Every conversion story needs a villain, and for J.D. Vance the villain is his own younger self: the restless Ohio State undergraduate, the Yale Law student chasing prestige, the Marine who came home from Iraq with more doubt than he left with. “Communion” is Vice President Vance’s attempt to explain how that young man became a Catholic convert who prays a daily rosary — and whether readers arrive as admirers or skeptics, the book asks them to sit with a genuinely strange American life story: hillbilly childhood, elite credentialing, war, atheism, and finally a return to the pews.
The premise is straightforward. Vance traces his religious drift back to his grandmother “Mamaw,” the fierce, foul-mouthed woman who raised him and whose death loosened whatever tether he had to the Christianity of his youth. He describes years of quiet unbelief — not the product of philosophy seminars or Richard Dawkins paperbacks, he insists, but of grief and a sense that faith had failed to deliver on its promises. The book then follows his slow re-conversion, culminating in his 2019 reception into the Catholic Church at St. Gertrude Priory in Cincinnati, and considers what that faith now means for a man who has gone from law school graduate to bestselling author to the second-highest office in the country.
Vance is at his best in the book’s early, most intimate stretches. His account of Mamaw is vivid and unsentimental in the way his readers will recognize from “Hillbilly Elegy,” and the chapters on his marriage — his wife Usha was raised Hindu, and their negotiation of two faiths inside one household is treated with real tenderness — are the closest the book comes to the “spiritual memoir” its jacket copy promises. When Vance writes about doubt itself, rather than about the political conclusions he has drawn from resolving it, the prose relaxes and the reader feels like they are getting an honest account rather than an argument.
That honesty grows harder to locate as the book moves into its second half. Critics across the ideological spectrum have converged on a similar complaint: that a book billed as a conversion narrative increasingly reads as a defense of Vance’s political positions, dressed in theological language. Reviewers have flagged passages that lean on stock arguments and combative framing rather than the searching, uncertain voice of the opening chapters, and several have noted the irony of a memoir about converting to Catholicism whose cover art depicts a church from a different denomination entirely — a detail that became its own small controversy. Even reviewers unmoved by the politics have tended to agree that the book is strongest when it stays personal and weakest when it becomes programmatic, and several have wished for more of the former and less of the latter.
The verdict, then, is a split one. Readers drawn to Vance as a political figure will find plenty here to chew on, for better or worse. Readers hoping for a pure conversion memoir in the tradition of Augustine or Merton will find real material in the first half and a more familiar political voice in the second. “Communion” is most convincing not when it is explaining Catholic doctrine or defending an administration, but when it is simply a grandson missing his grandmother and a husband trying to explain faith to the wife he loves.
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