The Great U-Turn: From Hillbilly to Secular Elite, and Back Again
A Review of JD Vance’s Communion
Vice President Vance’s new memoir, Communion, displays his personal evolution over the past decade since the release of Hillbilly Elegy, nearly ten years to the day. While there are many different takeaways from the book, the most important one is how he, like many from our generation, was conditioned to worship what David Brooks calls résumé virtues. For Vance, that long list of worldly achievements led to unhappiness and a desire for something different: truth. Communion shows readers how he turned the ship around with a new mission toward building a life with faith at the center. He provides insight into his own Catholic conversion as well as how that faith informs many of his political and economic views.
Memoirs written by elected officials should be read with a cautious eye, but not as a jaded skeptic. Reading through Communion brought me back to the days after I graduated from college in 2008. I was underemployed with my newly minted finance degree, living in Chicago as the Great Recession raged. With few job prospects, I had time to read Barack Obama’s memoirs. The first, Dreams from My Father, was insightful on matters of race as well as his unique upbringing in Hawaii. But the second, The Audacity of Hope, read like an endless string of feel-good platitudes by a man clearly running for president. Vance’s second book hits different. It’s not a theological manifesto of religious doctrine nor a 2028 plan for America but a story of one man’s spiritual journey with a few confessions sprinkled in.
Replacing Faith with Merit
Communion starts out with Vance explaining his own fall: “My own crisis of faith began, ironically enough, with the death of the woman whose life had taught me the most about Christianity.” Recalling Hillbilly Elegy, Vance describes his mamaw as an unconventional Christian: a foul-mouthed gal who rarely attended church but also one who prayed regularly and knew the Bible well. Vance mentioned that he rarely attended church, except when his mom decided that they needed to “get religion” on a random weekend. Over the years, Vance experienced different versions of Protestantism, from non-denominationalism to his father’s Pentecostal church to online preachers.
I enjoyed his generational pop-culture reference to “AOL chat rooms,” as Vance used such online connections to argue with evolutionary biologists about the book of Genesis. I was doing the same thing on the religion thread within the S-10 Forums, a truck website. We both read the C.S. Lewis classics, but where intellectual belief was reinforced for me, Vance found the works too foreign to the faith he was raised with at home.
When Vance left the military, it was Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged that pulled him away from his faith and toward a new one: meritocracy. He could relate because her stories included characters like himself. They came from dysfunctional families but were able to succeed by overcoming adversity through hard work. He would later read (as did I) the likes of the New Atheists—Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris—but would ultimately accept that a hyper-rational view of the world was insufficient. It was his need for acceptance, not rational persuasion, in college and law school that drove him toward atheism. Meeting Peter Thiel, a Christian, broke his worldview that dumb people are religious and smart people are atheists. Thiel shared the work of French philosopher René Girard, who named the competitive pressures Vance experienced to achieve status at Yale and beyond.
As he reflected on his experiences, Vance realized he had become trapped in the “rat race of modern meritocracy,” obsessed with prestige, wealth, and winning. He observed that for many elites, professional success morphed into a “quasi-religion” that dictated their identity rather than simply providing a livelihood. Ultimately, his wife, Usha, helped pull him off this endless treadmill by making it clear that she valued his character and role as a husband and father over his credentials and financial achievements. Before she came along, Vance had bought into the “bro culture” foisted upon our generation, which mocked having feelings and deemed romantic relationships to be mere transactions. “Play hard to get” and “Don’t come on too strong” were all parts of the game, Vance admits.
Toe in the (Holy) Water
Through an online Hebrew Bible class, Vance gained a mature appreciation for ancient scripture that transcended the “fairy tale” views of his youth. This spiritual awakening ultimately drew him toward Catholicism, where he found personal accountability and liberation through the practices of confession and reconciliation, realizing his difficult past was no excuse for bad behavior. Ironically, it was Usha, a Hindu, who actively encouraged his return to church, recognizing that it connected him to his roots and provided a moral anchor and healing that traditional therapy had failed to deliver.
Becoming a father to a son was a defining moment for Vance. At first, he and Usha were preparing him to become one of the elite, thinking about college before he was born. But then it finally dawned on Vance: life is more than credentials. Fatherhood forced him to start asking harder questions about whether his son would become a man of character and purpose. Prestige and achievements would have little value if he became a terrible person. Fatherhood offered Vance the opportunity to redeem his own mixed past, with the host of flawed male role models from his own history.
On Becoming Catholic
After settling down in Cincinnati, Vance realized his faith was merely an intellectual exercise. True faith must be one of both mind and heart. A decade of irreligion had attenuated his prayer life, so he began with written prayers, found mostly on Catholic websites.
Vance profited from reading Pope Leo XIII’s works on the industrial revolution and the resulting strife in America and Europe. He saw these arguments not in political terms but as commentaries on human society. Vance was also influenced by G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man and a second passing through C.S. Lewis’s collected works. But it was Saint Augustine’s critique of the shallow striver culture of late Roman society in his Confessions that resonated most deeply.
