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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH JD VANCE?  
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Colin Dickey
June 19, 2026
The New Republic
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_ His new book, Communion, sketches out a redemption narrative that
is jarringly at odds with his actions. _

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Communion: Finding My Way Back to FaithJD VanceHarperISBN:
9780063575011

The first chapter of JD Vance’s _Communion: Finding My Way Back to
Faith_ [[link removed]]_, _is titled
“What’s the Matter with JD Vance?” It’s a reference to Thomas
Frank’s 2004 _What’s the Matter With Kansas?_
[[link removed]]_, _but it’s also a fine
question in and of itself, a question one asks with increasing urgency
the further one gets in the book. On its face, _Communion _has all the
hallmarks of the standard Politician Book: the kind of thing one
writes in preparation for a presidential run, where one tells (or
retells) one’s life story, confesses some flaws and puts one’s
heart on one’s sleeve, while also making a case for why America is
the greatest country on earth and offering a bold vision for its
future alongside a smattering of policy proposals.

And yet. There is something deeply the matter here with JD Vance, and
with this book. Reading _Communion _requires a strange leap of faith,
a leap across a chasm into some alternate universe—several,
actually. For in order to make sense of this book, one must be able to
pitch one’s mind into a world where the Donald Trump of the past six
years somehow doesn’t exist, a world where Christianity is somehow
an entirely different religion than is generally manifested in
American culture and politics, and a world where JD Vance himself is
another person entirely. At times one feels as though one is actually
reading Whitney Streiber’s _Communion_
[[link removed]]_, _the 1987 blockbuster
about extraterrestrial contact, the content here so entirely alien to
the world we now inhabit.

On its surface, the story Vance wants to tell is a familiar one, and a
simple one, about “how a guy like me, who was raised Christian but
considered himself an atheist for a time, came back to the faith.”
Raised in Appalachia, he was surrounded by Christians for whom faith
was simply a way of life. Poor, socially conservative, the adults of
Vance’s childhood found community and kinship here; as a child, he
came to see that “God loved us, that He demanded our best but would
forgive our worst.” What’s clear is that from an early age, he saw
religion not just in terms of faith but in terms of community, and as
a way of bringing people together by creating structure to one’s
life and forging bonds. “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.” There’s a fair amount
of nostalgia here, but such is memory.

By the late 1990s, however, the community was deep in the _Left
Behind_ [[link removed]]_ _era of
eschatological fundamentalism that Vance saw as increasingly
irrelevant to the poverty and need around him. At the same time,
social issues like abortion that had always been present began to take
a bigger prominence. His turn to atheism, he writes, was fueled in no
small part by the Terry Schiavo case of the early 2000s, when social
conservatives across the country rallied to keep a functionally
brain-dead woman in Florida from being taken off life support despite
her husband’s wishes. “As tragic as Schiavo’s case was,” he
writes, “it seemed like a genuinely freak occurrence in a world
filled with overlooked tragedy. It felt to me like our pastors spoke
in abstractions about family values, while glossing over the divorce
and family instability that had wrecked my family and community. They
worried about the unborn, but ignored the abuse, neglect, and
struggles in homes like mine.”

That growing sense of disconnect, along with losing his grandmother
and joining the Army, led to his break: “What paved my path to
atheism wasn’t books or ideas, it was sadness and a sense of
betrayal.” What characterizes these pages, though, is less sadness
than an emotion that comes to define Vance in these pages: rage. He
comes to see expressions of religion as increasingly hypocritical and
phony, performative and insulting. “All the fervor, all the
overwrought emotion, infuriated me,” he writes. “I was sick of it
and skeptical that it did a bit of good.” He is “furious,”
“enraged”; like his 2016 book, _Hillbilly Elegy_
[[link removed]]_, _this is a story of an
angry young man.

From there, Vance tells the story of his rise, through the military,
and then on to Ohio State University and Yale Law School. It’s a
period in which, as Vance describes it, he cared little for religion
and was focused entirely on escaping the economic precarity of his
youth and of reaching the brass ring. “I didn’t care about God’s
will. I cared about my own. I cared about winning, about never having
to worry about money again, and having the type of job that commanded
respect.” It’s another theme he returns to over and over again:
“I wanted to win for winning’s sake,” he says later. When he was
an atheist he was mercenary, empty inside, determined to get ahead at
all costs. Striving.

Two people at Yale will change his life. The first is Peter Thiel, who
is described here primarily in terms of his religion—openly
Christian, a rarity in the elite worlds Vance now finds himself in.
Through Thiel, Vance finds the ideas of philosopher René Girard,
including the idea of “mimetic desire.” As Vance explains the
term, “We are such social creatures that we instinctively want what
other people around us want: the same jobs, the same women (or men),
the same university degrees.” In addition to his rage and his
striving, mimetic desire is the third thing that will come to define
Vance: finding himself in situations where everyone seems to believe
and think and act in the same way, a predicament from which he seems
desperate to escape. At Yale, the “groupthink pressure was
incredibly powerful,” and he’ll later learn that “the intensity
of social control was far greater among our elites than anything I’d
seen in a Pentecostal or Southern Baptist church back home.”

