Do not read JD Vance's new book. Read this review instead.

I must preface all my engagement of JD Vance with this: I do not trust this man. I do not believe he is working with sharp instruments. I do not believe he is a sincere, and thus accurate, autobiographer. Frankly, I do not believe he wrote significant portions of this book. Despite all this, I do believe JD finds the story of Communion interesting, and after suffering through it, I also do not believe JD knows what real drama is. I am only addressing this literary backroom because I know there will be people who mistakenly engage this apologetic screed in good-faith.

I’m starting my conversation about this book with the understanding that JD Vance ain’t nobody except a fad amongst the libs. If it were not for coastal know-nobodies who believe they are cosmopolitans because they can reserve dinner in Paris though they will never be invited to the fish fry, the world’s most famous Appalachian cosplayer would still be stuck in the obscurity of a venture capitalist boardroom. No matter what anybody at The New York Review of Books says, JD is not the missing link of White culture. He hasn’t consumed enough white Monster and crashed enough turbocharged lawnmowers into pokeberry thickets to have earned my culture’s most prestigious title. JD’s significance is to The Atlantic what data centers are to billionaires—snake oil and hype, too big to fail but a failure nonetheless.

It is also worth commenting on how to properly contextualize this book. Communion is closer to other apologetic works like Mere Christianity than it is to genuine memoir. It is a text aimed at winning the reader over by running a show-pony faith through a series of hoops conveniently selected by a self-serving author. However, where CS Lewis and many other apologists contend in the intellectual sphere, framing the superiority of their Christianity through passably-intellectual argumentation, JD takes a different route. Communion starts from the argument that Christianity is an unrivaled source of virtue. With this as its primary orientation, the book’s argumentation occurs in the arena where virtue arises—autobiography and narrative.

This is nothing surprising or particularly profound. Religious traditions come with their own emphases—the Pentecostals love ecstatic experience, and the snake handlers love charismatic feats. Where the intellect was the dominant realm of Lewis’ Protestantism, virtue is a foundational category for Catholicism. However, in an era of American nativism, the notion of virtue and its reliance on autobiography takes on additional meaning. In keeping with the conventions of America-first culture that are dominating the contemporary Right, Communion works in the personal drama of the American testimony with the ultimate intent of demonstrating the redemptive, irresistible, and prevenient pull of the US homeland. In the same way telling the story of how you love your family is a more powerful demonstration of familial belonging than a paternity test, placing yourself in the evocative drama of the American project is the most compelling proof of bonafide belonging.

I tell people at my shows JD Vance should have been me. It’s a silly bit, but I mean it sincerely. I am the actual embodiment of what JD claims to be—likeable, Appalachian outcast, and caught in the American twist-a-whirl of being White enough to access white collar culture yet too beholden to hillbillies to ever fit in without lopping off something I love. Plus, we share an unshakeable dislike of liberals for their hubris, their belief that America does not require domination to endure, the campist rhetorical strategies they have codified in the last two decades, their willingness to sell off jobs, and the do-nothingness of their moral grandstanding. Like many post-Appalachians, JD and I do not trust an easy life. As someone who is actually living it, let me definitively say, being one of us is pretty unremarkable. It is certainly not remarkable enough to leverage into legitimate political power, let alone write two books about.

The most meaningful differences between JD and me are what we have done with our social locations. White men caught in the transitions from working class belonging to Whiteness, imperial abuse to imperial promotion, the hardship of our grandparents to the spoils of acceptance into the American project have to choose their place. In all that liminal space where your default affinities are suspended by the possibilities of social advancement, choices have to be made about where you will place your loyalties. More on that later.

Unfortunately, I really am the right person to respond to this book. In addition to some common autobiographical details, I have a couple other relevant competencies when it comes to taking on Communion. I am a leftist country musician—I understand the task of telling your best story, negotiating the trade-offs between embellishment and nakedness in an effort to present your political vision in the most persuasive light possible. Plus, and I hate to have to admit this, through a complicated series of life events, I was once a theology nerd. In fact, I have a seminary degree. I know theology and its attendant disciplines of philosophy, history, textual analysis, and cultural criticism all too well. And while I no longer identify as religious, I am deeply literate in and appropriately appreciative of the ways religious traditions facilitate community, mutual aid, and emotional strength. Much of this awareness comes from spending the better part of the last ten years juggling music and a career as a hospital chaplain, helping religiously-diverse families sort through the resources and limitations their values bring to their ability to cope with illness, loss, and trauma. Very, very, very, very unfortunately, I really and truly am the right person to respond to this cursed book of Appalachain’t incantations.

