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JD Vance has a book to sell, and this week he sold it everywhere.
Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith arrived Tuesday from HarperCollins, the vice president’s account of his 2019 conversion to Catholicism and the sequel to Hillbilly Elegy.
As I wrote earlier this week, the book arrives on a man whose Catholicism keeps colliding with his politics. To move copies, Vance worked through nearly every studio that would have him — Fox, ABC, CBS, the friendly podcasts and the cold couches alike.
He came to talk about God. By the end of a two-day blitz, he had told us a great deal more about his ambitions.
Begin with Sean Hannity.
On Fox Monday night, Vance was asked about Donald Trump’s spiritual life and offered a portrait that strained belief: a president who “doesn’t wear it on a sleeve, but he is a person of faith,” a man who lies awake with “very deep questions. Where do we come from? Where are we going?” Vance credited Trump’s political resurrection to the Christians who stood closest to him.
By the next morning, the clip had become a punchline, and it earned the ridicule. The president who governs by cruelty does not, on the available evidence, spend his nights wrestling with the soul.
Then came Fox & Friends on Tuesday morning. Vance, who grew up Pentecostal in Appalachia, compared the serpent-handling churches of his childhood to the Catholic Mass, saying both reflect the same hunger for a direct encounter with God.
Comparing the Mass to a snake-handling revival seems like a poor way to win over the Catholic voters Vance will need in 2028. The sacrifice of the altar sits at the heart of the faith he just spent three hundred pages defending — and he reached for serpents to explain it.
On Greg Gutfeld’s show on Tuesday night, Vance turned the faith into a culture-war applause line, attacking Democrats as “terrible people” even as he promoted a book about grace.
Believing that Jesus “rose from the dead on the third day” gets you mocked by progressives as superstitious, he argued, while those same progressives insist that “a grown man takes some hormonal therapies … and that person will become a woman.”
He had taken the Resurrection and turned it into a debating point, the Gospel reduced to a weapon against the very people it calls him to love.
Over on CBS Mornings today, Norah O’Donnell took the gentler route, walking Vance through the conversion at the heart of the book and the role his wife, Usha, played in his return to the faith. He has said across this tour that he hopes the Hindu woman who shepherded him back to Christianity will one day convert herself. It was the book tour at its most disarming, and its most useful — a tender domestic portrait with a presidential campaign idling underneath.
CBS had offered an even softer hearing days earlier. On its “Sunday Morning,” taped before the blitz began, Vance sat with Robert Costa and his wife, Usha, to talk about faith, family, and the fourth child they are expecting.
He said he would decide after the midterms whether to seek the presidency in 2028, and that he expects Trump to be “very supportive” of whatever he chooses. The segment was reverent, almost campaign-ready — the clearest statement of purpose in the entire week.
The accommodating rooms were the easy part. At ABC, the couch turned cold. The hosts of “The View” pressed Vance to square the administration’s immigration crackdown with the Church whose communion gave his book its title. His answer split the difference: borders can be enforced, he allowed, “but you also have to take certain precautions and certain care.”
The Church he claims has been clearer than that — Pope Leo XIV has insisted that a nation’s right to its borders never cancels its duty to the migrant.
On the Epstein files he handed the hosts a gift, conceding “I am, frankly, kind of a conspiracy theorist on the Epstein stuff” before promising to “check” on the millions of records the Justice Department still refuses to release.
The New York Times has reported that Vance presided over the Situation Room meetings where the White House managed the Epstein crisis. Half of the records remain unreleased, and House Oversight Democrats accuse the administration of hiding them while claiming full compliance.
As I have documented in the Epstein-Bannon investigation, Jeffrey Epstein and Steve Bannon once schemed together to bring down Pope Francis — which makes Vance’s studied incuriosity about the files all the more telling. He offered the language of candor in the service of a cover-up, the practiced reflex of an administration that has spent months smothering a story it once swore to expose.
The Megyn Kelly sit-down held the most political risk.
Kelly has broken with Trump over the Iran war, and MAGA spent Monday furious that Vance would share her set at all. He went, and let the seams of his own coalition show.
Trump has said his vice president was “philosophically a little bit different than me” as the war began, “maybe less enthusiastic about going.” The party that papered over Iraq for a generation is arguing with itself about Iran in real time, and Pope Leo has already retired the warhawks’ favorite doctrine.
With Glenn Beck the conversation turned to Peter Thiel, the billionaire who bankrolled Vance’s rise. I have been a sharp critic of Thiel, who has suggested that Pope Leo XIV himself is a tool of the Antichrist and who told Vance not to heed the pope on matters of morality but simply to pray for him.
Vance refused to distance himself. He called Thiel a mentor and traced his road to Catholicism back to a speech Thiel gave at Yale Law, the moment he has called the most significant of his time there.
He even acknowledged the heterodoxy of it — Thiel’s Christianity is gnostic, idiosyncratic, fixed on technology as the engine of human salvation — and embraced the man anyway. A convert who owes his faith to a benefactor like that carries a complicated debt.
By Tuesday evening, Vance had pulled up a chair as a guest co-host on Fox’s “The Five,” where Jessica Tarlov pressed him on how he squares Pope Leo’s criticism of the administration with his own Catholicism.
He deflected, then spent much of the hour lecturing Tarlov on Iran, telling her she was “making the same mistake … that a lot of the Iranian propagandists make.”
The timing is its own indictment: Communion reached shelves only weeks after Vance publicly told the pope to “stick to matters of morality” and stay in his lane — a strange posture for a man whose book is named for the sacrament of unity.
Pull the appearances together and one project comes into focus. Across every set — the warm ones and the openly hostile — the assignment stayed fixed: present JD Vance as the natural heir, a man whose Catholicism certifies his character and whose loyalty to Trump certifies his viability. The faith has become a credential. That is the danger.
The timing is not an accident. A vice president weighing a run for the White House needs more than a record of obedience to Trump; he needs a soul the country can recognize, and Communion is built to supply one.
A memoir of conversion arrives, though, alongside the policies its author defends from the West Wing — the raids, the detention camps, the deportation flights — and the gap between the two cannot be narrated away on a morning show.
The Church Vance keeps invoking has already told him what it asks, and twice now its popes have corrected him to his face. Pope Francis rebuked his attempt to bend the ordo amoris, the Catholic ordering of love, into a license for mass deportation. Pope Leo has pressed the same point from Rome, and even the U.S. bishops’ own doctrine committee issued a formal rebuke.
A man can convert in earnest and still get the faith badly wrong in public. The measure of Vance’s Catholicism was never going to be how movingly he narrates his journey on Hannity’s set, or how fluently he reaches for the supernatural on a Fox couch. Watch instead for whether he can look at a migrant family in the back of an ICE van and see the face of Christ.
For JD Vance, the real verdict waits past the book’s reviews and the studio applause, in how he treats the stranger his own government is hunting — the test the Gospel sets and Pope Leo keeps pressing, the one room he has not yet been willing to enter.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the migrant families, the priests, and the people of goodwill who refuse to let the word “Catholic” become a campaign asset stripped of its demands.
The Gospel was never a credential to be brandished on a book tour; it makes a claim on how we treat the most vulnerable among us, and that claim does not soften because a powerful man has written tenderly about his own soul.
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