And then there’s Usha Chilukuri, his future wife. Falling deeply in
love with her, Vance resolves to do anything he needs to do to keep
her. She forces him to address unresolved issues from his past—at
first he tries therapy, but he scoffs after a few sessions. Therapy,
he complains, “was divorced from any sense of responsibility or
guilt.” The therapist’s suggestion that his problems stemmed from
intergenerational trauma “turned me into a victim rather than an
actor. I’m sure that therapy helps many people, but it made me want
to puke.” This seems a crude rendering of how therapy works, but
Vance wants to be the author of his own destiny and quickly gives it
up. Instead, he finds himself “searching for a more satisfying
accounting of wrongdoing and responsibility. Of temptation and
willpower. Of virtue and guilt.”

 

Ultimately he finds this in a return to religion, this time via the
Catholic Church. What’s made clear in _Communion _is that one of the
most important reasons Vance found God again was to keep from losing
Usha, and when he found it, she encouraged him to stick with
it—despite not being religious herself. “Therapy didn’t work for
you,” she tells him. “But church does.”

And so Vance finds his way back to God; the redemption arc is
completed and the narrative fulfilled. The second half of the book
charts his course from there: the success of _Hillbilly Elegy _and his
rise to fame as an interpreter of the disaffected Appalachian Donald
Trump voter, becoming a father, his run for Senate, and ultimately the
vice presidency. As a book unto itself, such a thing would be fine.
But in 2026, reading this is one of the strangest experiences
imaginable, simply because nearly every premise of the book defies any
kind of known reality.

For one, _Communion_’s_ _policy proposals and vision for a future
America suggest throughout a move toward the center—the kind of
thing you might expect for someone lining up for a presidential run,
if that someone was anyone, _anyone at all_, who was not associated
with the Trump administration. But Vance makes these statements as
though completely unmoored from everything that’s been going on,
unmoored from who he is and where he works, unmoored from the current
political divide and the current realities of what’s happening every
day—as though he’s a center-right Republican cryogenically
unfrozen from 2010. “We’re fine telling a businessman he must go
to church and tithe but not that he must pay his people a fair
wage,” he writes at one point. And: “If it is sinful to abort a
perfectly healthy human baby before birth, so, too, is it sinful to
depress that baby’s chance of a living a good life afterward.”
They’re the kind of lines that were once focus-tested to a high
polish but have long since been left on the shelf and allowed to rust.

Why this strange attempt to tack suddenly to the center-right? Does
Vance think his readers have the attention span of goldfishes?
What’s the matter with him? _Communion _seems to telegraph that MAGA
will not last beyond Trump, that the raw nativism and brutality that
have defined the past 18 months have an expiration date, and that
Vance himself may only be buying into it because he’s good at
following orders. Certainly, _Communion _is not a full-throated,
impassioned case for the righteousness of MAGA. (On the
administration’s immigration policy, for instance, he writes “Of
course, critics of the Trump administration say we’re too tough. The
point is not to litigate this issue on these pages but to highlight
that any application of moral principles in the real world requires a
constant evaluation of trade-offs.”) Instead the book is a
chickenshit attempt to have it both ways by appealing to some rational
middle that hasn’t existed in this country since at least 2014.

It’s hard to say how he thinks this is going to work out for him,
but _Communion _makes clear how he sees his path ahead—even if, by
releasing this during Trump’s reign, he may be playing his hand a
bit too soon.

Additionally, Vance’s understanding of Christianity is singular, to
say the least. It’s certainly complex, at times deeply thoughtful
and at other times frustratingly facile. His turn from faith seems
genuinely rooted in matters of social justice, in the religious
right’s refusal to deal with poverty and drug addiction in favor of
abstract social issues, eschatological fervor, and political power.
And his way back appears to have involved a great deal of serious
study and consideration. Again and again throughout his life, Vance
finds himself looking for something that will answer “the big
questions,” and neither atheism nor therapy comes close for him.
Religion does.

Reading _Communion, _the theme that emerges is that Vance sees
Christianity as a force for social cohesion, one that binds the
family, creating children, and the nation by providing a “shared
moral language.” But when it comes to political prescriptions, the
picture of Christianity he presents is so oddly one-sided that it
boggles the mind. When he discusses racial tension, writing that on
the left, “people worry about a rising tide of white supremacism,”
and on the right, “people worry about rising anti-white rhetoric or
anti-Semitism on college campuses,” he offers Christianity as the
solution:

From the intermarriage of the Spanish and native populations in Mexico
to the American melting pot of the nineteenth century to the Civil
Rights Movement, Christianity has long brought people together. And
yet, as our leaders have ushered in an unprecedented increase in
demographic diversity through immigration, they have simultaneously
discarded the most powerful force for cultural cohesion: Christianity.
It is hardly any surprise that the fruits of their labor are rising
racial conflict and gender division. Secularism has produced social
strife despite its promises of enlightenment.