Certainly, there is plenty to refute in Communion’s theology, and I’m willing to bet JD would prefer to direct critical engagement in that direction. After all, perpetual debate has become a tactical staple of his right-wing peers.

But I do not believe debating theology is a particularly persuasive task. It usually only works for people who have made themselves radical citizens of the Church because only a true believer is moved by the words of other true believers. Everyone else can squirm their way out of it, and it is clear JD has too many competing citizenships to be that type of Christian. For evidence, look no further than how JD hems and haws his way out of Rome’s criticisms of his administration’s immigration policy:

“What did they take issue with, exactly? The diplomats never specified. Did they object to deportations? Just to deportations of certain populations? Were they entirely fine with deportations so long as we didn’t say mean things about illegal immigrants? 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.

I’m sure they avoided specifics out of a desire to be, well, diplomatic, but what they said was too abstract to be helpful. Obviously I’m not going to always agree with them. And if our country’s interests conflict with their views, I’ve got an obligation to the American people.”

I do not believe the underlying dynamics that keep JD in his narrow Catholicism are primarily motivated by loyalty to the Church so much as getting to run with a cohort of men who style themselves as intellectual, upstanding, and magnanimous. JD belongs to an ecclesial men’s club more than he belongs to the Body of Christ. Addressing this loyalty is more important than debating theology. Contesting JD’s theology—the ideas that articulate his Christian belonging—is like arguing about the garish paint color in a shoddily built house in a poorly planned neighborhood in a devastated ecosystem. The ideas may be easiest to notice, but they are last in a long line of more fundamental problems.

Historians of American religions are keenly aware that, with slim few exceptions, it is only a matter of time until religious cultures take on uniquely American form once they arrive in the US. America is a force so powerful it even outstrips the cultural characteristics of the world’s great religions. Despite holding out for a while, the specific strain of JD’s Catholicism is no different.

Communion’s Catholicism is a relatively new brand marked by evangelical sympathies and rootedness in American Whiteness. It is distinct from its Roman predecessors that populated America before the turn of the millennium. After significant efforts to mainstream Catholicism via Fox News appearances, reactionary conservative movements like the Legionaries of Christ, and inclusion in the pro-life coalition, Catholicism has lost the unamericanism that made it an enemy of the Klan. We are a long way from the paranoia that JFK would be more loyal to Rome than the US. Under the umbrella of this new Catholicism populated by post-evangelicals and conservative media talking heads, Catholicism is less the religion of immigrants invading America and more what it was intended to be in the Americas—a tool of assimilation.

On a more granular level, it is important to understand that JD’s Catholicism is blogboy theology. With its DNA in American culture wars over abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, trans panic, and White backlash to Black Lives Matter, JD’s religion is more beholden to the Matt Walsh’s of the outrage-o-sphere than the Cyril’s, Basil’s, Athanasius’s, Augustine’s, Thomas’s, Ignatius’s, and, certainly not, Rahner’s of Catholic tradition. In a dead give away for those unfortunate enough to be initiated into hyperniche theological disputes, Communion’s glib rejection of therapy in favor of the social regulation of the Church is an old masculinist trope popularized by conservative theologians upset at the decline of Christian hegemony in the West. Panicking that pastoral theology has become too therapeutic is a well-trotted hobby-horse uniting a class of miserableass old men who have used theology as a means to become little more than professional complainers. The argument holds little water, but it does generate an in-group.

What I find most interesting is that this wave of pseudo-intellectual tradbro Christianity is animated by the discomfort of lost young men. JD’s story in Communion is neither original nor triumphant. It is based in intra-right reactionarism responding to the vacuity of the previous right-wing regime centered on international nation-building and the hedonism of prosperity gospel and rockshow evangelicalism. Now that the pillars of wealth, international hegemony, and revelrous individualism have proven politically, socially, and spiritually dissatisfying, these men have turned toward an alternative image of hegemony. No matter how sophomoric or disingenuous, this new cadre finds comfort in their first experiences of rigor, accountability, and tradition, because these hurdles feel like the touch points of hardwon social belonging. Finding your place in a fraternal hierarchy feels an awful lot like inclusion when you are accustomed to touch-starved masculinity created by years of social atrophy.

