Every few years, presidential hopefuls go through certain rites of passage. They ramp up fundraising, start visiting early primary states, and bulk up their foreign or economic policy credentials.

And, of course, they drop their memoirs.

This week Vice President JD Vance released Communion, a book tracing the arc of his faith and relationship with Christianity. It’s a big, introspective effort to define what he believes, lay out the role he sees for religion in public life, and even offer some hints of what a President Vance might do in office.

For Americans wondering how — or if — Vance can reconcile his Christian faith with serving President Donald Trump and leading his unruly right-wing political movement, it’s a revelatory read, and one that offers a telling look into the movement he may try to reform.

It’s always easy to dismiss a book like this as just another political PR effort (or, as Vanity Fair described his press tour, part of an effort to “sand off his rough edges”), but in Vance’s case there’s reason to mine it for a bit more meaning. Books are part of his origin story as a public figure. His blockbuster 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy was a thoughtful reckoning with the malaise in a wide swath of Middle America. As he acknowledges in Communion, it was that book that established him as a serious political thinker.

Vance is a good writer — and reading it as a cradle Catholic myself, I found his faith journey moving. And indeed his book matters, not just because it helps us understand him, but also because it provides answers to some of the big questions about his future, and the future of American conservatism. Can an intellectual Christian really step in to lead a movement birthed by a very un-intellectual, un-Christian president? How sincere is Vance — already an accomplished shapeshifter — about anything he purports to believe?

Spoiler alert: In Communion, Vance doesn’t really resolve the contradiction between his faith and his politics. Instead he lays bare a problem he shares with millions of Republican voters, including the young, drifting men he claims to speak for, and whose faith journeys in many cases mirror his own. In the course of explaining how he came to serve God, he also shows how easy, if not necessary in modern America, it is for him — and for them — to subordinate that faith to politics.

If there’s a thesis statement for Vance’s memoir, it comes in a parable that the vice president returns to: In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells a story of how faith is shown through actions and behavior:

It’s that last line, by their fruits ye shall know them — which he takes from the non-Catholic King James Version of the Bible — that he returns to over and over in the book. He uses it as a test for modern Christianity, for meritocracy, for liberalism in academia and elite business, for the secular West, for trade and economics, and for the liberal international order. He repeatedly asks: are these things bearing the fruit that we, or Christ, want?

And it’s also how he tests himself. His conversion story follows an arc familiar to many converts, particularly young men who are feeding the cultural narrative of an American religious renewal: of feeling lost, hoodwinked, and betrayed by the establishment, the corporate rat race, and wokeness in America — and seeking purpose and meaning in the millennia-old Catholic Church. In this, he falls into a pattern for American Catholic converts — raised in a nondenominational, evangelical Protestant culture. Like many others in his cohort, he converted to a more politically and culturally conservative American version of the church — one that embraces ritual, and finds itself in tension with more “liberal” social teachings of the post-Vatican II church.

In Vance’s telling, it’s an intellectual journey as much as an emotional one: a journey of discovering which church was “true,” while discovering that, as second lady Usha Vance told him, going to church was “good” for him. “Therapy didn’t work for you,” Vance recalls her telling him, “but church does.”

Here is where the first emblematic contradiction jumps out. Vance spends the first two-thirds of his memoir not just talking about his early-life fall away from faith, but deriding the individualistic nature of a world in which organized religion has receded, replaced by egotism, workism, secularism, self-improvement advice, groupthink, and woke. He spends another chunk of time praising the value of religion in creating community, a common language, and a common purpose. Yet, as with many young new converts, Vance ends up talking about faith in profoundly individualistic terms — how to be a good father, how to be a good husband, how to participate in church rituals, and how to understand doctrine at an intellectual level — while failing to seriously discuss the greater “fruit” that the church calls for.

The nearest he gets to acknowledging this disconnect is around his and Usha’s move to Cincinnati in 2018, when he wonders about how to “build a culture of virtue, within my own family, within my community, and within our entire society.”

“I found myself worrying over how to fuse a sense of social virtue with a personal one,” he writes, but admits that “at this stage, it was largely an intellectual exercise.”

Part of that exercise is his introduction to Catholic social teaching: the principles and tradition the church developed over the last century to guide individuals, political and church leaders, and governments toward creating a more just world that creates the kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

He recalls reading Pope Leo XIII’s century-old encyclical Rerum Novarum, about the relationship between workers and market economies, about the dangers of absolute socialism or capitalism, and about the right of workers to create labor unions. Though that tradition started with Leo XIII back in the 19th century, it has continued building upon itself through consecutive papacies — including church teachings on climate change, migration, war, racism, economic justice, and most recently artificial intelligence. They are intellectual and practical instructions for how to turn faith into good works beyond the individual realm, how to grow the good fruit that Vance is so fixated on cultivating.

If those issues sound suspiciously progressive in modern political terms…well, then you’ll understand why Vance is so shy about discussing actual achievements and results in his book. Many of those “progressive” issues have been taken up by two consecutive popes: Francis and the current pontiff Leo XIV, who have both clashed with Trump and Vance — and faced criticism and dismissal from conservative American Catholics and Republican Christians.

