Vance’s Communion book tests faith against Trump politics

In Vice President JD Vance’s new memoir, Communion, he frames his Catholic conversion and the idea that faith should be measured by “fruits,” but the account sidesteps major questions about how his politics align with the Church’s teachings—especially on immig

When Vice President JD Vance’s new book. Communion. arrived this week. it did more than lay out another origin story. It carried the weight of a different question—one many Americans are already asking out loud: how. exactly. does a Catholic worldview reconcile with serving President Donald Trump and leading the unruly right-wing movement that rallies around him?.

The memoir is a big, introspective effort tracing the arc of Vance’s faith and his relationship with Christianity. He also uses it to outline the role he believes religion should play in public life. and he even offers hints about what a President Vance might do in office. Yet the central tension runs through the pages like a quiet pressure point, never fully relieved.

Vance’s book. by the author’s own design. invites readers to treat his spiritual journey as more than private reflection. It’s part of what has made him politically compelling as a public figure: books are woven into his rise. His blockbuster 2016 memoir. Hillbilly Elegy. was described as a thoughtful reckoning with “the malaise in a wide swath of Middle America.” In Communion. Vance portrays himself as building on that earlier work—arguing. through narrative and conviction. that his faith journey also established him as a serious political thinker.

Reading Communion as a cradle Catholic. the author of this piece found the faith narrative moving—especially as Vance describes the conversion story itself. But the account also becomes a study in unresolved contradiction. specifically the gap between how Vance talks about faith and how the book treats the real-world fruits of church teaching.

In the memoir. one verse becomes a repeated test: “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” Vance returns again and again to the line taken from the Gospel of Matthew—“by their fruits ye shall know them”—using it as a standard for modern Christianity. for meritocracy. for liberalism in academia and elite business. for the secular West. for trade and economics. and for the liberal international order. He uses the verse not only to evaluate broader society; he uses it to interrogate his own spiritual life.

He tells a familiar arc of conversion for young men drawn to a religious renewal narrative: feeling lost. hoodwinked. and betrayed by the establishment. the corporate rat race. and “wokeness. ” then searching for purpose and meaning in the Catholic Church. That path. the piece argues. resembles a pattern for American Catholic converts—particularly those raised in nondenominational. evangelical Protestant culture—who end up joining a more politically and culturally conservative version of the church. In that telling. the conversion comes with its own internal tension: embracing ritual while remaining strained by the social teachings associated with the post-Vatican II church.

One detail captures the personal dimension of Vance’s story. He recalls second lady Usha Vance telling him that “Therapy didn’t work for you,” but “church does.”

Still. the book’s strongest contradiction. as presented here. emerges from how Vance describes the world he believes he is leaving—and the way he later frames faith in deeply individual terms. In the first two-thirds of Communion. Vance spends significant time describing his fall away from faith and deriding an individualistic world where organized religion has receded into egotism. workism. secularism. self-improvement advice. groupthink. and “woke.” He also praises the value of religion in building community. offering a common language and a common purpose.

Yet. as the critique follows him into the rest of the memoir. Vance’s focus narrows: faith becomes about how to be a good father. how to be a good husband. how to participate in church rituals. and how to understand doctrine intellectually. What’s missing. the author argues. is the broader “fruit” that the Church calls for—work rooted not just in private virtue but in public responsibility.

The closest Vance comes to acknowledging that disconnect. in this account. is around his and Usha Vance’s move to Cincinnati in 2018. He reflects on how he might “build a culture of virtue. within my own family. within my community. and within our entire society.” He also writes. “I found myself worrying over how to fuse a sense of social virtue with a personal one. ” while admitting that “at this stage. it was largely an intellectual exercise.”.

That’s where Communion introduces Catholic social teaching—principles developed over the last century intended to guide individuals. political and church leaders. and governments toward creating a more just world and bringing the “kingdom of Heaven on Earth.” Vance recalls reading Pope Leo XIII’s century-old encyclical Rerum Novarum. with its focus on workers and market economies and its warnings about absolute socialism or capitalism. as well as workers’ right to form labor unions.

In this story, Catholic social teaching is presented as both practical and intellectual—an instruction set for turning faith into good works beyond the individual realm. The critique in this piece becomes sharper when those teachings brush against modern politics.

Many of the issues Vance treats as “progressive” in political terms—climate change. migration. war. racism. economic justice. and artificial intelligence—are said to have been taken up by two consecutive popes: Francis and the current pontiff. Leo XIV. The critique notes that both have clashed with Trump and Vance. and both have faced criticism and dismissal from conservative American Catholics and Republican Christians.

The argument then turns to what Communion avoids. The piece says Vance stays shy about discussing achievements or results. and that many of the Church’s stated priorities are sidestepped or glossed over. It characterizes his discussion of economic teaching as acknowledging the inherent and inviolable dignity of each human person. while failing to engage with it beyond using it to justify his theoretical vision for economic policies in a Vance presidency.

