Call the roller of big cigars! J.D. Vance is ready to throw his hat in the ring. But maybe hold off on the parade. His new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, has the form of a pre-campaign memoir, but the tone is off. There’s no grand vision for America, no charge for renewal. He vacillates between the tough guy and the one who’s always felt a little out of place, ever since he left Appalachia and his people. He’s a child of the white working-class, a graduate of Yale Law School, a former venture capitalist, a rich guy, a vice president who once called his boss America’s Hitler, and—since 2016—something no one could have predicted, and that he has a hard time explaining: a Catholic.
What a punishing—but perhaps spiritually essential—choice. When he regained his religious faith after returning from the Marines, he had so many options for a familiar form of Christianity: the Pentecostalism that his grandmother preferred; evangelicalism; nondenominational Protestantism. These are faiths that were not only meaningful to him at one time, but would have brought with them great political advantages. White evangelicals accounted for 45 percent of Trump’s voters in the last election. But he settled on Catholicism, the worst possible choice for the politician he would become.
At the time of his conversion, he had come to understand that his “obsession with achievements and credentials had left me lost.” When his first book, Hillbilly Elegy, became a bestseller, he became a popular political pundit and speaker but realized that “Much of what drew me to this life was prestige.”
If that’s what ails you, Catholicism can set you straight, or at least show you the way out. With its emphasis on humility—expressed most pointedly in the sacrament of confession and the assignment of penance—it insists that all of us are sinners in the hands of an ancient and fearsome faith. Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault, as we recite near the beginning of each Mass.
