There is the zeal of the convert, and then there is whatever J. D. Vance is feeling in “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith.” His second memoir, released on June 16th, recounts the erratic Baptist and Pentecostal churchgoing of his boyhood, his wallow in atheism as a young man, and his eventual Catholic baptism, at the age of thirty-five, but it renders this years-long religious reckoning in impassive, even indifferent, terms. “I didn’t meet Jesus on my way to Damascus,” Vance writes, as if to manage the reader’s expectations. The Vice-President’s book does not stage an Agony in the Rose Garden or a wrestling match with an angel in a steel cage on the South Lawn; it communicates little of spiritual hunger, of crises of faith, of temptation or redemption or awe, or whatever else one might want or expect from a conversion tale.

Often, the strongest emotion Vance seems able to express in “Communion” is his distaste for the tenets and rituals of the faith he has elected to join. “For an evangelical, the weirdest Catholic sacrament may be the rite of confession and reconciliation,” Vance writes. “The idea of speaking of my sins to a stranger mortified me.” Of the Eucharist—the culminating sacrament of the Catholic Mass—Vance observes, “This was always a little weird to me as a Protestant: You guys actually think this bread converts to the body of Christ?” He tells us that some Protestants he knows “really don’t like the Catholic practice of praying to saints.” Asking a friend to say a prayer for a loved one is normal, Vance explains, “but they draw the line at consulting dead people—‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.’ ” Vance doesn’t bother glossing what, precisely, is odd about the Ave Maria, a prayer which the median cradle Catholic has uttered hundreds or thousands of times; its line-crossing weirdness, it seems, can speak for itself.

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Is it likewise line-crossingly weird for a prominent Catholic to equivocate on the Catholic belief that the saints are indeed alive in Heaven? Or to refer to the Holy Virgin as a “dead person”? Or to warn Pope Leo XIV, who has criticized the Trump Administration for its persecution of immigrants and its demented wars in the Middle East, “to be careful when he talks about matters of theology”? These lapses are typical of “Communion,” a Catholic-conversion story that features a Methodist church on its cover. But perhaps these mistakes are happy accidents; in its frequent vagueness or confusion on matters denominational, the book might serve to reassure Vance’s evangelical audience—a key demographic in whatever will remain of the MAGA base—that he has not strayed too far from his roots.

Vance’s first book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” from 2016, is a chronicle of his tumultuous Rust Belt upbringing that attempts to double as a sociological explainer of the white American underclass; a bipartisan swath of the punditry, who seized on it as a guide to understanding the rise of President Donald Trump, made “Elegy” a best-seller and Vance a household name. “Communion” is not poised to have anything like the same impact, in part because it adds relatively little to the available record of how Vance’s dormant faith was reignited (which he has written about in the past and has often discussed).

His path to Catholicism was adrenalized in 2011, when, as a student at Yale Law School, Vance attended a talk by the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, the unnerving co-founder of PayPal and of the surveillance borg Palantir. “Possibly the smartest person I’d ever met, he identified very openly as a Christian,” Vance writes of Thiel, in “Communion.” “He defied the simple social template I had constructed—that dumb people were religious and smart people were atheists.” But Vance’s milieu at Yale Law School itself would have seemed to defy this social template. It was at Yale that Vance became a member of the Federalist Society, co-chaired by the dark-money activist and devout Roman Catholic Leonard Leo, who is the person most responsible for the conservative-Catholic bent of the current U.S. Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. Vance, in pursuit of a religious denomination and an élite legal career, apparently knew where to find them both.

The pivotal talk at Yale is the first and last we see of Thiel in “Communion,” but he has been Vance’s champion almost ever since. In 2016, Thiel hired Vance as a principal at the venture-capital firm that he co-founded, Mithril Capital, and Thiel was a major backer of the firm that Vance co-founded in 2019, Narya Capital. (The name Narya, like Mithril and Palantir, is lifted from “The Lord of the Rings”—perhaps a show of fealty to Thiel, a Tolkien fan.) Thiel eventually helped forge a working relationship between the future Vice-President and Donald Trump—a comically unlikely feat, or so it felt at the time, as Vance had risen to pundit-class fame in large part owing to his contempt for Trump. (“Trump is cultural heroin,” Vance wrote in 2016. “He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.”)

Thiel donated a record-setting fifteen million dollars to Vance’s successful 2022 bid for Ohio senator, but his largesse on this score receives no acknowledgment in “Communion,” which portrays the campaign as little more than a lark. “In some ways, my Senate run was a quirky intellectual project: an effort to make what I thought were more explicitly Christian arguments about the economy,” Vance writes. “I focused less on abstractions like the GDP and more on the dignity of workers and the jobs they did.” (As senator, Vance voted against the PRO Act, which would have banned “right-to-work” laws and bolstered protections for unionizing workers; part of why he opposed the bill, he told Politico in 2024, was because “it’s dumb to hand over a lot of power to a union leadership that is aggressively anti-Republican.”)