And like many of those religious American conservatives, Vance mostly sidesteps these ideas. He explores the church’s economic teaching — saying that he understands its starting point is the inherent and inviolable dignity of each human person — but he fails to engage with this, beyond using it to justify his vision for economic policies in a theoretical Vance presidency.

Instead his book becomes quite defensive. He doesn’t actually say much about his actual works as part of the Trump administration, including defending a war in Iran that has killed at least 1,000 civilians, various blows to the social safety net, and harsh enforcement of immigration policy. Instead he does a lot of fingerpointing, blaming baby boomers for trying to prop up the liberal international order, woke CEOs and academics for trying to address racial inequality, and liberals for pushing secularism — really, blaming anyone but his patron Trump and his politics — for the lack of fruit that he has grown, or helped create.

Hanging over the whole book is Trump, the very secular strongman who chose Vance as his vice president, and whose legacy Vance is trying to claim.

Vance doesn’t write much about Trump — which makes sense, since Trump is notably irreligious, and prone to picking fights with Catholic leaders like Pope Leo XIV. And similarly, when it comes to Vance’s actual “works” in the world — his accomplishments in Trump’s White House, the fruit of his faith — the book goes notably light. So it’s worth introducing just a bit of the material he seems to have left out.

He prefaces this in his reflection on Rerum Novarum by saying that he tries “to stay humble about how little I know and how inadequate a Christian I really am…I am most comfortable engaging with the intellectual elements of the faith.”

In real life, though, Vance has taken a very active role in trying to educate the world on his version of Catholicism, and energetically serving as Trump’s go-to communicator to the various factions of MAGA and the religious right. Vance is a gifted debater and an agile thinker, and he has embraced this difficult job, arguing repeatedly about how Trump’s immigration agenda is morally permissible, how Catholics are called to love hierarchically (they aren’t, as Pope Francis responded), and why Pope Leo XIV should “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”

He has directly criticized the Catholic cardinals who raise the issue of immigration with him, saying he was “unsettled” by “how generic” the Vatican’s skepticism of Trump’s 2025 immigration policy was. “What did they take issue with, exactly?” he asks. “Did they object to deportations? Just to deportations of certain populations? Were they entirely fine with deportations as long as we didn’t say mean things about illegal immigrants?”

He then derides the Vatican for seeming “so afraid of saying something controversial that it chose, effectively, to say nothing at all.” Perhaps because of publishing deadlines, Vance does not really mention Pope Leo XIV, or the wave of criticism that he and the Vatican have unleashed on Trump and Vance in 2026. When he does engage the more recent church criticism, it is to dismiss the rare unified statement the US Catholic bishops issued criticizing Trump’s mass deportation program in fall 2025 and calling for respect of migrant dignity, a more measured enforcement operation, and prioritizing the least well-off.

In all of this, he has co-led an administration waging a prolonged attack on refugees, immigrants who have lived in the United States for decades, and those seeking economic opportunity — precisely the people the institutional Catholic Church is committed to helping and speaking for.

Of course, one reason for blaming the Vatican is to make excuses for Trump. Vance had “hoped for more out of the [2025] conversation with the Vatican diplomats,” he wrote about the bishops’ criticism of the White House’s mass deportations. He calls immigration policy “thorny,” “messy,” and requiring “trade-offs” — while spinning arguments about why too much immigration is actually un-Christian, because of what it does to social cohesion, labor unions, wages, and public safety. There is no mention of violence by ICE agents, of migrants who have died in ICE detention, of Alex Pretti or Renee Good’s killings, or of the general overreach of the administration. It took the ladies of The View to coax a response out of him this week. His response? Enforcement is messy.

And that speaks to the larger issue: Vance’s unwillingness to admit any Christian errors in his service to Donald Trump, or in Trump’s administration so far. He says he wants to infuse public service with Catholic charity and save the West from the “secular global liberalism” that has “destroyed” Europe. Yet he speaks of this while standing proudly at the side of a president whose works have been definitively un-Christian in their effects.

Perhaps taking up the MAGA mantle and leading a Christian revival as president is, indeed, the best path he sees to yield good works — good fruit — in the future. But the book doesn’t make that case, and his real-life track record looks a lot more like the non-apologetic backing of a man, and a movement, committed to dividing communities that once stood together, and punching down on the powerless.

Is it just Vance’s ambition getting the better of his faith? Does he really know better? (“I’m a bad Catholic. That’s why we need grace, as Christians, and we recognize there are things we have to work on,” he said on The View Tuesday.) Anyone who has followed Vance’s career finds these questions frustratingly difficult to answer. It’s hard not to wish he had grappled with the verse that precedes his favorite parable: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”

In the biblical context, Christ is talking about both human nature and spiritual salvation. Judge a person’s character by how he or she lives life and treats others; stand guard against those who push you off the path of grace, charity, and Christian virtue. The irony is obvious.