Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, by JD Vance, HarperCollins, 304 pages.

In 1990, the CNN founder Ted Turner called Christianity “a religion for losers.” Though compelled by a prudent regard for public opinion to apologize for this statement, it must be conceded the late media mogul had a point. Christ ministered to the poor and the sick, the widow and the orphan, the publican and the prostitute. His Kingdom was famously not of this world; condemned by His own countrymen, the Son of God died the agonizing death of a common criminal. And in the ensuing two millennia, the followers of Jesus have evinced an abiding concern for, and presence among, the lowly and the despised. Losers loom large.

But there has also been another dimension to the Christian experience. The faith spread like wildfire to become, by the end of the fourth century, the state religion of the Roman Empire. From a countercultural force, Christianity turned into The Establishment, which made its leaders and adherents responsible for affairs temporal as well as spiritual. Winners—great princes, high officials, wealthy merchants—were now an integral part of the flock. The tension thereby introduced has been with us ever since. 

And it stands at the heart of Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, J.D. Vance’s new book about his return to Christianity—though this time of the Catholic variety, rather than the nondenominational Protestantism of his youth.

For Vance has been on both sides. He grew up among America’s losers, in the forgotten hollers and post-industrial towns of Appalachia. And it was on their behalf that he entered public life: first as documentarian, shining a light on the poverty and dysfunction of his corner of the country in the best-selling Hillbilly Elegy; then as tribune, going to Washington to secure for these left-behinds the recognition, redress, and reform they deserved.

Yet Vance is also, on a personal level, an irrepressible winner. Since getting into Yale Law School sixteen years ago, the Ws have been stacking up. A lucrative investing foray into Silicon Valley; a near-universally acclaimed literary debut; a Senate seat before the age of 40; and now the vice presidency. What’s more, these prizes came not from a famous name or inherited wealth, but purely by dint of Vance’s perspicacity and discipline.

And now, of course, he is lieutenant to Donald Trump, the Ultimate Winner, a man who pursues and relishes and worships worldly success more openly, crassly, and zealously than any other figure in American history.

The vice president is undoubtedly conscious of this dynamic, even if he can’t quite say it out loud. But he doesn’t seem terribly bothered. He is, after all, hardly the first believer with an ostensibly God-fearing boss more preoccupied with things worldly than heavenly (just ask anyone who worked for Charlemagne—or King David).

More significantly, Vance finds in the gospels something beyond the problematization of power. For if Christianity makes these tensions acute, it also offers a blueprint for their management. The body of thought known as “Catholic social teaching” points the way. Vance is a great fan of this effort to use Catholicism to build a justly ordered society, and his memoir dwells at length on the influence that works like Rerum novarum (the famous encyclical of Pope Leo XIII upholding the dignity and welfare of labor against the overweening claims of capital) have had on his thinking.

Indeed, it is this aspect of religion—its utility as a guide to order both individual and collective conduct—that appeals most keenly to Vance.

As he tells us in the introduction:

What I saw around me, and what started my journey back to my faith, was that Christianity bore the best fruit. It was the set of ideas and practices that generated the most good, the most truth, and the most beauty of anything I’d ever encountered.

Hard for this Catholic to disagree with anything here; certainly the faith has generated the most good, truth, and beauty of anything in this fallen world. But inquiring minds want to know: Is Christianity itself true?

Interestingly, what might appear to be the central question is treated as a matter of secondary importance. 

Not that we are given much reason to doubt the sincerity of the vice president’s convictions. And he does try to show his readers that Christianity could be true, that many of the Reddit-y refutations of religion fail on their own terms.

But the arguments that swayed Vance, and which Vance in turn deploys to sway his readers, are fundamentally instrumental: Christianity will improve you as an individual and us as a society. (His wife, characteristically, perceived this with the greatest clarity: “Usha has said that the business of converting to Catholicism,” Vance writes, “was ‘good’ for me.”) 

I should hasten to add that this isn’t a bad reason to convert—not at all. Vance is genuinely interested in forming better citizens and building a better world; the Word of God is a sure and steady guide to both. And it is, in its own way, quite honest; in fact, it seems likely to me that the majority of the new arrivals in the pews were moved, at least initially, by a similar desire to obtain the fruits of Christianity. (That, anyway, is what brought this reviewer back to the Church some years ago.)

But it is a little strange to so completely elide the claim on which all other claims hang, particularly in a memoir of personal conversion. Consider that what was previously the most famous such narrative by a Catholic convert, Saint John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, is almost entirely concerned with explaining how its author came to believe that what the Church taught was objectively true. Although Newman, too, accepted the social utility of Catholicism, it was essentially immaterial to his case for the faith. The Church, he famously asserted, 

holds that it were better for sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions who are upon it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin.