However, their jump from individualism to communitarianism is a horizontal move. It simply rearranges deck chairs on the Lost Boy Titanic. This nostalgic Christianity offers new social configurations of the same White fraternity, instills new ethics of sacrifice for the same patriotic cause, lends new intellectual tools for reproducing the same reactionary positions, provides new logics of diversity and difference for upholding the same hierarchies, and meets different therapeutic needs while installing the same resentments.

In the past I have said this era of right-wing culture is defined by the production of nativist narratives—the domestic drama of the pioneering White civilizing the American wilds. Where the militancy of the Bush era required emotionally unavailable soldiers, this era of American right-wing ascent is defined by the softening of men. They return to a sense of community and family, possessing enough emotional intelligence and vulnerability to form attachments. They dramatize their lives as spiritual inheritors of American soil as if they occupy an unbroken succession of true American belonging.

What these nativist narratives lack is an awareness that Whites who do not come from the planter class in America are little more than trash washed up on American soil. We arrived here, at best, through the profound miscarriages of European life and, at worst, in the rapacious aspiration of New World greed. Like the survivors of the Middle Passage and the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples, those of us who came to be known as White are also subject to the deracination inherent in the American project, albeit without genocidal consequences. JD sees the contributions his overworked, indebted, under-franchised grandparents made and believes this is the story of Whites who made it work rather than workers who America seduced into Whiteness at the expense of their complex kinship with America’s underclass. Because this narrative of progress cannot be honest about the tremendous loss underpinning the entire American project, it creates the inevitable product of permanently forestalled grief: resentment. For all that feigned sincerity, that wide-eyed American optimism, that well-performed emotional intelligence, the kudzu of resentment grows over everything in Communion.

After years as a hospital chaplain helping people sort through the functions and dysfunctions of their cultural scripts, I’ve learned that all religions help you cope with something. The question is not if your religion is helping you cope but what it is helping you cope with. For some, religion offers a story more powerful than racial injustice; for others, it provides grounding amidst the pains of chronic illness; and, for many, it is a complicated salve when you need to get through the difficulties of loss. The coping in Communion’s theology is the palliation of a man who believes power and privilege should be comforting but only finds it riddled with imperial anxiety.

“Privilege” is one of those overused words that is just sharp enough to stay in circulation while being just abstract enough to be messy as hell. It needs strong context to generate much insight. In the context of chaplaincy where identity and culture impact our ability to respond to trauma and loss, I have come to realize that privilege usually manifests as social, psychic, and spiritual fragility. Our points of privilege are places where we have not had to learn real resilience and have instead relied on the fruits of domination to sustain us. Much of the internal work of losing privilege is learning to grieve because grief is the process of constructing agency in the face of significant loss. Where privilege presumes mastery of life’s circumstances, grief occurs where life cannot be possessed or controlled. In this narrow sense, privilege is faith that a dominated world will do the work of steadying your soul for you. JD’s blogboy Catholicism is an effort at assuaging the privileged who are confounded by a world that fundamentally refuses mastery. After all, submitting your life to the reactionary sect of a rigorous, millenia-old tradition because you can’t figure out if blue-haired enby’s are a civilizational threat is the kind of disproportionate response only an extremely irresilient person would resort to.

Where JD presents his faith journey as a testimony (the unofficial evangelical sacrament of narrative defined by the arc of Eden-fall-struggle-reconciliation), I see the insatiable hunger of a man possessed by the logic of accumulation. When accumulating prestige could not sate him, JD turned to money, and when wealth could not satisfy either, he turned to virtue. Each step offered something more abstract, more nuanced, and less obvious in its emptiness.

The real revelation of Communion is not the supremacy of Catholic virtue but how deeply the parasite of American power has eaten into this man’s vital spiritual organs. It is the story of a man who had one of everything on the menu offered by American dominance, and he only found empty calories. Communion is not a salvation story; it is a case study in addiction and neurosis. The story of JD’s coming to faith is the morality tale of a man born in an ivy patch who places faith in the soothing power of the fingernail that scratches the itch but spreads the poison.

