One of the peculiarities of being young and Catholic in New York City is that everyone and their mother (including my mother) have asked me about the supposed boom in conversions in the city. “Do you go to St. Joseph’s?” they ask, referencing the Greenwich Village church that’s gone viral for its very real surge in conversions. No, I reply.
It’s not because St. Joseph’s lacks anything. Rather, it’s that I’ve always felt at home at my current church, St. Vincent’s, on the Upper East Side, and I have no desire to move. But even my St. Vincent’s group has discussed the conversion boom—and, like many other commentators, my friends and I have wondered about it. Is this something to be celebrated, we wonder? Or something to be suspicious of, a trend that will render the Catholic Church New York’s hottest club for but a season until the influencers move on to something else?
I confess I leaned more toward the latter—for a while. That changed when I came across a post by the Catholic convert writer Eve Tushnet, who gave the new converts some grace: “Nobody stays in the Faith for the same reasons they converted,” Tushnet wrote in May. “The Church is bigger on the inside. Having entered, you may discover how much there really is, beyond the little alcove where you happened to find a door.”
I got to thinking about Tushnet’s comments as I read Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith (Harper, 2026), the new memoir by Vice President JD Vance. It’s purportedly the story of Vance’s journey from childhood evangelicalism in Ohio to a fumbling atheism in his young adulthood to the Catholicism he professed starting in 2019. It would be a fine memoir if you picked it up in the Walmart book section next to the Debbie Macomber and Stephen King novels—a light book, almost a beach read. (I read it mostly on the New York City subway.) But if you’re looking for a hard-hitting conversion memoir, full of wrestling with God and His dictates, there are better options.
More important, this is not a book by your random jabroni; it is, of course, by a sitting vice president, the highest Catholic in the land, one whose aspirations surely do not end at Number One Observatory Circle and whose journey there was launched by the influence of his first bestselling book. And so his conversion must be taken seriously.
But what parts of that conversion? So much ink has been spilled about this book that I don’t intend to comment on Vance’s fights with the pope(s) or whether he deserves the label “Catholic”; after all, I don’t know his heart. What interests me more is how Vance got to the door of the church—and what’s kept him there since.
Tushnet has some wisdom here. Once you enter the church via that little alcove—and for Vance, the alcove appears to have been a mixture of dormant childhood faith combined with a desire to raise his children well—what happens? As she writes:
So the real thing here is that when people enter the Church through small, weird, insufficient, or warped doors, they need wise guides to show them the path deeper in, into the heart of the Church. Those wise guides themselves rarely grasp the entire mystery (how could we?). Cradle Catholics, too, need these guides to grow in faith. All of us are called to move beyond where we started.
Reading Communion, you get a sense of who Vance’s guides to the Catholic faith originally were. First and foremost, there is his uncle Dan, who married into the family and who appears to be the first Catholic whom Vance ever knew well. Dan is special particularly because he has the approval of Mamaw, Vance’s grandmother, who raised him. “She felt the Catholic way of worship was rather formal, but what mattered to her was Jesus,” Vance writes. “Revelation 18 may have been about the corruption of the Catholic Church, the Whore of Babylon, and all its hocus-pocus, or it may have been about something else. But the Catholic she knew cared about Jesus, so Dan was all right with her.”
There’s never any explanation of Dan’s specific faith practices or theology; rather, Vance seems to look to Dan primarily as a good example of a husband and father, an example the younger Vance sorely lacked.. Still, in Dan’s behavior Vance sees a good Christian. “If there was a single person in my life who most embodied the Christian ideal, it was my uncle Dan,” Vance writes. “He did all of the most important things in life, and he did them well: He took care of his family, he was patient and loving with his wife and children, he worked hard without making an idol of his career.”
Vance, throughout the book, is extraordinarily concerned with being a good father and a good family man; he devotes several pages to criticizing the “rat race” he found at Yale Law and in the legal world, and several more to what he sees—correctly, in my view—as an overreliance on economics as a method of decision-making. It’s not hard to see why Uncle Dan, then, would become a role model for someone like Vance.
But what ever happened to Uncle Dan? He doesn’t come up in the current Vance’s musings, only in flashbacks; it is an open question to what extent this role model—who, according to the internet, is still alive—plays any part in the life of the sitting vice president. The same is true of Sam, a friend of Vance’s mentioned in pages near the Dan sections. “Our friend Sam talked often about the historical legitimacy of the Catholic Church—the idea that it represented a consistent, unbroken line from Christ to the present day,” Vance writes. “Catholicism’s historical continuity was powerful.” He’s another influence, certainly, for a boy and later a man who seems to have spent a lot of time grasping for permanence. But Sam doesn’t come up later, either.
So who is left? There are Dominic Legge and Henry Stephan, priests whom Vance spoke to at length before his conversion. Stephan, in particular, seems influential: his warning that Vance idolizes his wife gets about a page and a half, and in general Fr. Henry “gave the faith he represented a more personal connection, one based in honest (and sometimes uncomfortable) truths.” For Vance, who grew up evangelical, the idea that the Catholic love of Jesus could be personal and not just staid seems to have been a turning point.
