J. D. Vance’s Memoir “Communion” is But Paint

I don’t remember the first book I ever read, but the first book that truly moved me was The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien. I read it when I was 10, I think, and I remember being profoundly sad as I finished the last page that I had lost a friend.

My mother told me that there were three more books—the Lord of the Rings trilogy—but I quickly learned that Bilbo was only a passing character in them, so I had to grieve for the loss of my friend even as I met new friends including Bilbo’s nephew, Frodo. I was then saddened about a year later when I finished The Return of the King, and though I, of course, read The Silmarillion immediately thereafter, it only gave me details about the Tolkien universe. It did not bring back any of my friends.

As an adult I continue to read a great deal, but very little fiction. I prefer history, economics, and other forms of non-fiction, and recently finished Their Finest Hour, the second volume of Winston Churchill’s six-volume work covering World War II.

Only two books have ever reached me the way J. R. R. Tolkien did: The Godfather, which I read about a year ago, and Moby-Dick, which I read about 10 years ago. I had a similar feeling of loss when I finished The Godfather, which was not eased much by The Sicilian, also about Michael Corleone, and also by Mario Puzo.

The Sicilian was a good book, but a very different book than The Godfather. I did not find the Michael Corleone in The Sicilian to be the same character.

Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, was interesting as it was actually two separate books, compiled together under the same cover. One was the story of Ahab’s hunt for the White Whale that stole his leg, as told through the lens of Ishmael, a sailor on Ahab’s ship. The other was an instruction manual on whaling, and though both books were woven together into the same novel, the transitions between story and instruction manual were stark. It really did read like two separate books between which the reader was forced to switch back and forth. You would read a chapter in which Ishmael uses a harpoon, for example, and it would be followed by a chapter on how harpoons are built.

There is another series of books that have to be mentioned before I can describe J. D. Vance’s latest work, Communion.I have to mention Arthur Conan Doyle’s works on Sherlock Holmes.

The interesting thing about the Sherlock Holmes books is that Sherlock Holmes is not somebody to whom anyone can relate. He is brilliant, but cold. His sense of humor is often cruel, and he has an arrogance that makes him remarkably difficult to like. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle knew this, of course, which is why he told the stories of Sherlock Holmes through someone far more relatable, and far more likeable: Dr. John Watson. I would imagine that if I read all of Doyle’s works, I would have a similar sense of loss that I had when finishing The Lord of the Rings, except that it would not be Sherlock Holmes that I missed so much as it would be Watson.

Like Moby-Dick, Communion is not entirely what it presents itself to be. It is written as a kind of second memoir (after Hillbilly Elegy), but it is really a political justification, disguised as a Catholic apologetic, disguised as a memoir. In this way, it is reminiscent of Moby-Dick, although J. D. Vance is far less jarring in his transitions between intentions than was Herman Melville.

Like all the books on Sherlock Holmes, the protagonist in Communion is far too arrogant and far too perfect for anybody to relate to him. Also like Holmes, the book looks at the main character through the eyes of someone who is infinitely more likeable, but instead of a doctor-friend of the main character, we get Vance’s grandmother, Mamaw.

Mamaw is a likeable character to whom we can warm. J. D. Vance is not.

I should also be more accurate. Vance does not present himself as perfect in Communion. Far from it. He actually presents an extensive catalog of his shortcomings. The problem is that none of the shortcomings ultimately cost Vance anything via his narrative. Every flaw becomes evidence of growth, and every failure becomes something he somehow managed to overcome. His self-criticism becomes a kind of prolonged self-congratulation.

Also, Communion is the first book to which I have listened rather than read. I downloaded the audio version and listened to it on my wife’s Audible account, and I’m glad I did, as it gave me more insight about the book than reading it would have done. Vance narrated it himself, but he did not sound like he was reading something he had written, or even something to which he related. He sounded, rather, like someone reading a book with which he was unfamiliar.

That is not an accusation; I am not accusing Vance of using a ghostwriter. What I am saying is that his prose is direct and conversational, but surprisingly sterile and likely impossible to read from within, even by its own author. The book, like the author, is performative.

When I read Churchill, I feel like he is in my head. Churchill wrote exactly as he spoke, and, when you read him, you can literally hear him speaking. With J. D. Vance, you don’t hear him even when you are listening to him reading his own work. I found that to be very strange. It is almost as if the Vance in the book is a person completely different from the Vance in the recording studio.

