J.D. Vance's Communion of Saints

In 2015, Donald Trump published a book entitled Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again. It’s a work that’s almost never brought up by either his supporters or detractors, which even the most hardcore politics nerds have forgotten about, just as they’ve forgotten about “Stronger Together,” the campaign book Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine published the following year. From these books we expect focus-group cliches, vapid crowd-pleasers, and reminders that politicians are just like us, for they eat toast with butter and strawberry jam in the morning!J.D. Vance’s memoir Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith is not a typical politician’s book. It is J.D. Vance’s magnum opus, a grand ideological declaration of war against the “experiment of replacing a Christian culture with something else” that has produced “rising racial strife, a gender gap among our young people, falling rates of love and partnership, and a society with a declining population.” Yada yada yada. It would be nice if we could ignore such arguments, but unfortunately the man they’re coming from is an 80-year-old’s heart attack away from the most powerful office on Earth. How did J.D. Vance come to acquire such views? The memoir provides some hints, along with hints of how he’ll campaign during his inevitable run for the Presidency.Communion starts by telling us about Vance’s early religious upbringing. His biological father was not originally present in his life. His drug-addled mother would occasionally “get religion” and take him to church. Presumably she would lose religion, perhaps because she objected to the religious morality, perhaps because she was bored; Vance doesn’t say. He says more about the religious views of his grandmother, “Mamaw,” who rarely attended church, loved Billy Graham but hated most other televangelists, thought evolution was “bogus” and felt that abortion, while wrong, should be legal. As for Vance’s grandfather, “Papaw,” Vance tells us he “can’t recall him ever ment