Instead, the memoir leans defensive. Rather than emphasizing “works” tied to his role inside Trump’s administration. the critique says Communion focuses heavily on fingerpointing—blaming baby boomers for propping up the liberal international order. woke CEOs and academics for addressing racial inequality. and liberals for pushing secularism.

Trump hangs over the book as the central presence, even if Vance doesn’t write much about him. That absence is presented as purposeful: the critique describes Trump as notably irreligious and prone to picking fights with Catholic leaders like Pope Leo XIV. The portrait offered here is that Vance is trying to claim the legacy of a president whose public actions. in the critique. often run against the Church’s stated moral priorities.

The critique then pivots from the memoir’s theology to Trump-era conflicts that Communion, it argues, does not sufficiently confront.

The piece lists several areas where. it says. Vance largely dodges his own administration’s record: defending a war in Iran that it describes as killing at least 1. 000 civilians; blows to the social safety net; and harsh enforcement of immigration policy. It also says Vance avoids discussing violence by ICE agents. deaths in ICE detention. and the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. along with what it calls the administration’s overreach.

In this account. the sharpest test of alignment comes from immigration—where the Church’s focus on migrant dignity and enforcement that respects that dignity has been at odds with Trump’s policies. The critique says Vance blames the Vatican and redirects questions toward what it describes as excuses for Trump. It recounts Vance’s claim that he had “hoped for more out of the [2025] conversation with the Vatican diplomats. ” describing immigration policy as “thorny. ” “messy. ” and requiring “trade-offs.”.

The critique argues that Vance’s framing about “too much immigration” being un-Christian centers on social cohesion, labor unions, wages, and public safety—while omitting other realities it names. It also says that “The View” was the venue that pushed a response this week.

Vance’s response on that program, as quoted in the piece, is brief: “Enforcement is messy.”

The conflict between personal religious language and political service shows up. in this telling. as an unwillingness to admit Christian error in the service of Donald Trump. The critique points to what it describes as Vance’s desire to infuse public service with Catholic charity and “save the West from the ‘secular global liberalism’ that has ‘destroyed’ Europe. ” paired with a record the piece argues has been un-Christian in effect.

There is also a practical argument about public theology: that Vance has played a central role in educating the world on his version of Catholicism while serving as Trump’s communicator to factions of MAGA and the religious right. The piece describes him as a gifted debater and says he has argued repeatedly that Trump’s immigration agenda is morally permissible.

It also recounts remarks attributed here to Vance about Catholic teaching being misunderstood in his political messaging—describing claims that Catholics are called to love hierarchically—and it says he told Pope Leo XIV to “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”

The critique includes a specific description of Vance reacting to Vatican skepticism about Trump’s 2025 immigration policy. It says Vance was “unsettled” by “how generic” the Vatican’s skepticism was. and it quotes his questions back to the issue: “What did they take issue with. exactly?” “Did they object to deportations?. Just to deportations of certain populations?. Were they entirely fine with deportations as long as we didn’t say mean things about illegal immigrants?”.

It further describes Vance deriding the Vatican for seeming “so afraid of saying something controversial that it chose, effectively, to say nothing at all.”

Another element described is how recent Church criticism appears in Communion, if only indirectly. The critique says Vance does not really mention Pope Leo XIV or a wave of criticism that it says he and the Vatican have unleashed on Trump and Vance in 2026. and that when he does engage Church criticism. he dismisses a rare unified statement the US Catholic bishops issued criticizing Trump’s mass deportation program in fall 2025.

That bishops’ statement, as summarized here, called for respect of migrant dignity, a more measured enforcement operation, and prioritizing the least well-off.

The critique closes by circling back to the verse Vance prefers. It argues that Communion’s framing makes readers ask whether ambition is winning out over faith, and whether Vance truly grasps what his own spiritual standard demands.

At the center of that last question is a line the piece says Vance offered on “The View” on Tuesday: “I’m a bad Catholic. That’s why we need grace, as Christians, and we recognize there are things we have to work on.”

The piece ends by invoking the verse that comes just before Vance’s favorite parable—“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves”—and argues the irony is obvious when judged in the context of Christian virtue, charity, and grace.

Vance’s Communion may read as a deeply personal story about conversion and conviction. But in the way this critique lays out its facts—especially around immigration. political service. and what the book does and doesn’t grapple with—it also lands as a demand for an answer Vance has not fully supplied: what happens when the “fruits” test meets a presidency built on confrontation rather than reconciliation.

JD Vance Communion vice president Donald Trump Catholic social teaching immigration Pope Leo XIV Rerum Novarum US Catholic bishops The View MAGA