---
title: "JD Vance’s accidentally hilarious memoir"
date: "2026-09-03T00:01:00+01:00"
modified: "2026-08-27T18:57:49+01:00"
url: "https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/jd-vances-accidentally-hilarious-memoir/"
post_id: 10816
---

# JD Vance’s accidentally hilarious memoir

![](https://newhumanist.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/08/Vice_President_JD_Vance_is_sworn_in_01-1200x800.jpg)JD Vance takes the oath as he is sworn in as vice president. Credit: Office of Vice President of the United States**Review: *Communion –*** ***Finding My Way Back to Faith*** by JD Vance

If Vice President JD Vance possesses one overriding quality, it is the ability to be funny by mistake. Before this book about his path to Catholicism had reached the world, it was the subject of a minor scandal – reporter Joe Perticone noticed that the church on the front cover was a Methodist church, not a Catholic one. A year before that, Vance visited Pope Francis for the first time and the Pope immediately died. This is a man who isn’t funny himself, but someone to whom hilarious things happen.

This lack of self-awareness, let alone an understanding of irony or hypocrisy, colours this strange book – strange both because it isn’t clear whom it’s for and because Vance himself is an inescapably odd fish. No one who defends Donald Trump in public could ever be described as normal, but there is a blankness about Vance that confuses and deters people. *Communion* goes some way to assuring the reader that a heart beats beneath the suit, but it will still leave many unsure what Vance believes and what he simply pretends to.

There are passages at the outset that bode well. Vance talks often about the value of having children – the book could, in fact, just as well be called *Kids: Have ‘Em* – and there is something sweet about how passionately he advocates for parenthood. As a rebuke to Ayn Rand, he writes, “Children exert an incomparable gravitational pull on people, even (or perhaps especially) when the children are at their most ‘useless’.” He also rhapsodises about his wife, Usha, and the way that he was powerless to her charms when they first met.

But we know that this all connects to a broader natalist politics. And even if we agree that declining birthrates might be a genuine problem, the book is rife with internal contradictions. It is difficult to square the often sensitive, insightful Vance with the Vance who has aided and abetted the cruellest, stupidest presidential regime imaginable. “I don’t worry about what I will find on the other side of eternal sleep” is a remarkable thing to say for someone who has been so prominent a Trump defender; someone who thought it wise to call Renée Good a “deranged leftist”, blaming her for being shot dead by an ICE agent. The fact that Vance seems not to worry that he might end up in Hell says more about him than he could ever realise.

He sleeps like a baby, it seems, because of his Catholic faith. Unfortunately, Vance is incapable of inhabiting the mind of a sceptic and persuading them *why* someone might embrace Catholicism. He is a fan of false dichotomies, at one point implying that the act of Catholic confession is the opposite of “running away from the fact that you screwed up or pretending that you didn’t” – as if those were the only two options. This rhetorical technique doesn’t work, and neither does the true underlying message of the book: that the world needs to reject secularism and embrace Christianity.

At one point Vance writes about politicians who no longer profess any fealty to God when being sworn in to public office: “These men and women had taken God out of their postwar oaths and alliances, and they wondered why so much else had been lost as well.” Only 27 pages earlier he was describing how Catholic priests, whose oaths to God could not be more serious, institutionally committed awful acts of sexual abuse against children.

When Vance laments the erosion of Christianity in public life over the last century, he writes, “If the Titanic is going down I’d rather be on board than hop on a lifeboat.” You only need to look at his life, however, to recognise that not only would he have leaped onto the first vessel available but that he would have elbowed elderly women out of the way in order to get the best seat.

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