{"id":234,"date":"2026-06-18T18:37:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T18:37:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=234"},"modified":"2026-06-18T18:37:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T18:37:19","slug":"j-d-vances-book-is-actually-two-books-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=234","title":{"rendered":"J.D. Vance\u2019s Book Is Actually Two Books"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

For its first 177 pages,J.D. Vance\u2019s new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, <\/em>is a thoughtful read. He spends chapters meditating on trauma and fatherhood, on periods of feeling spiritually adrift, on coming to love a \u201cmajestic\u201d faith tradition while remaining connected to the rowdy evangelicals of his childhood. And then you hit\u00a0the moment where he stops thinking as a writer.<\/p>\n

Read more Just Let Him Have This<\/a><\/p>\n

After a section about his own adult baptism, the pinnacle of his faith journey, Vance launches, jarringly, into a chapter about his views of the international order. But before can get into his political career, he has to do a tiny bit of throat clearing: \u201cMuch has been made of my evolution from Trump critic to Trump supporter,\u201d he writes. \u201cTo my critics, it was a politically cynical maneuver to gain political power. I doubt I\u2019ll ever change their minds.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

From that point on, Communion<\/em>, which came out on Tuesday,is a stiff and unimaginative political memoir. It deploys an eye-roll-worthy staff of straw men as it defends Trump\u2019s policies. The voices he hears in opposition to harsh immigration policies are CEOs angry they have to pay American workers living wages. The advocates for women\u2019s equality dream of a world in which young mothers have to spend late nights working at high-power law firms. The world leaders of the Munich Security Conference engage in \u201cthought policing\u201d instead of trying to solve global problems. The rest of the book is, in other words, what we might have expected from the vice president.<\/p>\n

The tragedy of Vance\u2019s new book is that this split reminds you of who he used to be. It\u2019s not only that he squandered a decent beginning, but that he revealed how far he has fallen from the thoughtful young man who once had something original to say.<\/p>\n

The first half of Communion<\/em>, on Vance\u2019s journey from evangelical Christianity to atheism to Catholicism, takes the reader through his disillusionment with the conservative evangelical churches of his youth. But the most interesting part of the book is his clear-eyed analysis of why he is drawn to his final step, finding his new spiritual home in Catholicism. He writes that he appreciates it for being a highly structured religion, something that provides him comfort after the chaos and instability of his youth. And in perhaps the most interesting passage, he writes of feeling personally empowered by Catholicism\u2019s ideas about trauma.<\/p>\n

As he explains it, he had felt \u201cdebilitated\u201d by sociologists\u2019 understanding of youths like the one he lived through. He worried he would never escape his own destructive patterns or sense of impending doom. But Catholic ideas he encountered helped him gain a sense of control while also acknowledging that forces beyond the individual matter. Catholicism, with its social teachings, offered him a bridge between the flawed individualism of his youth and the cold systems-analysis of liberal academia.<\/p>\n

\u201cI could read studies until I was blue in the face about how kids who were abused were more likely to abuse,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThese things were obviously true, and the knowledge undoubtedly helped doctors contextualize their patients\u2019 problems. But I yearned for a way of understanding the world that could make room for both the importance of my past and the existence of my own agency.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more J.D. Vance\u2019s Book Is Actually Two Books<\/a><\/p>\n

This version of Vance is introspective. There are even parts on more political matters where he demonstrates some intellectual honesty (\u201cI\u2019d be lying if I said I\u2019ve ever experienced overt discrimination for my religious views\u201d). He often articulates opinions modern leftists would embrace. Much of his scorn, for example, is directed at the millennial Lean In<\/em> crowd that wanted women to be more like successful men\u2014ambitious and loud. Everyone, he writes, should instead be more family-focused and less devoted to meaningless work. These sections sound straight out of a Gen Z anti-capitalist tract.<\/p>\n

All of this thoughtfulness disappears after he has to grapple with the Trump of it all. And considering this, what happened here is clear: He had written the first part of this book before he decided to run for Senate in 2022. One of the sections about Catholic theology was taken almost verbatim from an essay he published in 2020; he alludes to this break in the book and thanks his editor at the end for helping to revive it. His ire for the Lean In<\/em> corporate feminists sounds outdated because it is. He simply wrote it at a different time, when he was most famous, still, as a memoirist for Hillbilly Elegy<\/em>, the story of his chaotic Appalachian upbringing.<\/p>\n

This makes the turn all the more depressing. Up until that point, you might have forgotten you were reading a book from the same Vance who supported Immigration and Customs Enforcement\u2019s brutal crackdown in Minneapolis. You might have been rooting for J.D. from Hillbilly Elegy<\/em>, happy that religion had provided him with the comfort and stability he never got in his childhood.<\/p>\n

But instead, we\u2019re snapped out of it as we read about Vance stocking up on ammo in response to the \u201cChina virus.\u201d Everything reasonable from the first half quickly sours. He\u2019s no longer a man able to translate the anger of his own white rural background; he\u2019s instead a man with power and responsibility who can harness that anger to punish immigrants. His musings about the importance of prioritizing virtue and family over career ambition\u2014a through line of the first half, as he searches for his own sense of meaning beyond the striving culture of Yale Law School\u2014seem insulting, given that he wants to become the literal president of the United States. And his search for a Christian philosophy goes from meditative to frightening. He writes of a powerful desire to return America to being a \u201cWestern Christian civilization.\u201d That\u2019s no minor point, given that he just may be our future president.<\/p>\n

In another timeline in which Vance never entered politics, Communion<\/em> could be considered a kind of companion book to his popular memoir, an offering perhaps for a certain class of highly educated conservatives who like to read Christian philosophers. But that\u2019s not the timeline we\u2019re in, and the book instead offers a window into just how much the thoughtful boy in Hillbilly Elegy<\/em> allowed himself to be corrupted by politics.<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more Stephen Miller Was Closer to Realizing His Scariest Idea Than We Ever Knew<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The book is excellent right up to page 177.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":230,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3,10,161,132,160],"class_list":["post-234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-books","tag-donald-trump","tag-j-d-vance","tag-religion","tag-slate-book-review"],"yoast_head":"\nJ.D. Vance\u2019s Book Is Actually Two Books - Home Move Chronicle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=234\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"J.D. 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