I was sitting on my back porch last June, watching the neighbor’s kid miss every single basketball shot he took. He kept trying though. That’s when I opened JD Vance’s Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. I had just finished arguing with a friend about whether politicians ever actually believe anything they say. I wasn’t sure I wanted to read a conversion story from a sitting vice president. It felt like watching someone try to sell me something. But then the kid hit a three-pointer and ran inside screaming, and I started reading.
What the Book Is Actually About
Here is the simple truth about this book. It is not a political manifesto disguised as a spiritual memoir. It is not a campaign document. It is a man trying to figure out why he spent years being so sure of things he now doubts.
Vance tells us about his grandmother’s faith, the kind that was warm and present but never really made sense to him as a boy. He went to Iraq as a Marine and came back an atheist. He went to Yale Law School and came back a striver chasing money and status. He fell in love with Usha, who is Hindu, and she somehow made him want to be a better man without asking him to change his beliefs. She just lived differently. She worked hard but she also left work to have dinner with him. She wanted children more than she wanted a corner office. This confused Vance. It made him ask questions he had been avoiding.
Here is the core of the book. Vance realized that his atheism was not really about evidence. It was about pride. He liked being smarter than the religious people he grew up around. He liked the feeling of having escaped their narrow world. But the smarter he got, the more hollow he felt. So he started reading. He read Augustine. He read Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. He read his way back into faith, step by step, argument by argument. He converted to Catholicism. He became the kind of Christian who can tell you why he believes what he believes.
The Unbearable Weight of Being Right
I will be honest. The most uncomfortable part of this book for me was not the theology. It was watching Vance describe his younger self with such cold precision. He talks about how he modeled his ambitions on whatever the people around him valued. In high school it was popularity. In law school it was prestige. He was chasing things other people told him to want, and he never stopped to ask if he actually wanted them. I recognized this. I do this.
The book’s central image is a kind of emptiness. Vance describes sitting in a fancy law firm office, looking at older partners who had no time for their children, no time for anything except billable hours. They were winning. But they looked exhausted. He realized he was becoming them. That is the moment faith stopped being an intellectual problem and became a survival question.
Vance criticizes both parties in this book. He says the economy exists for human beings, not the other way around. He says we measure prosperity wrong. He says a society that prioritizes GDP over family formation is a society that will not last. These are not left or right positions. They are positions that make both sides uncomfortable.
The Story That’s Almost Too Neat
The book has a problem. It is too neat. Vance’s conversion story follows a classic arc and it feels almost too perfect. The atheist striver who finds meaning in ancient tradition. The ambitious man who learns to humble himself. I kept waiting for the part where he admits he still struggles. He does, a little. He talks about doubt. He quotes Peter who walked on water and then sank. But the overall shape of the story feels smoothed out, like a photograph that has been edited.
Sometimes the writing gets a bit academic. Vance is a smart guy and he wants you to know it. There are passages where he is clearly showing off his reading list. I found myself wishing he would just say what he felt instead of telling me what Augustine thought about it.
This book is for people who have lost their faith and are not sure if they want it back. It is for people who have achieved everything they were supposed to achieve and still feel empty. It is for anyone who has ever wondered if being smart is the same as being wise. If you hate JD Vance because of his job, you will probably hate this book before you open it. If you love him for the same reason, you might miss what he is actually saying.
I finished the book and sat on my porch again. The neighbor kid was gone. The hoop was empty. I thought about the things I chase. The things I tell myself I want. The book did not fix me. It does not offer to fix anyone. But it made me ask a question I had been avoiding: what am I really hungry for?