But then the book was not really written as a memoir, and it was not really about J. D. Vance, except as experienced through the eyes of his grandmother. Even after she died in the book, he continues to use her as a literary device, telling us what she would have said about different situations, were she still alive. Just as Dr. Watson tells us about Holmes, Vance tells us about Mamaw telling us about Vance. And that was a wise choice: Mamaw is what makes the Vance character work. Without Mamaw, we would be left with just J. D. Vance, which would work about as well as Sherlock Holmes without Watson.

Vance is very willing to criticize himself, but his failures have a strange quality to them. They are rarely just failures. They are almost always evidence of something admirable that Vance took too far, or something Vance was eventually wise enough to overcome. Vance tells us, for example, that his desire for stability eventually became a “craving for conquest.” He became too ambitious, wanting to win for the sake of winning. He became too focused on worldly success, and eventually discovered that worldly success was not enough.

There is certainly self-criticism in that, but to become disillusioned with extraordinary success, one must first become extraordinarily successful. Vance’s ambition was a problem because he was so ambitious. His obsession with achievement was a problem only because he achieved so much. His pursuit of money and prestige was a problem because he acquired money and prestige and discovered that neither fulfilled him.

Even when Vance is wrong, the error somehow reflects well on Vance.

Perhaps the best example comes when he discusses his infamous remark about the Democratic Party being run by “childless cat ladies.” Vance calls it one of the dumbest things he ever said and describes it as a “boneheaded comment.” Fair enough. But he then describes the comment as “intentionally (and successfully) provocative rather than illuminating.”

Even the apology contains a victory lap.

Yes, Vance tells us, he was wrong, but he was always successfully wrong.

That does not mean the personal growth Vance describes is false. I have no reason to believe it is. It means that Communion is constructed in such a way that virtually every road eventually leads back to the growth, insight, achievement, or wisdom of J. D. Vance. Like the Vampire Lestat, as told in the works of Anne Rice, J. D. Vance keeps becoming more powerful.

That pattern becomes more important when Vance begins discussing his conversion to Catholicism. In some ways, Communion is a Catholic apologetic. The problem is that it is not a particularly effective one, as Vance never establishes why Catholicism may be true. He only establishes why Catholicism became compelling to J. D. Vance. He then assumes that if it is good enough for him, it is good enough for everyone.

Elementary, my dear Watson!

This is actually the undercurrent of the entire book. Vance writes as a memoir to explain why he decided to be Catholic, and then he applies his personal journey as a political mission, assuming that anything he found beneficial in his life should be replicated in policy for the rest of us.

Vance’s movement away from atheism was not initially driven by some great theological revelation. Peter Thiel played an important role as an extremely intelligent man who was also openly Christian, and Vance had constructed a worldview in which intelligent people were atheists and religious people were not. Thiel didn’t fit into that, but nothing Thiel said is singled out as particularly relevant. It was just that someone intelligent believed. Later, while visiting a cathedral in France with his wife and son, Vance described experiencing “a distinct sense of belonging and presence.” Private instruction with Dominican priests followed, and Vance was baptized into the Catholic Church in 2019.

All of that explains Vance’s conversion, but it does not prove Catholicism.

Vance does not spend much time establishing why Catholicism may be more correct than Protestantism based on Scripture. He does not systematically work through competing Catholic and Protestant understandings of ecclesiastical authority, salvation, the sacraments, or apostolic succession. In fact, he often uses the broader word “Christian” where one might expect a Catholic convert writing a Catholic conversion story to use “Catholic,” and he gives the Protestant churches of his youth real credit for laying part of the foundation upon which his later faith was built. This makes Communion an unusual apologetic.

The closest he comes to saying that Catholicism is better than other forms of Christianity is in saying that it is older and more structured, and even that is not entirely true. It is, of course, the oldest of the Christian traditions, but anyone who thinks it is the most structured has never experienced the Dutch Reformed church that turned my mother against God.

Vance’s argument is not so much, “Catholicism is true, and here is why,” as it is, “Catholicism made sense of my life in ways the alternatives did not.”

That is a perfectly legitimate reason to write a memoir about becoming Catholic. It is considerably less useful as an argument for why anyone else should become Catholic. And this is where what might otherwise be a literary criticism of Vance’s ego becomes important to the rest of the book.