The invocation of “explicitly Christian arguments” is one of several instances in “Communion” when Vance’s approach to political campaigning and governance can seem borderline theocratic. One of his everyday challenges as Vice-President is to figure out “how to take an accepted moral principle and apply it in the real world as a Christian leader.” This conflation of public service with puffed-chest religious crusading is especially jarring when he writes, at length, about his 2025 visit to the Vatican, shortly before the death of Pope Francis, and his tense interactions with officials there, mainly over U.S. immigration policy. “Here I was, the most senior Catholic in the United States government,” Vance recalls, affronted, “and the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes.” He goes on, “I’m one Christian statesman who would welcome an institutional faith less focused on platitudes and more focused on reality.”

It’s hard to imagine a reality-based conversation about the intersection of Catholic ethics and immigration policy with a man who campaigned for the Vice-Presidency by spreading calumnies about Haitian immigrants eating the pet cats and dogs of their neighbors in Ohio. Or who, after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a mother of three during the agency’s siege of Minneapolis, condemned the victim as a “deranged leftist” whose death was a “tragedy of her own making.” Or whose career has been largely bankrolled by the co-founder of Palantir, which has a thirty-million-dollar contract with ICE to provide A.I. surveillance and data-mining technology for hunting and deporting immigrants. Or who uses Elon Musk, the tech trillionaire and former Department of Government Efficiency overseer whose cuts to public-health agencies and infrastructure are projected to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, as an exemplar of how “immigration can bring benefits to the host country in its own right. Just think of Elon Musk and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that trace directly to his decision to come to the United States.”

In emphasizing the supposedly Christian or Catholic nature of his leadership, Vance may be nodding to integralism, a loosely federated intellectual movement also known simply as “political Catholicism,” which holds that civil law and governance should subordinate themselves to Catholic doctrine. But, in April, when he admonished Pope Leo to make sure that his theological remarks are “anchored in the truth,” Vance seemed not to understand that a Catholic is obligated to subordinate himself to the Vicar of Christ. “What is striking about his comments, and devastating for integralism, is the breezy impertinence with which he rebukes the Holy Father,” the Scottish writer Stephen Daisley observed in the conservative religious magazine First Things. Vance, Daisley marvelled, “tells the pope not only to keep his nose out of the affairs of the state but that he is in error on Church doctrine. If this is how a postliberal Catholic, and a convert no less, speaks of the pope’s involvement in politics, the prospect of recruiting postliberal Catholic politicians, Republican or Democrat, who will agree to submit American policymaking to the magisterium of the Church is slim in the extreme.”

One suspects that Vance would have a better grasp of Catholic customs and vibes if he spent more time around rank-and-file parishioners in “fraternal sharing and in ecclesial communion,” to borrow Pope Leo’s words. But Vance admits that, about “half the time these days, we attend Mass at home.” (Your book is called “Communion,” my brother!) A surpassingly strange thing about Vance’s book, in fact, is how often he sounds not much like a Christian at all, Catholic or otherwise. “Religious beliefs are less like certainties such as the boiling point of water—which can be verified through testing—and more like claims about complex systems,” Vance writes. “Take, for example, the following: An increase in the minimum wage would raise the standard of living for low-income people.” Raising wages might sound nice, Vance goes on, but it might also “reduce the number of jobs available to low-income people. . . . The complexity counsels some humility in the face of difficult questions.”

Now, there is some off-the-charts breezy impertinence! Religious beliefs are actually very much like certainties to those who hold them, for one thing. And a policy proposal is not a religious belief, for another. The passage is incoherent, yet, in conflating progressive reform with arrogant blind faith, it is perfectly suited to Vance’s cynical conservatism.

If you contend that a belief is less like a certainty and more like a claim, and if a claim—that workers deserve a fair wage, that immigrants are human beings with God-given rights—can be debunked, then perhaps you hold no true beliefs at all. I’ve written in the past, as have others, about “Vance’s essential mutability—his willingness to change his positions and convictions according to the prevailing winds of the political moment.” (It took Vance just five years to complete his transition from “Hillbilly Elegy”-era Never Trumper to MAGA-aligned Senate candidate.) “Communion,” far more than “Hillbilly Elegy,” is the work of an inveterate opportunist, one who appears torn between the urge to camouflage his careerism—Vance’s true religion—and an equally strong desire to be admired for how well and how profitably he plays the game.

One of the few people for whom Vance shows an open, earnest reverence in “Communion” is his grandmother Bonnie Vance, a.k.a Mamaw, the Bible-reading, gun-toting, compulsively cussing Appalachian matriarch of “Hillbilly Elegy.” In lieu of embracing Marian dogma, Vance kneels at the altar of Mamaw, “the woman whose life had taught me the most about Christian love and virtue.” He worries about what Mamaw might have thought of his becoming a Catholic. “The Christ of Catholicism floated high above you, as a grown man or a baby, wreathed in beams of light and crowned like a king,” Vance writes, before wandering somewhere in range of light blasphemy. “Mamaw would have felt discomfort with that kind of Christ. He was a majestic deity, and our family had little interest in majestic deities because we weren’t a majestic people.”

This passage, like many others in “Communion,” scans syntactically but collapses as thought. To be a Catholic—to practice any monotheistic religion—demands more than little interest in a deity, regardless of whether that deity reminds you of you, regardless of whether Jesus Christ might have struck your grandmother as a little highfalutin nailed up there on that cross, suffocating for your soul, looking down his nose at those dirty sinners from the Holler. All high and mighty, thinking He was God’s gift. ♦