Ahead of Easter, Vice President JD Vance announced a new book set for release in June, tracing his return to Christianity and conversion to Catholicism, following his bestselling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
Vance revealed the forthcoming book on Tuesday morning in a post on X:
I’ve been writing this book for a long time, and I’m honored to finally be able to share the full story with you all. Communion is about my personal journey and how I found my way back to faith.
It will be available in June, but you can pre-order today.
According to the book’s description, Communion is an “intimate account” of why Vance drifted from the Christianity of his youth and what led him back to his faith. Described as a “spiritual exploration” of being a Christian through each stage of his life — as a child, young man, husband, father, and leader — the book in some ways “pick[s] up” where Hillbilly Elegy left off.
It recounts how Vance’s pursuit of “material privileges” led him into a “secular wilderness” before he regained his faith, converted to Catholicism, and came to see that faith as guiding both his work in public life and his thoughts about the future.
Vance was baptized and received into the Catholic Church in Cincinnati in 2019 after more than three years of studying.
“I was raised Christian, but never had a super-strong attachment to any denomination and was never baptized,” Vance remarked at the time. “When I became more interested in faith, I started out with a clean slate, and looked at the church that appealed most to me intellectually.”
Vance said he had gradually come to believe Catholicism was true and that people close to him who were Catholic also influenced his decision.
He explained he had been deeply moved by St. Augustine’s Confessions, which helped him understand Christian faith in a more intellectual way.
“I also went through an angry atheist phase. As someone who spent a lot of his life buying into the lie that you had to be stupid to be a Christian, Augustine really demonstrated in a moving way that that’s not true,” he stated.
Vance chose St. Augustine of Hippo as his patron saint.
He said Augustine had become “an incredibly powerful advocate for the things that the Church believes.”
Vance’s Catholic faith has become an increasingly prominent part of his political career. Trump received 56 percent of the Catholic vote to Kamala Harris’s 41 percent, according to multiple exit polls. CatholicVote.org president Brian Burch stated Catholic voters played a decisive role in the Trump-Vance victory and that Trump and Vance won Catholics by a “massive margin” by promising to improve the lives of those most affected by inflation and by promising to bring about a humane and orderly solution to the chaos at the border. Burch also said Trump and Harris “differed sharply over the role of religion in America.”
The release of Communion comes as Vance’s earlier memoir, Hillbilly Elegy — which has sold about 1.6 million copies and was later adapted into a Netflix film — has returned to the center of political debate. Earlier this month, Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) delivered a speech in Vance’s hometown of Middletown, Ohio, in which he criticized the 2016 book as “hillbilly hate” and “poverty tourism.”
Vance’s latest book announcement drew a response from the radical left that appeared to follow a similar set of talking points:
The new book reveal also comes one day after second lady Usha Vance launched a new podcast for kids, Storytime with the Second Lady, focused on reading and childhood literacy.
The Vances are also expecting their fourth child, a son, due later this summer.