Vance repeatedly has difficulty distinguishing between what his personal experience establishes for J. D. Vance and what it establishes for everyone else. Were Vance just an author, this would not be as much of a problem, but Vance is also the vice president on the eve of campaign season.

Catholicism gave Vance something he believed he had lost. He had spent years understanding his childhood through sociology and statistics. Poverty, addiction, family instability, and trauma could be understood as forces that produced predictable outcomes, and Vance found that explanation debilitating. Catholic teaching on sin and grace offered him something different. Circumstances mattered, but he was more than the product of those circumstances. He remained, as one review of the book summarized his understanding, “a soul with agency.”

I actually find that part of Vance’s conversion compelling. People have agency. I’ve written about that a fair amount myself. But while Vance uses agency when talking about himself, when he extends his personal understandings into the political world and discusses what kind of society he would make society based on his personal understandings, he begins to take that agency away from other people.

There is an enormous difference between saying, “Catholicism taught me how I should live,” and saying, “Catholicism taught me how everyone should live.” There is an even bigger difference between saying, “Catholicism taught me how people should live,” and saying, “Government should structure society to encourage people to live that way.”

Communion crosses all three lines.

Vance specifically rejects classical liberalism and its focus on individualism—not atomized, nihilistic, all-night raver “me-ism,” but its understanding of individuals as responsible, dignified, unique people whom the state does not have the right to oppress for any reason. His Catholicism increasingly becomes a framework through which government can judge whether the rest of us are ordering our own lives correctly.

That brings us to economics. J. D. Vance hates economics, and is very clear about that in his book.

Vance is right about something important: GDP is not a measurement of human flourishing. Of course it isn’t. GDP measures economic production. It does not measure whether you love your wife, whether your children respect you, whether you have meaningful friendships, whether you go to church, or whether you will die believing you lived a worthwhile life. Economics has nothing to do with answering those questions—as if it weren’t a strawman argument to imply that Milton Friedman or Margaret Thatcher ever said it did—and Vance repeatedly treats economic considerations as though they are a competing moral philosophy.

Economics is nothing of the sort. When a husband and wife sit at the kitchen table and decide whether they can afford another child, they are not worshipping GDP. They are looking at their expenses, such as their mortgage, the cost of childcare, groceries, healthcare, their incomes, and whether one of them can afford to stop working.

Those are not ideological abstractions. They are constraints. This distinction matters enormously because Vance’s solution is not to tell people that family matters more than money. He increasingly moves toward the position that government should use policy to make particular family choices easier and more attractive.

There is nothing inherently unusual about government policy affecting family decisions. The question is whether the government should decide what behavior it wants. Vance’s answer appears to be yes, whereas classical liberalism would say that such decisions are none of the government’s business. The government exists to protect liberty—it does not exist to control our lives.

Helping a family make the decision it wants to make is fundamentally different from pushing it to make whatever decision Vance wants the family to make and then structuring government policy to encourage that decision, and that is where Vance and I part company. It is also where the irony of his conversion story becomes impossible for me to ignore.

Vance found liberation in the idea that he was not the product of external forces. He takes solace in the knowledge that he was not a statistic or an output, but was, rather, a unique soul with agency. Then he constructs a political morality in which millions of other souls increasingly become outcomes for him to manage.

Once the government is responsible not simply for protecting the conditions under which people pursue what they believe to be good, but also for defining what is good, the relevant question becomes what government believes human beings are for. Vance has an answer for that, and it is substantially Catholic.

Vance makes a particularly telling call-out to Pope Leo XIII’s work, where Catholic social thought bridges between personal morality and political organization to link the individual soul to the overall society. His public arguments around his book have likewise emphasized Christianity’s role in American public life; in a July interview, he described America as, “in a very foundational sense,” a Christian nation. Vance connects secular liberalism to social division.

That is not the same thing as demanding that the United States become a Catholic theocracy, and it would be unfair to pretend otherwise. Vance calls for something more subtle. Vance rejects the proposition that government should remain neutral between competing understandings of what constitutes a good life, and once the government has a preferred understanding of what counts as human flourishing, policy becomes the mechanism through which that preference is expressed. That’s kind of like theocracy-lite, or diet theocracy.

And this brings us back to economics.

Morality can tell us which outcomes we consider good. It cannot, by itself, tell us whether a particular policy will actually produce those outcomes. Morality does not expressly deal with cause-and-effect relationships, and it is hard to live a truly moral life unless we know how the things we do will affect other people. This is important for each and every person within the country, and it is vastly more so for someone who wants to be the President of the United States. Vance’s contempt for using economics in decision-making is thus a real problem.

