When JD Vance published his first memoir at age 31, he wrote in the introduction that although he had a happy marriage, a good job and a comfortable home, “I’ll be the first to admit I’ve accomplished nothing great in my life, certainly nothing that would justify a complete stranger paying money to read about it.”
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A lot has changed in 10 years.
That book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” catapulted its author into the public eye just as a political novice named Donald Trump was securing the Republican nomination for president. But Vance’s new book is not about his professional transformation, but a spiritual one.
In “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith‚” released this week, Vance details how he went from being a nondenominational Christian to atheism to Catholicism.
It was a journey, he writes, that began after reflection on something that Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew: “Ye shall know them by their fruits.”
“What I saw around me, and what started my journey back to my faith, was that Christianity bore the best fruit. It was the set of ideas and practices that generated the most good, the most truth and the most beauty of anything I’d encountered. Nothing else came close,” Vance writes.
When he applied Jesus’s words to his own life after becoming a father, Vance says he realized “the fruits I had reaped since discarding my faith were rotten.”
Here are other seven other things we learn about the vice president from “Communion.”
One: Although Vance is now Catholic, he says he is “not a particularly sectarian person.”
He writes that he’s not sure he would have returned to faith without “the spiritual foundation I developed in a variety of Protestant churches growing up.” And he says, “Some of the most rewarding conversations I’ve had about faith have been across denominational lines, and that tradition of Christian ecumenism is part of what makes our nation so great.”
Two: Vance didn’t attend church often as a child, but was exposed to the preaching of Billy Graham on TV.
“Our family attended church very rarely. Our faith was amorphous, tied to family and oral traditions and not to institutional orthodoxy. Mamaw (Vance’s grandmother) loved Billy Graham but hated most other televangelists whom she saw as little more than faith profiteers. Yet we watched their broadcasts regularly.”
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Three: He is a fan of C.S. Lewis and took several of Lewis’ books to read while he was deployed as a Marine in Iraq.
“Years later, a friend of mine would tell me that he found C.S. Lewis boring and stupid, totally unpersuasive. Even though I called myself an atheist at the time, I couldn’t agree. I found Lewis thoughtful and compelling.”
Four: When Vance decided to start going to church again, he was concerned about how it would affect his relationship with his wife, Usha, who is Hindu.
“Usha hadn’t signed up to be married to a Christian, and I worried that she’d feel alienated from my new interest. But she had the opposite reaction: She joined me at church. … ‘Therapy didn’t work for you,’ she admitted. ‘But church does.’”
Five: He decided to get baptized in the Catholic Church after a moment of “genuine epiphany” while at a cathedral in Burgundy, France.
“It would be a lie to claim that every ambivalence I’d ever felt about organized Christianity went away in a moment. But what I do recall was the distinct sense of belonging and presence. … No people were here in the space besides me and my sleeping son. But God was.”
Six: Vance worries about the declining fertility rate not only for economic reasons for the countries involved, but also how fewer babies affect us personally.
“My children gave me and my mother a second chance. My cousins are some of my closest friends. How many friendships will never blossom, and how many families will never heal, because we have deprived ourselves of children?”
Seven: He believes that the Gospel of Jesus Christ “is an inherently inconvenient message” and that it’s easy “to allow politics to lead our faith, rather than the other way around.”
“We confine Christianity to the most private of questions — relations between husbands and wives, reproductive decisions — and are then surprised when kids like me grow up in the faith and then discard it. We have to do better. If Christianity is true, it must be true for the whole human person at all times of life.”
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