What I want to impress on the reader-who-should-not-read-this-book, is that Communion presents an author whose existential premises and conclusions stand in sharp contradiction. He adores his grandmother and wife for embodying gift and grit, yet he cannot embrace a feminist ethic. He lifts up the social and cultural wounds of American capitalism, yet he faults immigrants. He claims the Church is home to the hard truths of virtue, yet hand waves at their criticism of his administration’s abuse.

When Matthew Remski asked me to read this book and I begrudgingly agreed out of deep commitment to the principles of comradeship (which I am beginning to reconsider at this point), I took time away from my bigger project this summer—the Anti-Confederate Southern History Book Club. Reading Communion alongside Hammer and Hoe, the story of Alabama Communists in the Great Depression, it became clear to me that JD Vance only superficially belongs to anyone.

The story JD tells of American progress is rife with a patriot’s sense of moral relativism. It is the moral relativism of nation-builders who accept the genocide of Indigenous people, the horrors of chattel slavery, the slaughter of non-Americans for imperial expansion, and the exploitation of poor workers in the name of economic development. It is the kind of story you can only tell when no one in your moral community has been meaningfully impacted by the costs of making this nation. If the victims of America’s original sins count as real moral subjects, then you can’t simply chalk it all up to the accidents of America’s gradual moral development or flawed leaders being products of their time.

What reading the history of anti-Confederates has confirmed to me is that Southerners have no convenient stories to tell, no American apologetics to peddle. Southerners either choose to believe the brutal reality of America or they spiral into delusion. (This lack of a middle ground is why I believe we are bad at being liberals down here.) As a moral site, the South demands you pick an uncomfortable lane—participate in all this killing or resist it. Our place in America was as traitors or outlaws, vigilante stormtroopers for the planter class or apostates of the country that laid claim to us. Consequently, a good many of us are keenly aware that the US is neither an organic political outgrowth of life on this continent nor has it been created and sustained through righteousness. The South reminds us this nation has been built on blood and ugliness.

Communion frames the suffering JD’s family endured as a sacrifice they offered to the American project, a testament to their faith in a national metanarrative. For all the ways I find JD disturbingly insincere, I do believe he is sincere in his belief that the story of American belonging connects him to this family lineage. I am convinced of his sincerity not simply because it explains the absurd moves he has made as America’s chief sycophant but also because he fits a type. In abusive family systems, there are often key family members who play the pivotal role of upholding the family myth that all that abuse has its reasons, compliance is the best option, and the abusers aren’t really that bad. These people are often complicated caretakers of the family culture. They are familiar with the abuses endemic in the family because they have personally experienced them, yet they cannot imagine belonging anywhere else, believing any other story, or building any other system. JD is the conformist older brother apologizing for Uncle Sam in the abusive American family. His only way of maintaining kinship is to include everyone he loves in the myth of an America that has good enough reason for its ongoing violence, and he loudly expects the rest of us to conform to that myth as well.

Assuming his self-report is accurate, JD and I have many things in common. We both admire our grandmothers, we intimately know the effects of addiction, we know Appalachia (him not so much), and we have given years of our lives to witnessing the blood required by the American project. His as a soldier deployed to Iraq; mine as a hospital chaplain supporting families ruined by social murder.

Like JD, I too have been fortunate to travel parts of the world I never imagined I’d be able to visit. In Communion, JD talks about how traveling Europe filled him with a sense of heritage and the dread of losing it. The cathedrals falling out of use in secularizing Europe reminded him of the accomplishments Christian societies were capable of and the ruin portended by declining Christian hegemony. In Europe, JD imagined a story that included him.

When I walked through Notre Dame, visited the palaces of Madrid, and stood before the gold-glinted altars of old Spanish churches, I was overcome with the sense that these aristocratic places were not built for my ancestors. My people would have been in the lesser churches built for the peasantry outside the towering cathedrals reserved for the ruling factions. What I saw were the ways the powerful have always wrapped themselves in superficial splendor, likely more for their own comfort than anything else. I saw how the gold of Spanish tabernacles was a way of banking the plunders of the New World; how the palaces and castles of old Europe were marvels of what the elite could accomplish when they invested their innovation in the needs of internecine warfare; how, for all their bluster, the monuments of the Old World are no match for the even older Earth. What JD calls ancient is barely that when you measure time in terms of trees and rocks and the six inches of soil that sustain all life. Ultimately, I have more belonging to the dirt where I have worked and played than I do to the ruins of Europe’s bellicose elite.

