My wife scoffed when I brought home JD Vance’s new book Communion from the library. It’s really two books, but we’ll get into that later. Communion is centered on Vance’s spiritual journey from a childhood in evangelical culture to atheism and back to faith, now as a Catholic. I really appreciated Vance’s first book, Hillbilly Elegy, it provides a really careful and well-told picture of the rural poor who helped propel Donald Trump to the presidency.
Communion does much the same for the political movement that’s called MAGA - although there should be separation between the political actors and intellectual cadre that runs this movement from the oft-derided rank and file who support it with votes.
My wife scoffed that I’d read what amounts to campaign literature from someone who stands for so many things that I abhor, but I think it’s important to understand people - all people - because I believe deeply that all people are important and valuable and we’ve got to be able to talk to each other.
I say this is two books, because it very clearly started as something different than it became. Halfway through, right as Vance was debating whether or not to run for Senate in 2020, he mentions turning in the first draft of this very book that would be published six years later.
That first half is a poignant exploration of faith, quite honestly. Vance recounts his first disillusionment with the evangelicalism of his youth, where people seemed more concerned with talking about God, winning culture ways, and bland platitudes than they did with helping actual people. No one in his religious community seemed to do anything about the addicts who found Jesus each Sunday and went back to the bottle or the needle the next day.
These are critiques that ring true in my own life and for many Christians across the theological spectrum. Hypocrisy and empty religion are valid and easy critiques of Christianity in the contemporary western world.
Vance dives deeply into the drive for success that elite society offers as an alternative motivation. He goes to college and Yale Law School, gets prestigious jobs, finds influential friends, makes some money - and discovers the happiness they promise is empty. He finds value in a wife and family and searches for deeper meaning and connection, which brings him back to God.
I read that section of the book with some sense of impending doom. We know the end result, right? Vance is now Trump’s Vice President and one of the staunchest defenders of brutal ICE tactics, isolationist foreign policy, and the breakdown of democratic norms. You can’t help but ask, “how does he get from here to there?”
To be honest, he doesn’t really say. The shift from the portion of the book clearly written before political aspiration and the half written to bolster those same aspirations is like night and day. In some sense, it is an extension of his religious journey in that he very much roots all of his politics in faith - it’s just that the humility and wonder are completely absent as he embarks on the practical.
There’s a quote from the Epilogue that succinctly sums up Communion and provides the grounding point from which any agreement or critique must arise.
“I’m proposing that we have now run an experiment of replacing a Christian culture with something else for decades. And the fruit of that experiment includes rising racial strife, a gender gap among our young people, falling rates of love and partnership, and a society with a declining population.”
Vance is infatuated with Christian culture - but Christian culture as defined by it’s intermingling with political power. It’s telling that when the book makes its turn, Vance goes from quoting and engaging scripture to quoting and engaging with Catholic political theologians. He includes Constantine as a central figure in the rise of the Christian culture he lauds and advocates for when an increasing number of Christian scholars point to Constantine as the moment when Christianity lost its scriptural trajectory.
Some of this is theological. There’s a long strain of Christian interpretation that sees the Eden of Genesis 1 as the pinnacle of human existence - a utopia we ruined with sin and to which we’re struggling to revive.
I tend to see Eden as the perfect beginning. Yes, subsequently marred by human selfishness and greed, but perhaps necessarily so. In order to reach the eternal future envisioned by God, human freedom (and thus human error) was assumed. I differ from Vance, because I do not believe there is some faultless past to which we can and should return, but only a bumpy path forward, in imitation of Jesus Christ, by which people are won over through love and not coercion.
As Vance gets into policy positions, it’s clear he has a very specific, preferred way of life. He wants all people to live and act a certain way and is willing to use the levers of power if not to force people into it, then to heavily incentivize it - to the point where rejection feels like punishment.
I won’t deny that I also have thoughts on how people ought to live - a perspective that is grounded in faith and scripture, albeit interpreted differently (in some points) from Vance. The difference is that key to my understanding of this way of life is non-coercion. Freedom. I believe people not only have the right to think and decide for themselves, but that this choice is essential to arriving at the correct way of thinking and living.
Vance, for the most part, correctly identifies many of the problems in our modern world. He sees the danger of prioritizing economic growth, efficiency, and productivity over things that might cost us something, but produce meaning and fulfillment in life.
At the root of the problem is his relationship to power. I don’t think he’d disagree with me that the best form of human government is a benevolent dictatorship - that a person with near unlimited power and the best interests of the governed in mind is most effective.
We differ in that I simply don’t believe that’s possible, whereas Vance seems willing to give it a try. Maybe dictatorship is too strong a word for his intentions (although the actions of the administration of which he’s a key player might say differently) certainly he wants to be part of a power structure with benevolent interests.
I think the issue is largely pharisaical. Vance seems to be advocating for the US to “get it right” and then export the perfect society to the rest of the world. His vision is necessarily exclusionary. The quote talked about a declining population due to declining birth rates, but that’s only true in industrial societies. Overall the human population is growing, but most of that growth is black and brown babies in poor country without a history of “civilization” as Vance would ideally define it.
This is the same reason he can ascribe dignity to both sides of the Civil War without mentioning the enslaved people over which it was fought. Yes, Vance is clear that the North was the correct side, but he then proceeds into a glossy, nostalgic picture of the European settlers who discovered unlimited bounty in their new world, without ever mentioning the people who were already living here.