Vance was drawn to Catholicism’s deep historical roots and abiding traditions. Catholic priest Father Henry helped him understand grace as a process, which occurs by living a sacramental life that includes going to church, confession, and taking communion. In August 2019, Vance was received into the Catholic Church, a journey he described in a lengthy op-ed published the following Easter in The Lamp titled “How I Joined the Resistance.” I believe this is where the original manuscript Vance submitted for Communion ends, but for those following along, this shows his commitment to finishing the project and his passion for sharing the message.
Intersecting Faith and Politics
As a U.S. senator, Vance recounts his trip to Munich, where he witnesses European leaders mourning the collapse of the world they had built. He concludes that the modern West had lost its foundational Christian values—the shared moral language that originally built the postwar order—replacing it with a shallow secular global liberalism that has forgotten what it stood for.
At this point in the book, his political views become more explicit as he travels to Rome as a newly elected official. While Vance is often criticized for his somewhat adversarial relationship with the last two Bishops of Rome, he reveals that he found their guidance on complex issues to be frustratingly shallow, mirroring what Rob Henderson dubbed “luxury beliefs”—where insulated elites promote ideals without facing their real-world consequences. Vance makes it clear that he desires a faith rooted in practical reality rather than abstract ideology, arguing that a Christian statesman must balance the moral duty of charity toward immigrants with the reality of limited resources. For Vance, preserving social cohesion is essential for sustaining the welfare state and labor unions. Thus, he argues that strict border policies can represent a necessary moral trade-off rather than a dehumanizing act.
Consumption Worship
In the chapter “A Dismal Science,” Vance takes aim at the free-market fundamentalists. Vance makes several arguments about the obsession with maximizing GDP. The relentless pursuit of growth has led to the devastating loss of America’s industrial base and the subsequent loss of livelihood and devastation of cities that presaged the opioid epidemic—all for the “efficient” trade-offs for cheaper consumer goods. The true well-being of a nation includes the dignity of a good job and the ability to manufacture critical supplies domestically, even if it results in slightly lower overall GDP. To critics on the right, this is a form of incipient socialism.
Economists often view unpaid domestic labor and time spent raising children as “unproductive,” incentivizing a culture that values work above all else. This hyper-economic logic incentivizes retail employees to miss Thanksgiving to boost Black Friday profits for corporations. He notes the destructive nature of the “attention economy,” where tech companies prioritize engagement over human well-being, engineering social media to addict children and actively disrupt the attention and time parents owe their families. The problem he identifies is that a family-centered model is disappearing because it is not economically efficient, something brought up nearly a century ago by agrarian writers in books like I’ll Take My Stand and Who Owns America?
Ultimately, Vance links this worship of commerce to the global demographic crisis, arguing that modern societies have successfully conditioned young people to prioritize careers and consumption over falling in love and raising families. Children are a profound moral good that expands our capacity for empathy and joy. A Christian approach to economics must measure success not by raw consumption but by how well the economy serves human flourishing. He comes full circle from his atheist days, stating his appreciation of Appalachian people and his family, noting that they cared far less about credentials and job accomplishments than about their kin. My own family in western Kentucky also cares little about money, job titles, and status.
Civilizational Continuity
Vance experienced a profound dread of civilizational decline during a trip to the United Kingdom, witnessing their rich cultural inheritance falling into disrepair. What kind of world are we leaving our children, where people no longer honor their ancestors or maintain their cultural foundations? The narrative of American history he learned as a child bonded generations together through a shared story of struggle, sacrifice, and triumph. In order to stay connected to past generations, Vance regularly visits a family cemetery in eastern Kentucky.
Vance sees a parallel story in the Catholic Church, noting that Simon Peter suffered a violent death without ever witnessing the triumph of the church he helped build. Where the mighty Roman Empire eventually collapsed, the church Peter planted endured to inspire billions of followers millennia later. There is a lesson in Christian humility: faithful action does not always yield immediate earthly success or instant gratification.
Faith: Individual vs. Community
Many have questioned why a Catholic would put a United Methodist church on the cover of his book. Vance is paying homage to his roots, his Mamaw, and Appalachia. Vance’s evolution has parallels to de Tocqueville’s observations on individualism and community in America. The Protestantism Vance was raised with, and what he saw in Mamaw, focused on the individual. Through his conversion to Catholicism, that faith became communal, with an emphasis on being a good husband and father.
A decade ago, Vance was a nobody, and three years after Hillbilly Elegy came out, his life chasing “Conveyor Belt Capitalism” took a back seat to a religious conversion and recommitment to the things that matter in life: faith, family, and community. The real miracle in Vance’s life is the sobriety of his mother and her loving presence in his kids’ lives, which parallels the redemption of his grandparents in Hillbilly Elegy. The one word Vance has for the ability to heal old wounds through second chances: gratitude. The focus of Vance’s op-eds, the consistency of his political views, and the alignment of his actions with his values demonstrate that Communion has little to do with the 2028 presidential election but a real focus on something altogether different: the abiding significance of eulogy virtues.