This awful conviction of the truth of Christianity, and the sacrifice—even of the whole world!—that one must be prepared to accept for its sake, is rather alien to the chirpy tenor of Communion.

There’s another difference between this book and Newman’s Apologia. James Joyce, who knew something about literary style, had his alter ego Stephen Dedalus praise the sainted cardinal’s “cloistral silverveined prose.” Alas, no one would apply such descriptors to Vance’s latest effort.

It’s a great shame, because the vice president himself is not devoid of literary chops. Hillbilly Elegy was a wonderful read, an original story engagingly told. But Communion has little of the candor, fluency, or wit of that earlier work. It’s often starchy, and very much in the vein of a traditional political memoir. Platitudes abound; genuinely interesting episodes, like Vance’s entry into Peter Thielworld, are skipped entirely, while less interesting episodes, like his courtship of the future Second Lady, are belabored. (Respectfully, few indeed are the readers interested in a dozen pages on how much you love your wife.) 

Many of the edges have been sanded off. The fascinating ambiguities and frank observations of the first memoir have given way, in the second, to pious affirmations of orthodoxy and just-so stories. Even Mamaw has been bowdlerized (her frequent and creative cursing, one of the funniest motifs of Hillbilly Elegy, is here censored by prim and proper asterisks).

Some emphases have also changed. In that first book, Vance was quite honest about the kind of Christianity that existed among his family and neighbors, who were “deeply religious but without any attachment to a real church community.” 

“Despite its reputation,” he wrote,

Appalachia—especially northern Alabama and Georgia to southern Ohio—has far lower church attendance than the Midwest, parts of the Mountain West, and much of the space between Michigan and Montana. Oddly enough, we think we attend church more than we actually do….

The pattern of deception has to do with cultural pressure. In southwestern Ohio, where I was born, both the Cincinnati and Dayton metropolitan areas have very low rates of church attendance, about the same as ultra-liberal San Francisco. No one I knew in San Francisco would feel ashamed to admit that they don’t go to church. (In fact, some of them might feel ashamed to admit that they do.) Ohio is the polar opposite. Even as a kid, I’d lie when people asked if I attended church regularly. According to Gallup, I wasn’t alone.

Christianity was therefore a vague, individual affair; real, of course, and with cultural cachet, but lacking organic instantiation in the communal life of which the young J.D. partook.

But in Communion, there is a shift from interrogating stereotypes of Bible-thumping hillbillies to leaning into them. In an account of his great-grandmother’s funeral, we are told that:

Christianity wasn’t just a “belief” to us. It wasn’t a judgment we arrived at after evaluating the evidence. It was a practice, a way of life. It connected us to our ancestors and our progeny…. Losing my faith wasn’t, consequently, a primarily intellectual act. It was the equivalent of a divorce. I was severing myself from my roots as I understood them—from my family, the grandmother I’d just lost, the values I’d been taught.

(It would have been more interesting, and, I think, more productive, to consider why institutional Christianity underwent such decay—and whether it might be reversed—instead of gesturing toward the chthonic faith of the hill folk.)

Of course, there is a sense in which subjecting the text to extended critical interrogation is missing the point. This is primarily campaign literature; it was written more to exist and generate discussion around its author than to be, well, read.

Still, Vance is too compelling and perceptive a figure to write an entirely uninteresting book. His critique of the “GDP-first” lens through which so much of the right continues to look at economic policy is extremely important (the point about the pleasantness of Japan proving economics “fake” was particularly strong); so, too, is his attack on the excesses of tech and the attention economy. And his attempt to apply Catholic social teaching to the contemporary American context appears both genuine and salutary (even if it’s doubtful whether all this theorizing has much connection with what the White House is actually doing).

There are also occasional points of deeper personal revelation. Late in the book, Vance confesses that the destination of his soul after death doesn’t keep him up at night. “I don’t worry about what I will find on the other side of eternal sleep,” he says, adding that “even as a child, I never feared hell.” (It’s an interesting contrast with his boss, who told reporters last year he didn’t think he was “heaven-bound.”)

What, then, does the vice president worry about? “Death without triumph,” he tells us, “death knowing that your friends will be worse off… death without any certainty that your earthly labors will bear fruit.” “Civilizational death,” as he puts it elsewhere in the book—the possibility that our great deeds and traditions will eventually be consigned to oblivion.

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Of course, he recognizes that these sentiments differ in some important ways from the worldview suggested by Christianity. There is even a whiff of pagan antiquity about them.

In fairness, every good statesman probably needs at least a dash of this, a little virtù to leaven his virtue. And a major part of Vance’s unique appeal is that he combines a genuine seriousness about ideas with a clear interest in—and growing comfort with—power.

But the trick is not to get too comfortable: not to allow the effects to entirely eclipse the cause, nor to let an interest in the fruits cause one to lose sight of the tree. Because when you’re winning so much, it can be easy to forget about the losers.