Vance's 'Communion': Faith Argument vs. Trump Reality
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- JD Vance's "Communion" poses "What must I do to be saved?" as a challenge to the destructive norms of majority culture, framing elite modernity's pressures on ambitious professionals as analogous to substance abuse's toll on the rural poor chronicled in "Hillbilly Elegy".
- Vance argues people are inducted into wanting what others want rather than inherently desirable goods, illustrated by his Yale law school experience where he says progressive orthodoxies brooked no dissent on issues like abortion.
- Vance's conversion to Catholicism was shaped by what he calls "liberation in guilt" and a preference for grace absorbed over time over the evangelical "quick spiritual fixes" he encountered in childhood.
- The book's social vision draws on Pope Leo XIII's late 19th-century encyclicals insisting economic life must enable rather than subvert the dignity of persons and families — a framework Vance uses to support union activism and just wages.
- Vance defends the first Trump administration's "success" and dismisses much early criticism as elite "fastidiousness" about style, yet the reviewer finds no attempt to connect those pages' values with the current administration's corruption, verbal bullying, Iran war, or immigration enforcement.
- The reviewer flags Vance's claim that "rising racial conflict and gender division" result from de-Christianisation as difficult to reconcile with the record of Christian nationalism in American history.
Why it matters: The book's intellectual seriousness creates a credibility problem for Vance: he presents himself as a Catholic social thinker rooted in dignity, mercy, and just wages, yet serves an administration the reviewer catalogues for corruption, verbal bullying, reckless foreign policy, and brutal immigration enforcement. The unresolved gap between Vance the thinker and Vance the politician is the book's most newsworthy residue, and one that complicates efforts to read "Communion" as a roadmap for his political future.
