JD Vance’s new book, Communion, charts his journey from atheism to Catholicism, asshole to acolyte. Once a ruthlessly competitive young lawyer, he’s now a churchgoing family man. He has also progressed from comparing Donald Trump to Hitler to becoming his toady-in-chief, though this he fails to mention. He does, however, readily admit what a jerk he used to be in his godless days, enraptured as he was by wealth, power and prestige. But this is because he wants to show that atheism does bad things to your soul, whereas people of faith look beyond money and status to such loftier goals as beating up abortionists and blowing Palestinians to pieces. The memoir is designed to portray its author as a man engagingly candid about his past sins, rather than the nasty piece of work whose best friend was the racist Charlie Kirk. Kirk called George Floyd a scumbag, and one wonders whether his buddy would agree. When a group of Young Republicans circulated racist and antisemitic messages, Vance called them “edgy jokes”.
In fact, the vice-president is still a jerk devoted to wealth, power and prestige. It’s just that he’s now added to his property portfolio something called spiritual values. He looks to a resurgence of Western Christian civilisation, which is to say an illiberal, anti-immigrant, anti-Islamic social order. Muslims, he tells us, can be motivated by their faith to the most terrible violence, which has never of course been true of Christians. Conflicts of race and gender are the fruit of turning away from God, not of white supremacism or patriarchal power. He doesn’t say much about actual politics, since it’s hard to sound spiritual while talking about people being shot dead in Minneapolis or booted in the head on the Mexico border. It’s wiser to burble on about “falling in love with God’s wonderful creation” rather than comment on CIA torture centres. Nor is there much mention of Vance’s political master, a man with the spiritual depth of a slug. He does, however, insist that “there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine’”. Perhaps “Christ” here is a typo for “Trump”.
Christianity is founded on the torture and murder of an itinerant preacher by the occupying Roman forces in Palestine around 30 CE. Vance knows something about such imperial adventures. In between visits to mass, he has been complicit in massacring civilians in Gaza and burning the flesh off Iranian schoolchildren. Having colluded with a savage cut in US aid for the global poor, he tells us that it’s one’s Christian duty to protect the less fortunate. The Jesus presented by the New Testament is homeless, jobless, without property and without family. If he were to wander anywhere near the White House today, Vance and his cronies would probably set their goons on him and ship him back to the shithole country he hailed from.
The New Testament doesn’t believe in spiritual values. Instead, it sees salvation as a matter of visiting the sick and feeding the hungry. Spirituality is an everyday material affair. It also inherits from Judaic culture an honourable tradition of welcoming the stranger. Love in its view is first of all a love of strangers and enemies. Anybody can love a friend. The Gospels are also ferociously hostile to fat cats and big shots. When Mary is pregnant with Jesus, she bursts out with a triumphal chant, singing of the way God “has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and raised up the lowly. He has filed the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.” Some New Testament scholars suggest that these incendiary words might be borrowed from the Zealots, the anti-imperialist guerrilla force of the time memorably satirised in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. The child in Mary’s womb will grow up to be assassinated by the state.
St James’s epistle calls on the rich to weep and wail over the miseries which lie in store for them. Jesus himself denounces wealth and power because they bind you to the present, and in doing so blind you to the prospect of a transformed future. He also announces astonishingly that the riff-raff of the highways and byways will take precedence over the law-abiding burghers in his future kingdom. As far as riches go, Vance was recently made fraud czar by the Orange Lord, but seems not to be especially perturbed by the fact that the Trump family is reputed to have made $6.5bn from dealings which some consider shady.
The term “justice” is almost absent from this book’s lexicon. Yet it was because Jesus spoke out for justice and fellowship that the ruling class of the day moved to silence him. He warns his comrades that if they do the same, they too will be eliminated. Or, as one theologian has put it: if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do they’ll kill you. The decision to execute Jesus was made by an eminently respectable, highly religious body of men with whom Vance would have found much in common. Crucifixion was the form of death reserved by the Roman empire for political rebels and runaway slaves. It’s true that all this happened in a shithole country long before the Alamo, when they didn’t have air conditioning or vaginal eggs, but it may still be worth pondering.
Much of Communion is about Vance’s wife, Usha, a quasi-supernatural figure whose moral superiority puts the Virgin Mary in the shade. According to the book’s epigraph, she’s the guardian of all that’s just, pure and lovely. He even compliments her on her height. In this dreary male fantasy, women are unsullied figures, while men get their hands dirty shaving immigrants’ heads and hijacking other people’s countries.
Like a large number of Americans, Vance can’t stop praising his own family. Mamaw (his grandmother) was a good Christian except for a distressing habit of saying “fuck”, who owned 19 loaded handguns. The guns prove handy when the precocious young Vance asks her about the relation between body and soul: “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?” The Cartesian-minded Mamaw confirms that this is indeed the case. In a moving snatch of dialogue, the vice-president recounts how the old lady potty-trained him:
“JD, today we’re going to pee and poop on the pot.”
“No, Mamaw.”
“JD, today we”re going to pee and poop on the pot.”
“No, Mamaw.”
“JD, today you”re going to p*** and s*** in that toilet, and don”t argue with me.”
“Yes, Mamaw.”
You can always tell a conservative by his asterisks.
Right-wing Americans make a fetish of the family, but the New Testament takes a different view. Jesus’s attitude to the domestic hearth is consistently hostile. As a child, he chides his parents for failing to understand his mission, and later brusquely informs a group of relatives who want to see him to wait while he goes about his public business. He responds to a woman who praises the womb that bore him with a withering put-down, and declares that he has come to set family members at each other’s throats. Faith, in a word, is thicker than blood. Families are an obstacle to joining the movement he has set in progress, one in which his own brother was eventually killed. To the chagrin of right-wing Roman Catholics, his mother is mostly absent from the Gospels and his (step-)father has only a walk-on part. He himself is celibate, so that he can be available to more people beyond providing a partner and a couple of children. This form of abstinence, like that of a guerrilla fighter, is in no sense anti-sexual. In fact, the New Testament is remarkably laid-back about sexuality, unlike a great many of its devotees. It has strikingly little to say on the subject, which is why it had to be rewritten as The Da Vinci Code in an age obsessed by sex.
Communion is also theologically illiterate on the question of suffering. Predictably, Vance subscribes to the late Duke of Edinburgh school of human development, maintaining that pain is good for your soul. “For most of my life,” he intones, “suffering has been my pathway to God.” Perhaps he means inflicting it on other people, which in recent years has absorbed much of his attention. Here again, however, he’s out of line with the Gospels, which regard physical and mental illness as an evil to be overcome. Jesus spends most of his time curing the sick, and at one point suggests that such afflictions are the work of Satan. If you can pluck something positive from your torment, well and good, but it would be better if you weren’t tormented in the first place. Jesus himself is shown as panicking at the prospect of his crucifixion. He goes to his death not because he wants to, but because in a world run by the likes of Vance that’s what tends to happen to people like him.
Not that the vice-president isn’t mildly troubled by all the heartbreak around the place. Bertolt Brecht once wrote a fable about a king who asked his wise men to enquire into this sorrow and discover its source. Having put their heads together, the wise men inform the king that the source of all the trouble in the world is himself.
Terry Eagleton’s A Death of One’s Own will be published by Yale University Press in September
[Further reading: Britain can’t talk about religion]
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This article appears in the 08 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Great Con
Join the debate
Subscribe here to commentChrist, Terry, tell us how you really feel. Of course, as all minions promoted to their respective levels of incompetence, J.D. Vance is infatuated with his own significance. He believes he has seen the light. Let’s hope this means he won’t be eligible for further promotion.