Fr. Stephan also demands more of Vance than the evangelicalism of his youth did. “For most of us, grace is not something that happens in a moment,” he tells Vance. “You don’t feel God’s presence and then change in an instant. Real grace comes through practice. This is why we demand that you live a sacramental life: going to church, taking Communion, doing confession. This is a process. You don’t accept Jesus into your heart—or get baptized—and fix everything. That’s not the promise of the Church. The promise of the Church is that you are lost, and the Church will provide you with a road map to God.” Vance writes that these words were “very profound” to him.
But then Fr. Stephan, the speaker of that profundity, also disappears. (He does appear in the book’s acknowledgements, as someone who provided commentary on Communion’s theological arguments.) And Vance carries on, describing trips to Munich and Rome, conversations with Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk. The entirety of the time between his nomination to be vice president on July 15, 2024, to his inauguration the following winter is condensed into a paragraph; there is no mention of the prayers he said, the priests he called, the Masses he attended. If there were ever a time to follow a road map to God, it might be while on the campaign trail, when millions of eyes are trained upon you, or in the interim between election and installment, when the whole country holds its breath. But Vance, in Communion, doesn’t say a word about any of this.
I don’t want to be unfair to Vance here. There are certainly many cases of of people being faithful Catholics without a strong Catholic community.
But the community helps. More than a year ago, for this magazine, I wrote about the aspects of Catholic life beyond mass: how friend groups and Bible studies and church activities help circulate the profundity you’ve experienced in the Eucharist, how all of these things keep your head turned toward God and not toward His opposite. I could be Catholic in New York City without these things. But it would be much, much more difficult.
So who keeps Vance’s head on straight? It’s not his wife; Usha Vance, while supportive of her husband’s faith, remains a more secular Hindu. It’s not his family, which remains evangelical.
Perhaps some member of his inner circle? It’s likely not someone on his staff, who are not known to be Catholic and many of whom are Jewish. He’s called the Catholic secretary of state Marco Rubio his friend in past interviews, and he’s also influenced by intellectuals like Patrick Deneen and Sohrab Ahmari. But assuming that any of these men serve as Vance’s spiritual guides would be mere speculation. On top of that, Vance writes in Communion that he often celebrates Mass in his own home, apparently to avoid security snafus; while this makes sense, it’s not clear who besides Vance’s own children—and whatever priest is celebrating—is in the room with him. And on top of that, Vance also completed the necessary pre-conversion prep work not in a class, as is common, but via study with Frs. Henry and Dominic. This is a fine way to convert. But it’s hard to read Vance’s journey to Catholicism, and through Catholicism, as anything other than lonesome.
And the Catholic way is anything but lonesome. We are the universal church, called to Mass with our fellows every Sunday, and even during Mass we ask our assembled brothers and sisters to pray for our souls. Jesus himself did not break bread alone; even when during his solitary prayer, his apostles were often gathered a short distance away. But who breaks bread with JD Vance? Who really prays for him?
There are technical answers to these questions: the first is the unnamed priest who celebrates Mass with him; the second is nearly every Catholic in America, as we pray for government leaders during the Prayers of the Faithful. But Vance claims to want a personal God. How better to access that personality than through the persons God has made?
In the end, Communion is the book all politicians write when they’re gearing up for a presidential run. If you want to know even slightly more about Vance—and you should, since even if he loses in 2028, he’s likely not going anywhere—it’s worth the read.
But it shouldn’t be the only read. Indeed, what struck me most about Communion is how decent and honest Vance sounds throughout the book; you would not think, for example, that the JD Vance who growled about “childless cat ladies” ruining America is the same JD Vance who writes humbly about his mistakes as a husband and father. Of course, perhaps the “childless cat ladies” example is unfair; in Communion, Vance explicitly apologizes for the phrase by calling it “boneheaded,” and this is a good action on his part.
But he does not apologize for other things, like his knowing spread of misinformation about Haitian immigrants in Ohio; his defense of adults who joked about antisemitism and rape; or his claim that “violence will be met with violence,” a sentiment that anyone with a cursory knowledge of the New Testament should view as deeply suspect. Read Communion to understand the likeable part of Vance. But look at other angles to get a fuller picture of the man.
Still, that fuller picture also generates some sympathy. I do not envy JD Vance. Being a Christian is difficult enough in the modern world; Christianity, in the words of one popular Orthodox writer, is “terrifying, and it is designed to kill you.” You really are called to take up your cross, to give up what you have, to—and I mean this—die to yourself. Doing that as an average person is hard enough; doing that as a flawed man at the whim of millions of flawed voters seems nearly impossible.
That same Orthodox Christian also wrote the following: “What this means to us is that fighting our ‘civilisational war’ in the name of Christ will fail, and catastrophically, because Christ does not fight wars other than those that go on in the heart.” Vance is fighting wars both civilizational and military, and he has political allies in both. But Communion seems to reveal that the war in Vance’s heart is bereft of support. I hope Vance lets in God—and some friends—soon.