There is another problem with Vance’s economic argument that his own biography makes difficult to ignore: J. D. Vance discovered that money was unimportant only after becoming fabulously wealthy. Vance does not want others to pursue wealth the way he did, but nor has he given his own wealth away. Instead, he says that winning is a futile exercise—while writing this book as a sitting vice president, on the cusp of running for higher office to achieve even more power than he already has, and to “win” another election.

Perhaps he should take his own advice and do something that would be easier on his family. Life in the White House is the opposite of what his book seems to recommend both to himself and the reader, and that is a tension Communion completely ignores.

Vance is not simply telling us that he has learned things. Every memoirist does that. He is gradually asking his personal journey to carry weight that extends into public policy. Vance is saying that because Catholicism worked for him, Catholicism must describe the public good. Vance is saying that because Catholicism taught him how to order his family, Catholicism also tells him how other families should be ordered.

At every stage of Vance’s journey the evidentiary burden grows larger while the underlying evidence remains remarkably personal, and yet Communion stops just before getting to a point where Vance becomes specific about what his political justifications mean in terms of actual policy. That may be the politically shrewdest thing about the book.

The Associated Press described Communion as potentially serving as an “origin story” for a future presidential campaign and as a kind of manifesto about religion’s role in public life. Vance himself, while promoting the book, described it as “way less political than you might think.” The truth is that Vance tells us what government should value without telling us how the government should impose those values. He tells us that liberal neutrality is inadequate without giving us a replacement, and he tells us that the government should care about family formation without defining the limits of government’s authority over the family.

Does Vance want to be the President of the United States, or is he running to be the national Papaw? I don’t ask that rhetorically—Vance’s description of our future directly contradicts the separation of church and state.

There is something almost Aaron Burr-like about J. D. Vance’s book, at least in the popular conception of Burr in the musical Hamilton: “Talk less. Smile more. Don’t let them know what you’re against or what you’re for,” as Burr sings. People attracted to Vance’s political justification can imagine whatever political outcomes they prefer, whereas people alarmed by Vance’s direction have no concrete political policies against which to argue. This allows Vance to establish his moral justification for a political program without assuming any responsibility. Something Barack Obama did effortlessly.

And that is why I call Communion a political justification disguised as a memoir, rather than a political manifesto disguised as one. A manifesto would have been more honest.

Vance has argued that modern liberalism inadequately understands human flourishing. He has argued that economic success is not an adequate measure of what constitutes a “good society.” He has presented Christianity, and more specifically his Catholic moral framework, as a better account of what human beings actually need, and he has moved from individual morality toward the proposition that government has a legitimate interest in encouraging the conditions he believes produce flourishing, which is solely based on his limited understanding of what helped him.

Perhaps some of this is unavoidable in a memoir. Every autobiography is an act of selection. Every remembered conversation has to pass through the author’s memory before it reaches the reader, and of course his political views will come out. We also tend to think of ourselves in a generally positive light, and I’ve written most of my own story, which, when published, will probably deserve some of the same criticisms. Vance’s book, however, goes further, asking for his personal growth to serve as evidence for his political judgment, and his personal growth, however real, does not establish the political propositions Vance builds upon it.

It is particularly striking because one of the most important things Vance says Catholicism gave him was the recovery of his own agency. He says he is not just a product of Appalachia, poverty, family instability, Yale, Silicon Valley, or politics, but is, rather, a human being capable of choosing what kind of man he has, and will continue to, become. Unlike J. D. Vance, I believe everyone else deserves the same courtesy.

Mamaw is what makes the Vance character work. Through her eyes, Vance becomes human. She gives the reader someone warm enough, funny enough, flawed enough, and real enough about whom to care. But Mamaw did not write the book, and Mamaw is not asking for our vote. J. D. Vance is.

Let’s be honest: the memoir is but paint. The question Communion leaves unanswered is what Vance intends to build underneath it. 

I finished the book without feeling like I’d lost a friend.

I won’t say Communion is poorly written. It is not. It is, in fact, quite engaging, and if it stopped at the point of saying what worked in J. D. Vance’s life, I would applaud it. Unfortunately, it is not a memoir. It is only disguised as one, and as a political justification, it fails miserably.

Luckily for me, I’ve now finished Communion and can go back to reading Winston Churchill.