No serious student of history would deny that Christianity has
produced its share of good in the world. But Christianity is not good
simply because it’s Christianity. Being a good Christian does not
make you good. That both the Civil Rights Movement and the Ku Klux
Klan claimed God was on their side is an undeniable fact, and makes
the central argument of _Communion _more or less a nonstarter. Is he
really this naïve about Christianity’s shortcomings? Is he really
suggesting that the solution to antisemitism is Christianity? Does he
really think the relationship between the Spanish conquistadors and
Indigenous Americans was one of happy communion? What’s the matter
with him?

This is why the country’s Founders tried to structure the United
States in such a way that our laws did not rely on God, so we
wouldn’t have to get into the thorny question of _Whose God? _and
_Whose interpretation? _Instead, Vance seems to think that injecting
God into policy is itself a panacea. He notes that at the 2024 Munich
Security Conference
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there “were no mentions of God,” but there were “lots of appeals
to vaguely defined shared values. ‘Putin is evil,’ I heard many
times. ‘We are on the side of justice and truth, and our enemies
seek to destroy these things,’ a French parliamentarian told me
about the transatlantic alliance.” It’s unclear why “justice”
is any more vague than “God.” Putin’s invasion of Ukraine
violated international law, which seems to be a textbook definition of
injustice. Why the need to bring God into it?

Because it suits him. Of his meeting with Pope Francis in 2025, Vance
comments, “I preferred his specific exhortations to the vagueness I
encountered during our Vatican meeting. Better to have an honest
conversation than one masked by clichés.” But for Vance, his
discussion of Christianity is too often itself nothing but a cliché,
a shield invoked as a cover for his specific policy preferences, held
up as a transcendental ideal and thus something that need not be
argued for or substantiated with evidence.

But most of all, in order to read and make sense of this book one must
pretend, somehow, that JD Vance is not JD Vance. The arc of the
narrative here is an angry young man, striving for the sake of
striving, who once succumbed to groupthink—but who, through the love
of a good woman and the grace of God, has found the grace to work past
all that.

_Communion _accomplishes this in the strangest of ways. Vance
continually reminds you of his faults when recounting his early days
as an atheist: his anger, his hollow pursuit of wealth and status, how
again and again he found himself in places like Yale where he was
subject to groupthink.

But once his conversion takes place, significant events in his life
just sort of seem to happen, without the same kind of burning
motivation he once felt—though they are the sort of accomplishments
that do not just fall into one’s lap without serious effort. His
decision to write _Hillbilly Elegy _is reduced to a sentence: “On
the side, I worked on a book slated for publication in the summer of
2016.” And his political moves are likewise minimized. Here is his
decision to run for Senate: “I went back and forth for awhile on
whether to run before eventually deciding to do it.” He adds one
paragraph about his platform, and then here is the race itself:
“Much has been written about that Senate race, and I doubt I can
offer much original here. But the most important thing to say is that
I thought we’d lose but we didn’t.” The 2024 presidential
campaign—from the phone call where he learned he was being vetted
for vice president to moving into the Naval Observatory in January
2025—is covered in three pages.

A memoir in which the most significant moments of a person’s career
fly by as nonevents makes for a truly baffling read. Is not running
for Senate and vice president the ultimate expression of someone still
striving for “having the type of job that commanded respect”? And
are we to believe Vance has broken free of mimetic desire—with its
tendency toward groupthink—now that he serves in an administration
where no one
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that
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Trump lost the 2020 election? If it was in Yale that he first
discovered that he “was susceptible to intense pressure to believe
certain things,” are we to believe that has changed, when he and
Marco Rubio now sport the too-large shoes
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their boss bought for them? Are we to believe Vance has let go of his
anger issues, despite the fact that he still talks elsewhere about how
he loses his temper
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What’s the matter with JD Vance? What are we even doing here?
_Communion _seems to be trying to convince us of its redemption
narrative simply by ignoring who Vance is, and who he shows us to be
every single day.

What, finally, has Christianity done for Vance, other than gird his
marriage and make him a father? Has it, for instance, given him the
grace to offer forgiveness to his enemies? The same Vance who,
according
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to a _New York Times _story published the day before the book came
out, was urging Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to crush the
protest movement in Minneapolis, claiming without evidence that the
protesters were paid agitators; who spread the accusation that Alex
Pretti was an “assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents”
and subsequently refused to apologize
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In what reality does he expect anyone—even his supporters—to
believe measured, conciliatory lines like this? “I can believe (as I
do) that I owe a given immigrant—even an illegal one—duties of
charity and grace, while accepting that in a world of limited
resources those duties necessarily come up against other
responsibilities.” These words ring insultingly hollow when his
public persona betrays no hint that he feels any duty to provide
charity or grace to those his administration has locked up in the most
appalling and inhuman of conditions, and not a hint of remorse about
it.

Throughout _Communion,_ he returns to Matthew 7:20 as a refrain: “By
their fruits ye shall know them.” So then. Know him by his fruits.
Not this book.

 

Colin Dickey is the author of _The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters,
Alien Encounters and Our Obsession With the Unexplained_ and
_Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places_.

* Politics
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* JD Vance
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* memoir
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* religion
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