(LifeSiteNews) — Tuesday saw the release of U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s new book Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, shedding light on his professed religious journey and the intersection with his private life and public service.
The first follow-up to Vance’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which made Vance a national figure ahead of his entry into politics (and which was adapted into a 2020 film by Ron Howard), Communion is billed as a “spiritual exploration of what it means to be a Christian in all the seasons of life JD Vance has experienced.” The story documents that a “pursuit of material privileges ultimately led him into a secular wilderness” and how he later “regained his faith,” eventually converting to Catholicism.
Vance himself describes the book as a collection of reflections from “many years grappling with the meaning of religion in my life.”
Reported highlights from Vance’s latest memoir include how the passing of his grandmother was pivotal in his initial religious decline, meeting his future wife Usha in law school, and how meeting entrepreneur Peter Thiel – who he says “identified very openly as a Christian” (despite being openly gay and pro-LGBT) – “defied the simple social template I had constructed – that dumb people were religious and smart people were atheists.”
The vice president also describes how the “distinct sense of belonging and presence” while visiting a French cathedral with his family in 2018 contributed to his eventual conversion to Catholicism. At the same time, he also relays his sometimes contentious interactions with the Vatican while representing President Donald Trump.
“Here I was, the most senior Catholic in the United States government, and the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes,” Vance writes. “I was struck that one of the few institutions with the moral authority and global perspective to address the migration question seemed so afraid of saying something controversial that it chose, effectively, to say nothing at all.”
Vance also discusses abortion, one of the most contentious issues for the second Trump administration’s relation to religious Americans, given Trump’s 2024 turn against federal abortion restrictions. On the campaign trail Vance echoed Trump’s decision to support abortion pill access, and in the book Vance suggests pro-lifers “start winning people over” by “reflecting Christian charity in the way we champion the unborn” by focusing on alleviating economic burdens imposed on pregnancy.
Vance, a potential candidate for the presidency in 2028, is slated to appear on ABC’s left-wing daytime talk show The View Tuesday at 11 a.m. Eastern to promote the book, along with discussing the latest in national politics and the Trump administration.