In Search of J.D. Vance

I’ve just finished reading Communion, J.D. Vance’s book about his conversion to Catholicism. . .and, well, it’s a puzzler. But then, I’ve been fascinated by Vance ever since I read Hillbilly Elegy, a lacerating account of his rural Appalachian childhood. And apparently the Vice President has become a general object of curiosity and dismay this summer, especially among Republicans, for reasons I can’t quite explain…except maybe that Trump is waning and they’re going to have to choose a new Tsar. But liberals are boggled, too. Tom Edsall has written two columns about him in recent weeks. From the first:

Once there was a young man who was not afraid to tell Americans some hard truths. In looking at epidemics of drug abuse and domestic violence in his Midwestern hometown, he wrote: “those wolves are here—not coming in from Mexico, not prowling the halls of power in Washington or Wall Street—but here in ordinary American communities and families and homes...What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution.” Need I say that young man was JD Vance?

Communion continues his journey up and into meritocratic America, and then sort of out of it. Clearly, he’s a very smart dude—and this is an erudite book. His religious conversion isn’t the usual Come to Jesus down the tent meeting sawdust trail. He doesn’t dwell in the fever swamps of Revelation. He cites the Book of Job—God telling Job, you can’t know my ways—and a bundle of real, respectable theologians. He becomes a Catholic because of the traditions and aesthetics of the faith, frequently citing Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. That is serious stuff right there…and I envy his conversion. My favorite line in the Catholic Mass is “let us celebrate the mystery of faith.” I’ve never been able to unravel it.

I’m obsessed with Jesus, the greatest moral philosopher in history, but I can’t get to the Divine Part. I separate, as Thomas Jefferson did, the moral teachings from the miracles, which were add-ons by later generations, according to the Jesuit John Dominic Crossan and other scholars. And I’m willing to acknowledge that something BIG was happening with this guy. It took the Jews and Greeks 2000 years to build their foundation myths; the Christians did it in a single generation. Those who knew him—Saint Peter and his inconvenient brother James—were willing to die for the love of him and his message.

The story of his life may well be, as advertised, the greatest ever told. It certainly advanced the theology of the scapegoat sacrifice, the most profound ritual of the ancient world. Scapegoats were murdered to absolve the sins of society. The Jews sanded the edges off the tradition—and made the scapegoats into actual goats, slaughtered on Yom Kippur. Jesus was not only murdered, but the means of his death became sacred. The Cross, I believe, is a transcendent, elegant, ironic, immensely powerful symbol: You crucified him? We worship the means of his death—because he died for us. I get verklempt just thinking about it.

And Catholicism? It became a brutal. intolerant aberration from what Jesus taught—all those crusades and tortures and hypocrisy about sex. But it also produced the intellectual rigor of the Jesuits and the aesthetic power of the Pieta—and countless other artworks—and the gospel of Social Justice. I’ve even spent time supporting—proselytizing and raising money for—the miracle of inner city parochial schools. My favorite Bible verse comes from Matthew 25:

⁵ For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:

³⁶ Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

³⁷ Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?

³⁸ When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?

³⁹ Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

⁴⁰ And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me

So I’m not going to gainsay Vance’s conversation—from evangelicalism as a boy to atheism at Yale Law School to Catholicism. As I said, I envy it. He’s made a leap I can’t: from intellectual credence to faith.

But there is something odd about it, nonetheless. The pieces just don’t fit. As a public figure, Vance perplexes me. He was eloquent—and quietly devastating—in his vice presidential debate with Tim Walz. But at the same time, he was brutal and stupid when he lumbered the great hero, Vladimir Zelensky, in the Oval Office. And what about his recent insinuation about Jeffrey Epstein on the Joe Rogan show:

“Yeah, Mossad or C.I.A. or some other deep state. Or both. You know, look, was he — he clearly had connections to the upper — the highest levels of American intelligence. He clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence. . . . I’ve asked, ‘Were there documents connecting Jeffrey Epstein directly to our intelligence agencies or anybody else’s?’ And the answer is no. But if that shit existed, it wouldn’t exist in 2026.”

I get that Vance, like many veterans, hates war. I respect him for that…but again, the pieces—the vehemence, the conspiracy theories about Epstein—just don’t fit.

The worst was his contention, during the 2024 campaign, that Haitian immigrants stole and ate pets in Springfield, Ohio. He later tried to absolve himself by saying that part of politics is to “create stories” that make real issues more accessible to the masses (kind of like the Miracle stories in the Bible). But these were real people he was slagging—the least of these—and they are exceedingly honorable ones, too. According to the most recent statistics, Haitian immigrants have a higher workforce participation rate (69%) than other immigrant groups (67%) and the lazy native-born whites he scourged in Hillbilly Elegy (62%). I can’t imagine an actual Christian making up barbaric stories about people like that.

You might ask: In the service of what Demon is he doing this brutality? He makes a fairly convincing case that making money as an investment banker just didn’t float his boat. He doesn’t discuss his reasons for running for Senate from Ohio, a stupendous omission. He doesn’t discuss Trump very much—he never slags him and offers some light praise—but Communion isn’t a yucky act of obeisance, the common currency in Trump World. It is a serious book.

So what is going on here? One has to imagine that it is related to politics. Vance’s demon is the Dark Lord of Ambition. He is entering a presidential campaign. He has been battered in recent months by neoconservatives who don’t like his opposition to Bibi Netanyahu’s war. Bret Stephens—no intellectual slouch himself—wrote a column about that and then doubled down in a conversation with the equally clever Frank Bruni:

Frank: “The prospect of this callow and sinister opportunist taking the place of the erratic buffoon now governing us may be the single scariest thought in world politics today.”

Bret: Let me go on the record right here: Even as I would gladly vote for Marco Rubio over nearly any Democrat, I will vote for any Democrat in 2028 over Vance.

Frank: Uh-oh. There goes the promised point of tension. I was planning — given all the chatter about her lately — to ask you if you’d vote for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over Vance?

Bret: Yes. At least she’s evolving in a mildly saner direction. And she’s probably now found Taiwan on the map.

The battle between Vance and Marco Rubio—who says he doesn’t want it—-for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028 could be cosmic. MAGA world is split: Rubio represents the hawkish neoconservatives and the SiliconValley technocrats. Vance has taken great pains in this book to style himself a regular guy, beer-chugging (Jesus’ first miracle was turning water into wine), dog-loving, Ohio State football fanning…and, of course, Jesus-worshiping regular guy. A cynic would say he’s positioning himself to represent the more numerous right-wing populist MAGA legions.

Except…

Why did he convert to Catholicism, a faith considered sorcery by many evangelical sects? Why does he work overtime here to establish his intellectual cred? Again, it just doesn’t add up. Unless this is exactly who he is. Real authenticity, the political gold standard in the consultant class, involves more than just cursing and shucking oysters. It is an amalgam of competing and sometimes conflicting attributes. And it involves challenging your supporters with truths they may not like.

But then, I work in the service of the Dark Lord of Complexity.

Share