A politician’s progress

At only 41 years old, JD Vance has already been the subject of a bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, and a biopic movie of the same name. That story’s unforgettable centerpiece is not Vance but Mamaw, the smoking-and-swearing but Jesus-loving grandmother who defines his upbringing in rural Appalachia. She’s back in Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith (Harper, 304 pp.), a new memoir that combines stories from Vance’s life, meditations on his faith, and reflections on American culture.

The stages of Vance’s life structure the book. First, a young Vance grows up immersed in a small-town Pentecostal faith leavened by an open-minded ecumenism that appreciated Jesus wherever He showed up. Vance drifts away from faith as he enters the Marines and is an agnostic/atheist by the time he enrolls in Ohio State and Yale Law School. There he falls in love with Usha, and they marry and start a family.

The arrival of his first son coincides with a stirring in his soul to return to faith. He writes that God nudged him in an otherwise empty cathedral in France, and more directly through a persistent and patient Dominican priest. He eventually decides to enter the Roman Catholic Church, even as he retains a deep appreciation for the low-church faith of his youth and an affection for his family that still holds to that faith.

Eventually, Vance reaches politics and the vice presidency, as his chapters transition to applying his faith to public policy, especially “the dismal science.” He pulls no punches in his critique of an unchecked free market, where economic statistics are glorified without counting the soft costs of job loss and social disruption.

The epilogue is one of the strongest parts in the book, as he writes about the role and necessity of faith to American civilization. Politicians often talk about the demographic decline facing first world nations like Japan or much of Western Europe, but Vance unabashedly puts the finger on the root problem: a decline in meeting, marrying, and mating. He asks hauntingly: “How many friendships will never blossom, and how many families will never heal, because we have deprived ourselves of children?”

His faith today stands confidently in Christ, such that he faces eternity not worried about his own soul, but nevertheless burdened by the worry that if death came today, he might leave his children and his country worse off: “My big fear isn’t death but that we inherited a great civilization and are slowly letting it fall into disrepair.”

That fear is understandable, but his hope is justified as well. As Vance writes, “God works mysteriously—frustratingly, even—on His time, not ours.” Yet Tolkien reminds us that time is not ours to dictate—we can only do what we can in the time we’ve been given. Vance is clearly on a mission to make the most of his time and platform, and this memoir is another landmark in the story of a man out to make American civilization great again.