In the last few days, while reading JD Vance’s terrible new book, Communion, and reacquainting myself with his 2016 memoir/polemic, Hillbilly Elegy, I was struck by a segment from the latter in which he emphasises the importance of speaking, and knowing, the truth.
With disbelief echoing from the page, the man who is now vice-president of the US quotes a poll in which “32 percent of conservatives said that [then President Barack] Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure”. These numbers, he goes on to note, include “acquaintances and distant family members [who believe] that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world”.
The 2016 Vance was happy to distance himself from those people, but times have changed. In accepting the nomination as Donald Trump’s running mate in 2024, he willingly and knowingly aligned himself with the leading proponent of the conspiracy theory that gave license to such rampant falsehoods.
This was not the only shock of returning to the book with which JD Vance made his name, just as he publishes his new one. Hillbilly Elegy is only 10 years old, but the new Vance is all but impossible to recognise in its pages.
The same cannot be said for his new memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back To God. Here, its author is unmistakably the smug and charmless egomaniac who ran his mouth in the direction of the Munich Security Conference, the citizenry of Greenland and Denmark and Volodymyr Zelensky.
Inevitably, strutting the stage like a peacock in a Millwall shirt has been detrimental to Vance’s already limited chops as a writer. With rabid abandon, 17 months as veep have robbed him of a priceless authorial anonymity that even God cannot restore. Crack on about faith all you want, sunshine, but these days everyone knows you’re an arsehole.
Obscurity is how he got me in the first place. With the claim that his account of the challenges faced by hardscrabble communities in Ohio and Kentucky “vividly articulates the despair and disillusionment of blue-collar America”, in 2016, Hillbilly Elegy caught my eye only days after publication. I can picture it now, in the window of Waterstones, on Piccadilly, calling out to me on first-name terms.
I necked it in only a few hours. As a customer from a rough-and-tumble town in the north of England, one who didn’t go to university, the prospect of exchanging a modest amount of money and time for the kind of story the otherwise scrupulously inclusive book business too often excludes from the shelves seemed like a bargain.
To my surprise, though, reader and writer didn’t see eye to eye. With its tonal confusion, nauseating sentimentality, and an encroaching tendency to blame the poor for not being rich, Hillbilly Elegy remains the most aggravating book I’ve read this century. I can assure you of this: no matter how much you may dislike JD Vance, odds are, I got there first.
Which might explain why casting my eyes upon its successor was akin to being visited by a miracle. In tossing religion into his bubbling stew of faux humility and folksy sapience, with Communion, Vance has somehow written a book that is a good deal worse than its predecessor. In doing the bidding of some of the unholiest people in His kingdom, one suspects even God might have preferred this gobbiest of lost sheep to have remained unreceptive.
Instead, the case for faith is made with bewildering logic. In a strange attempt to establish Biblical bona fides, the author writes that “no matter how well-read you are, how thoughtful you fancy yourself to be, most knowledge in your head is mediated by the people and institutions you trust”. In other words, if your beliefs have been assuredly informed by peer-reviewed scientific papers, or a comprehensively sourced article in the New Yorker, then why not extend the same courtesy to a 2,000-year-old book?
Or perhaps not. In what I suppose can be described as the Groucho Marx school of religion, when needs must, Vance is quick to dismiss expert testimony on matters spiritual. Not just this, but in his haste to relegate the scriptures to mere polestars of convenience, communal Christianity cedes ground to a kind of oblivious entitlement particular to the gilded elite he claims to distrust.
When the noted American theologian Robert Prevost dared to speak out against the trauma and outrage unleashed by ICE agents on American streets, earlier this year, the vice-president was there with the fire extinguishers. Addressing the dissenter by his job title, he told a crowd at a Turning Point USA event, in Georgia, that “it’s very, very important for the Pope” – yes folks, the Pope – “to be careful when he talks about matters of theology”.
Despite ascending to a spiritual plane, on the page, Vance is today running the same plays as he did a decade earlier. He remains quick to tell us that his moral course was set by a redoubtable maternal grandmother – referred to, irritatingly, as “Mamaw” – while guile and enterprise allowed him to dine above the salt in the private and public sector. Sing along if you know the words. In retreading old ground, Communion is as much a broken record as it is a brand-new book.
On the face of it, the author’s ascent from a dysfunctional childhood in Middletown, Ohio, to within an aneurysm of the presidency is the kind of achievement only the uncharitable would deny. But in his blindness to inconvenient truths, what ought to be an encouraging story reads like a con trick.
As the recipient of financial assistance at both Ohio State University and Yale Law School, for example, Vance starkly refuses to reckon with the unvarnished truth that his long and arduous slog to fortune and fame was underwritten not by a free market he so evidently adores, but by a public sector he emphatically does not. Make no mistake, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is easier when you’re a beneficiary of the GI Bill, which paid for Vance’s college education after he served four years in the Marines as a military journalist.
