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.