He’s happy to have a diversity of faces and religions, so long as they’re willing to live in a society that looks like European Christendom. I use the word “Christendom” intentionally, although Vance does not. He’s keen to connect that nominally Christian civilization to Christian faith, when there’s little historical evidence to connect the two.
It’s one of the really disingenuous parts of Communion. Vance is just too smart not to know what he’s doing. By rooting the first half of the book in deeply spiritual language and exploration, he’s attached the appearance of gospel to the naked politics of the second half of the book. I’m not arguing that Vance is using his faith as an excuse for his politics - I certainly understand the logical moves he’s making to get where he’s going - I simply reject the inevitability he implies. It’s manipulative in the worst sense.
He’s very good at recognizing the complexity of issues without actually critiquing his own position. He recognizes the emotional challenges of immigration enforcement without ever addressing the actual violence and brutality of ICE agents under this administration.
He talks about a holistic approach to pro-life activism, challenging Christian pregnancy centers to do more for babies after they’re born without addressing the outright lies, scare tactics, and shame that’s common practice in many of them.
He says, at one point, “It’s one thing to vanquish an enemy and another to humiliate him.” Which is incredibly hypocritical for someone who defends Donald Trump rhetoric and himself called Zohran Mamdani “evil” just last week!
It’s not overtly stated in Communion, but it really feels like Vance believes intention is more important than action, at least when it comes to morality. He’s trying to do the right thing. He wants the good. I think I believe that, but he seems to believe the ends can justify the means and that is entirely un-Christians.
He gets all the critiques correct. He’s upset about the right things. His examination of post-WWII hegemony is spot on. He just missed wildly on the prescriptions.
For example, Vance notes that it's difficult for any culture to absorb a large immigrant population without division and violence. He cites the many struggles of large immigrant groups in the US over the years to back up his point. All of this is true and valid. He concludes, though, that the problem in this scenario is immigration and not nationalism.
He approaches ethics from the assumption that the existence of nations is amoral at best. He often cites the morality of nations controlling their borders, but never the morality of the nations’ existence. This critique might seem radical, but it gives cover to treat citizens of one country differently than citizens of another - which is perfectly acceptable from the perspective of the US Vice President, but is not theologically defensible.
There’s a focus on “self-sufficiency” both for individuals and for countries. I think, at its core, this comes from a belief that people need to feel what they do is meaningful. This was at the core of Vance’s rejection of elite society - people were working for status more than meaning. It’s a good, valid, and Christian critique.
However, rather than address this theologically, as his set-up would dictate, his solution is entirely pragmatic and insular - countries need to take care of themselves. Scripture pretty clearly teaches community - people engage in meaningful work to provide for themselves and others, while also relying on others to have their basic needs met.
This doesn’t have to be an either/or scenario, but Vance seems keen to choose, perhaps because he’s afraid of what including people who think and act differently, those with different perspectives on the world might have to say - and how including those people might change the beloved western civilization he’s trying to save.
He makes a wonderful argument for prioritizing family and children over productivity, reminding us rightly that a peaceful and meaningful life is better than pure economic growth. But this is tempered with real-life policies that favor traditional families over non-traditional ones.
He mentions population growth - or rather, decline - noting that most of the western world is not bearing children at replacement rate and some nations are struggling with an aging population. He doesn’t note, however, that overall, humanity is still growing. The unspoken reality is that most of those children are black and brown kids from impoverished and non-Christian places.
At its core, Vance’s current theology is pharisaical. I’m not sure he says it outright, but every implication is that “if we, as the United States of America, would just be Christian and follow Christian principles, everything would be fine,” without any willingness to have actual dialogue about what that means or how it might be implemented.
There’s a sense that if government favored conservative, traditional, Christian families, people would be incentivized to do the same. This is directly contrary to God’s non-coercive presence in the world. Even assuming JD Vance knows with 100% certainty the best way to live in the world, he doesn’t have any right to force people into obedience, even for their own good. This is the fundamental Christian critique to benevolent dictatorship, which is what Trump and Vance pretend to at their best moments.
Both Vance’s theology and politics are also self-centered and insular. The solution to a good US manufacturing job being outsourced to a cheaper worker overseas is to artificially raise the cost of such a move to keep the job home - rather than, say, improve the economic and working conditions of people in other countries so every worker can compete on a level playing field.
I’m sure he’d argue that his role as Vice President of the United States requires him to prioritize US citizens, which brings up the question of whether a Christian can be in political power at all without compromising the gospel. If the job requires treating some people differently than others, can a Christian do it faithfully?
I’m reminded of the quote I first heard from Ed Robinson - a professor at Nazarene Theological Seminary, where I attended - although I’m confident it did not originate with him. He said, “the only ethical use of power is to give it away.”
I’ve struggled with all the same questions Vance struggles with - although, admittedly, my struggles have all been theoretical, while his have real consequences. Ultimately, though, I can’t get away from the firm belief that Christian faith is entirely incompatible with power. I don’t like that conclusion, but I can’t find any other place to land.
The entire history of Christianity - at least since it was first recognized by Rome - has been a series of people who think they can wed these two things together and utterly failing. Does JD Vance think he can be the one to crack it? Maybe. I think perhaps he’s just one more well meaning Christian who’s fallen prey to the idea that the only way to fight power is with power when Jesus says pretty clearly the answer is love.
God’s love promises a more beautiful future. The civilization Vance fears to lose was good for but a few. The incorporation of those who’ve been left out as true equals in the human project will necessarily be messy. It will be unfamiliar, perhaps scary - but everything in Christianity, scripture, tradition, reason, and experience tells us it will be better.
