Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, by JD Vance (304pp, William Collins, £19)
JD Vance's memoir is subtitled Finding My Way Back to Faith – but the faith to which he returns is not the one he abandoned. His turn to atheism came while serving as a communications officer with the Marines in Iraq, after he had become alienated from the Evangelical churches of his childhood.
His beloved grandmother, Mamaw, with whom he had his closest childhood bond, had a personal relationship with Jesus, though she didn’t particularly distinguish between one form of Christianity and another, and neither, it seems, did the young JD. Once she died, there wasn’t much to keep him in church, but he still valued the robust sense of community in the Baptist and Pentecostal churches.
Vance felt less warmly about the salvation experience of emotional conversion. He witnessed people rise from their wheelchairs only to be crippled again the next day, or addicts abjure drink or drugs only to end up with a hypodermic needle in their arm once they left church. His father – who had adopted JD at the age of six in his best interests – was a sincere Christian. In old age, he dismissed his cancer treatment on the basis that the Lord knew better than oncologists and was baffled that JD didn’t realise Christ was going to heal him. But, as JD grimly recalls, “God did not heal him.”
He also took issue with the Evangelical churches’ narrow approach to morality, which ignored the wider economic and social condition of their congregations.
So, although he left faith because he was upwardly mobile and the institutions on his upward social trajectory – first Ohio, then Yale Law School – didn’t care for religion, he didn’t return to that Evangelical faith, although he acknowledges its strengths. His Appalachian family background, memorably recorded in Hillbilly Elegy, was dysfunctional and impoverished, and Christianity was part of the past he put behind him.
Vance gravitated to Catholicism gradually, drawn initially by Augustine and his views on those who discredit the Faith by sounding off on subjects in the Bible about which they are embarrassingly ignorant. That had an obvious resonance. CS Lewis was a predictable influence. So, less predictably, was GK Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, which glories in the miraculous strangeness of being human (and is very funny).
The clincher was Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, the great encyclical on relations between capital and labour and the fundamental rights of workers. He is struck by Leo’s insistence that a frugal worker must be paid enough to support a family, not as little as possible. So the human worker is an end in himself, not merely a means of production.
This resonated with JD, who finds at Thanksgiving dinners that members of his family are absent because their work schedules in the retail sector are erratic or ignore the holiday – just so that other Americans can buy things they don’t need on Black Friday. That points to necessary constraints on capitalism.
He was sincerely horrified when an opponent of the Republicans’ policy on migrants, a hotelier, berated him for reducing the amount of cheap migrant labour and obliging him to pay for American workers instead. Leo’s insistence on the dignity of labour also made sense. When JD and his wife, Usha, had dinner with some big shots in the tech industry, he asked them how, in an AI world, people would find meaning in their lives without work. The response was that workers would find fulfilment in online video games. JD and Usha made their excuses and left. It would be good to know how he feels about the present Leo’s encyclical on the challenges of artificial intelligence.
The historical continuity of the Church appealed to him too; the slowness of the evolution of doctrine. In that context, the most striking feature of this account of conversion is an absence: St John Henry Newman, who was an inescapable influence on almost every convert of note up to the Second Vatican Council. His idea of the development of doctrine – that Catholic doctrine is implicit in the earliest teachings of the Church, as an oak tree is latent in an acorn – countered claims that the Church departed from the teaching of scripture. Someone, somewhere, get JD Vance a Newman reader – Newman’s own selection of his sermons, with an introduction by Muriel Spark, maybe, with Eamon Duffy’s excellent little book on Newman.
Other elements resonated with JD in his path to faith. His adored wife, Usha, pushed him towards therapy for his dysfunctional past, but there he rebelled. He didn’t want responsibility for his sins taken away from him; he wanted Confession. (One sin was describing his political opponents as “childless cat ladies” – he admits that wasn’t charitable.) Ultimately God took over. When he sat in an apparently empty French cathedral, he had the inescapable feeling that this was where he belonged.
He passionately believes that Americans set store by the wrong things, and should value family, and have more children. He leads by example: he and Usha have just had a fourth child.
In returning to faith – to Catholicism – it seems JD has, after all, come home.
