of a manifesto for religion in public life.
Some of it lands. He writes with feeling about his mamaw, whose death drained the Christianity out of his youth, and about a rain-slicked road where his car stopped short of a guardrail in what he calls the closest he ever came to a supernatural experience.
After a fellow Marine handed him Ayn Rand, he became, in his telling, a “self-professed atheist and meritocrat.” He puts the creed plainly: “I didn’t care about God’s will. I cared about my own.”
The turn back came through people. He recalls deciding, after meeting Usha in law school, “I will marry this girl. Or I will be a lifelong bachelor.” A 2018 visit to a French cathedral with Usha and their son Ewan softened his ambivalence about religion into “a distinct sense of belonging and presence,” and he was baptized the next year.
He also credits Peter Thiel.
Vance describes leaving a Thiel lecture convinced he had met “possibly the smartest person I’d ever met” — a man who “identified very openly as a Christian” and so “defied the simple social template I had constructed, that dumb people were religious and smart people were atheists.” Thiel, who would become one of his earliest political patrons, helped break the spell Rand had cast. Thiel was one of the figures who drew him back toward the Church, though not the only one.
What the memoir omits is what Thiel has since become. In private lectures I reported on, Vance’s chief benefactor cast Pope Leo XIV as a tool of the Antichrist, mocked him as a woke American pope, and counseled Vance to disregard the pope on questions of morality altogether. The man Vance credits with his return to Christianity now treats the head of Vance’s Church as an enemy of human progress.
Then there is everything the book gets wrong.