In Christianity, JD finds the answer to the only death he claims he fears: civilizational death. In the traumas of the Middle Passage, the ethnic cleansing of the Trail of Tears, the battles between secessionists and free staters, the South knows civilizational death. We have lived past his worst nightmare and know there are forms of kinship and resilience deeper than the American story and its need to find cohesion in the fragile Christianity of reactionary men. The South of the poor, the survivors, Black and Indigenous folks, the imprisoned, and the heretics has already outlived America. This place is America’s afterlife, and how you reconcile to us determines whether or not you experience civilizational heaven or hell.

Wrapping up, I have to make sure two points are clear. The first point is slightly petty but must be said nonetheless. Communion is thoroughly unremarkable. Its brand of Catholicism is neither profound nor robust—it is a traditionalist facade for unhappy American men desperate to find a feeling of rootedness amidst the banalities of an everyday American existence they were told would be extraordinary. In terms of drama, Communion doesn’t offer much. JD hasn’t so much lived a life worth telling as he has overestimated the insights he has gleaned from a life that is only remarkable in the eyes of those insulated by wealth and status.

As a literary work, Communion is a mess. It cannot decide on a tone, waffling between self-discovery and bootlicking, thumbing its nose at most of the characters it introduces us to while also telling us it is a story of gratitude and repose. If I were JD and my entire world was populated by people I disliked, I’d probably fix my heart and find a new world to live in instead of writing another book about it.

The inconsistent intellectualism of this book is also telling. Like the dilettantes who have defined this era of right-wing culture—Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, and Charlie Kirk, to name a few—Communion only cites sociology and philosophy when it is convenient, playing stupid when it cannot do anything other than be just that. JD critiques feminism but only lean-in feminism. Yea, babe, everyone with a backbone hates that shit, especially feminists. JD bends over backwards to defend nuanced and fictitious reconstructions of the people back home but lumps all critics of patriarchy and racism into the thought-terminating cliche of the “woke mob.” JD even pokes at blue-haired people. Tired. Communion is the highest evolution of disingenuity—deceit without the self-awareness of its malicious intent. It is sincere only in its vapidity, and, unfortunately, many will only latch on to its sincerity.

Much of what JD discloses in this book shows a deep lack of social mooring. He is a pitiable and pathetic man oblivious to the fact that much of what he shares in an attempt to be relatable only shows him for what he actually is—a social scarecrow full of straw and good at running off creatures. The majority of my time reading Communion, I was filled with the kind of disgust you feel when you are overcome with second-hand embarrassment for someone you also revile. In its theology, politics, and self-conception, this book is like watching the worst man you know make a fedora his entire personality. It is as embarrassing and undersocialized as JD’s peers: Elon Musk, Ben Shapiro, and Pete Hegseth. Unlike a sofa, this book is deeply unfuckable.

My second point is less petty, and, frankly, it should end all consideration of this book. Without equivocation, Communion is a masterwork of moral obliviousness and absurdity to the point of genuine moral evil. JD Vance and his colleagues are responsible for bombing boats of Venezuelan fishermen, kidnapping and torturing immigrant children, bombing Iranian schools, accelerating the Palestinian genocide, and imperiling food and medical access for millions of people. Publishing a book about your quaint, domestic faith, a faith whose superiority is supposedly evidenced by the virtue it inculcates, while you are responsible for murder, torture, and immiseration is nothing short of genuine pyschopathy. There is no virtue in causing starvation, child abuse, rape, murder, war, and genocide. Any religion, nation, creed, or story that calls these acts anything other than evil is carrying water for demonic men, laundering their violence through empty virtue and family values. For all the ways JD Vance has built a career on trying to seem like a relatable everyman, remember that a remarkable few of us are capable of the levels of duplicity, moral dissociation, and violence that JD has enacted. Communion is the Helter Skelter of a man morally deranged enough to publish a quiet book about coming to faith while the daily headlines show fresh blood on his hands.