In an authorial voice that veers between pompous sage and drunk-guy-at-a-bar-at-last-call, short shrift is given to anyone whose standards of fortitude and discipline fall below the author’s own. With rare consistency, the belief that personal experience is a licence with which to generalise about the thorniest aspects of poverty up and across a country he claims to love is unshakeable.
“We spend our way into the poorhouse,” Vance writes in Hillbilly Elegy. “We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.” (Of course, a more honest writer would have used the word “they”, not “we”.)
Elsewhere, the reader is presented with the wildly scattershot claim that “We eat Pillsbury cinnamon rolls for breakfast, Taco Bell for lunch, and McDonald’s for dinner. We rarely cook, even though it’s cheaper and better for the soul.”
Enough. As vice-president, today, Vance plays second banana to a commander-in-chief whose insatiable love for junk food, according to Republican National Committee chairman Joe Gruters, extended to a meal of “hot fries… a Filet-O-Fish, a Quarter Pounder and a Big Mac”. When it comes to financial prudence, Trump’s companies have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy no fewer than six times.
With some chutzpah, perhaps inevitably, chunks of Communion are given over to explaining the author’s fulsome conversion to a president he once famously described as “America’s Hitler”. “To my critics, [the decision to support Trump] was a politically cynical manoeuvre to gain political power – I doubt I’ll ever change their minds,” he writes in what is a rare moment of self-awareness.
As it so happens, I doubt it too. Hypnotised by the promise of power and personal humiliation, in full view of the entire world, VP JD has set fire to the moral rectitude of his younger self. Never mind starchy sentences that lay claim to moral altitude; outside the pages of his books, life has become a yobbish descent from the accepted norms of human decency.
It wasn’t always this way. Although brick-deaf to the role played by structural inequality in determining the lot of the American poor, in 2016 Vance did not emit anything like the stench he does today. Certainly, he did not seem like a racist. In a low-key sentence in Hillbilly Elegy he even claims to have “worried about racial prejudice in my own family and friends”.
Well, not any more. To make himself heard above the fire-in-a-pet-shop ruckus of the Trump White House, Vance has taken to spewing nativist filth with all the discretion of a monkey masturbating in a cage. As well as denigrating Somalis and more, last month the vice-president even went so far as to ignore the wishes of a bereaved father by steaming into an already hot-blooded “debate” about the murder of Henry Nowak.
In a post on X, he opined that the 18-year-old “should still be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it”.
In a just and fair world, Vance would perhaps be similarly exercised by a trillionaire immigrant from South Africa who spends much of his time injecting poison directly into the veins of the free world. He might also raise an eyebrow in the direction of the son of a Scottish mother who grew up to be a convicted felon, an adjudicated sex offender and the most brazenly corrupt president America has ever known.
With its UFC octagon and its demolished East Wing, he might even recognise that the White House is now home to the kind of problem neighbour so lustily belittled in the pages of Hillbilly Elegy. Instead, Vance clings to the belief that antisocial behaviour is a problem only when carried out by hoi polloi.
In attempting to identify the reasoning at the heart of such towering hypocrisy, I can easily drive myself mad. The truth of it, though, is that in the race between words and actions, motivation finishes a distant, and irrelevant, third. As his venal cunning poisons the well of world politics, the sincerity of Vance’s spiritual and moral beliefs becomes immaterial.
As such, it seems superfluous to point out that the vice-president is a lousy Christian. Even by the deranged standards of America’s swivel-eyed evangelical right wing, the yawing cavity between rhetoric and reality invalidates almost all claims to higher matters. But yet here he is, slobbering from the maw at the prospect of the presidency, pontificating away about matters ecumenical in a “thoughtful” style that seeks contrast with the coarseness of the present occupant of the White House.
Today, though, the only people who view Trump as anything other than a one-man island in which “truth” and “lies” are both subjective and immediately dispensable are those who live in hope that cats might yet learn to be kinder to mice and birds. In comparing the two men, the only distinction that matters is that JD Vance once knew better than this.
It is in this light, and this light only, that Communion bears a streak of unwitting authenticity. Its author is right about one thing. In plumbing the depths at which even Satan would reject his soul, only God can save him.
But let us finish by at least giving the man his due. In the days when his personal brand was that of an émigré from the margins of American life, Vance liked to (rightly) beat his chest in support of anyone who had managed to avoid drowning in chaos.
With typical romanticism, in Hillbilly Elegy, he writes of “the old neighbour who diligently tended her garden even as her neighbours let their homes rot from the inside out; the young woman… who returned to the neighbourhood every day to help her mother navigate old age.”
I have no doubt that in 2016, the man who would be vice-president imagined himself to be exactly this kind of person. Not any more, though. Much like the country over which he may yet preside, in the space of a decade, JD Vance has fallen prey to the ravages of disrepair and disrepute.
Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith by JD Vance is published by HarperCollins.
Ian Winwood is the bestselling author of Bodies: Life & Death in Music
