Communion is an intimate account of why Vice President JD Vance strayed from the Christianity of his youth and what led him back to faith.

JD Vance was brought up to believe in God. In Hillbilly Elegy, the book that made him famous, he wrote of how, aged six his biological father told him that he had asked God for signs that an adoption was in JD’s interest. “Those signs apparently appeared, and I became the legal son of Bob, a man I’d known for barely a year.”

Vance was mostly brought up by his grandmother, “Mamaw”, who felt she had a personal relationship with God.  “By Mamaw’s reckoning, God never left our side. He celebrated with us when times were good and comforted us when they weren’t.”

It seems more than likely that God feared Mamaw rather than vice-versa. One day, when she was driving little JD to Kentucky, she missed a one-way sign on the motorway exit ramp and they found themselves  speeding the wrong way down a three-lane highway, with the oncoming cars swerving to avoid them. As JD screamed in terror, the redoubtable Mamaw snapped: “ We’re fine, goddamnit. Don’t you know Jesus rides in the car with me?

Vance takes up the story of his religious education in his curious new book, Communion. Aged seveb, at the funeral of a great-uncle, he asked Mamaw how someone could go to Heaven when his body was buried underground. He then answers the question for himself. “After some back-and-forth, I settled on an analogy that betrayed our mutual love of firearms. “So the soul is like the bullet, and the body is like the casing. And God shoots off the bullet to heaven but the casing gets trapped here on earth?” I asked. She considered the question for a bit, not wanting to lead me astray. “Well, goddamnit, I guess it is like that.”

By the age of 11 JD had read the Bible from cover to cover.  Communion is a spiritual exploration of what it means to be a Christian in all the seasons of life JD Vance has experienced- as a child, a young man, a husband, a father, and a leader. Communion as reveals how Vance regained his faith and discusses his conversation to Catholicism, how his faith guides his work in public life, and how it shapes his thoughts about the future.The prophecy Study Bible, he joined other members of his family in believing that the world would come to an end in 2007, “ at the latest”. The first Harry Potter book appeared when he was 14. JD and his fellow churchgoers thought it contained satanic rituals, so boycotted it.

After his beloved Mamaw died in 2005, JD, now a marine, found 19 loaded handguns stashed all over her house, “under her bed, in her closet, in the silverware drawer”. He recalled this discovery in his acceptance speech for the vice-presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in 2024. “This frail old woman made sure that no matter where she was, she was within arm’s length of whatever she needed to protect  her family. That’s who we fight for! That’s the American spirit”.

But without Mamaw around to guide him, JD lost his faith in God. “With her gone, no one really cared about my faith, and soon I stopped caring too.” By  2006 “I was no longer, in any real sense, a Christian”. Instead, he took up the winner-takes-all, blessed-are-the-rich philosophy of Ayn Rand, which he summarises as stop whining, stop praying, and start working your ass off”. Hers was the materialistic faith he followed through Ohio State University and most of Yale Law School, where they regarded Christianity as “a weird superstition”. He now thinks his loss of faith was not primarily intellectual, but the inevitable result of transferring his political allegiance to an ungodly liberal elite. “It was the equivalent of divorce. I was severing myself from my root.” But then, around 2014, after he’d fallen in love and got married, he began to see that by becoming “so focused on winning the game of life.. I had neglected the deeper truth”. One particular passage from the New Testament made him “feel like God was speaking to me”. It is the passage from St Paul to the Philippians: “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever  things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”

Vance writes that he started writing his book in 2017, following the success of Hillbilly Elegy the year before. At this point of his life, he was still fiercely anti-Trump, describing him as “a cynical asshole”. At that point, he had, he says, “found a comfortable niche as a Trump sceptic”. He submitted a first draft of the book in 2019. That same year he was baptised a Catholic. The tone of the book suddenly alters dramatically, and without any real interior logic. In the second half after embracing Donald Trump and the rest before? Suddenly grace is out of the window, making way for rage and fury. It is as though a disc-jockey were to switch mid-track from Aled Jones to the Beastie Boys

Vance claims that it was the godlessness of liberal America that drove him into the arms of Trump. “I had looked inside our elite institutions and found them intellectually and spiritually lacking”.

Communion Finding My Way Back to Faith by JD Vance, William Collins £20, 289 pages.