Stumbling in the light

Evelyn Waugh, who spent the years after his conversion in 1930 being an awkward, demanding and frequently mortifying Catholic, developed a sharp eye for a particular kind of convert: the man who had found the faith and was now looking for a use for it. He would have recognised J.D. Vance immediately. The verdict would have been more sympathetic than Waugh usually allowed himself, and more troubled than Vance would find entirely comfortable.

At its best, Communion — an account of the Vice President’s conversion to Catholicism — is an honest book. Vance is unusually willing to expose the machinery of his own conversion, and what that machinery reveals tells us more than he perhaps intends. He abandoned Christianity in college because Ayn Rand told him intelligent people were atheists and that the self-made man owed nothing to the communities that formed him. He returned when he encountered Peter Thiel, possibly the smartest man he had ever met, who professed Christianity openly.

Thiel, however. was not merely an admirer Vance had encountered at a lecture. He was, and remains, Vance’s principal political patron: the man who funded his Senate campaign, shaped his public profile, and in a meaningful sense authored the career that the Vice Presidency crowns. 

Vance then discovered René Girard, the French philosopher under whom Thiel had studied at Stanford. Girard’s theory of mimetic desire — that we want what our models want — spoke directly, Vance says, to the competitive pressures he had felt at Yale. Yet Vance does not pause to acknowledge what the sequence reveals. He abandoned Christianity because Rand told him intelligent people were atheists. He returned because the smartest man he had ever met professed it. Girard would have recognised this immediately. (Girard himself converted to Catholicism late in life, after decades of developing a theory that pointed inexorably toward Rome without quite arriving there.)

Communion contains two books, and the better one emerges in its second half.

The first is a memoir of faith that communicates little of genuine hunger, crisis, or awe. Vance “flirted” with Catholicism (his word) — attending Mass irregularly, reading Chesterton and Newman from a comfortable intellectual distance, and finding in Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum a social theory that suited his emerging politics. The Catholic tradition prizes intellectual engagement more than any other Christian confession. But it insists the intellect is ordered toward an encounter that exceeds it. Chesterton did not say Christianity felt truer than the alternatives. He said it was true, and that its truth explained everything the secular account left unexplained. Vance absorbed the feeling while quietly setting aside the ontological claim. He was satisfied with the arguments.

The second book begins with Father Henry, the Dominican priest who became Vance’s confessor and the most compelling figure in the memoir. That Vance’s formation is happening through a Dominican — the order of Aquinas, of the Summa, of the insistence that faith and reason are not in competition but completion — suggests he may have found more than he bargained for in his confessor. Father Henry is six foot five, built like Friar Tuck, with an echoing laugh and a complete indifference to the sensitivities of the powerful. Within months he delivered a judgment that was, in Vance’s own account, “equal parts enraging and perceptive”: that Vance placed too much emotional pressure on his marriage because he treated Usha as a saviour rather than a spouse. “She isn’t your saviour,” Father Henry said. “Jesus is.” Vance was enraged — but accepted it anyway.

Father Henry alone justifies the cover price.

This is also where the book’s most theologically serious passage appears. Father Henry: “Real grace comes through practice. This is why we demand that you live a sacramental life… The promise of the Church is that you are lost, and the Church will provide a road map to God.” Vance accepted this too, and it produced the shift the first half had not managed: from faith as intellectual assent to faith as something lived.

The cathedral epiphany that follows — Vance alone with his family in an empty church in a foreign country, preferring, as he puts it, to go down with the Titanic than hop on a lifeboat — is not the language of a man who has found a superior social theory.

Partially and imperfectly is the point. Pope Francis explicitly rejected the theological framework Vance publicly invoked to defend the Trump administration’s mass deportation policies. Vance’s response was to advise his successor, Pope Leo XIV, to be careful when talking about theology. The tradition does not require intellectual submission on every prudential question. But the contrast remains: Father Henry told Vance uncomfortable truths and Vance accepted them. Rome told Vance uncomfortable truths and Vance advised Rome to examine its theology. The faith has gone deep where it is personally costly. It has not yet gone as deep where it is politically costly.

George Pocock, who coached the University of Washington crew to gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, told his most gifted and most damaged oarsman that trust precedes everything — not focus, not concentration, but trust. The self-reliance that had kept Joe Rantz alive through a childhood of abandonment was the same disposition that kept him outside the boat.

Vance is not outside the boat. The Father Henry passages, the cathedral epiphany, the quietly serious meditation on Saint Peter’s death and the mystery of God working on His own time rather than ours — these are the writings of a man who has, at real personal cost, accepted something he did not construct. The question the book leaves open is whether the cox’s call is yet fully audible above the noise of the political programme.