Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith
By JD Vance
Harper, 295 pages, $35
In 2016, JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir of ascent from Appalachia to Yale Law, became the definitive professional-class explainer on Trumpism. This summer, Vance’s follow-up memoir has him finding his way from Yale back to religious faith and a few other middle-American things, such as distrust of elite prescriptions for personal and societal flourishing. An apologia for his conversions to both Catholicism and Trumpism, Communion has had strong sales and a rough reception outside of pro-Trump outlets. The book narrates changes of mind and heart, and provides grounds for reasonable criticism of its author and his transformations. Unfortunately, its mainstream reviewers haven’t found them.
“They loved Hillbilly Elegy.”
Communion is disparaged as a mishmash of genres: conversion memoir, policy defense of Trump II, groundlaying for 2028. Reviewers’ complaints about the book’s formal incoherence reflect a substantive judgment against Vance’s professional, ideological, and spiritual transits. They loved Hillbilly Elegy for the way it blamed downscale whites for their problems. Communion, by trashing the professional-class community quartered at Yale and in Silicon Valley, reminds them why they went from feting Vance to hating him. You don’t come up from Middletown, achieve professional-class nirvana, and then decide that Mamaw was right after all. So reviewers find ways of saying (as Tim Walz did during the 2024 campaign) that Vance is “creepy and, yes, just weird as hell.”
Attacking—sorry, advocating for—the wife is a favorite tactic. Usha Chilukuri Vance is the book’s second leading character, who despite being a secular Hindu helped to restore JD’s faith in Christianity. Concerned feminists seem to regard Usha’s role in her husband’s redemption as beneath her, or constraining, or something. The Cut headlines, “JD Vance Wrote a Book To Convince You His Wife Doesn’t Hate Him.” The reviewer, Ginny Hogan, is incredulous that Usha, the former star of Yale Law and clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts, could approve of JD’s conversion to Catholicism or actually want this fourth child they had in July. No woman ascends to corporate-law officemaxxing and then embraces a conservative vision of motherhood. Something weird is going on.