J. D. Vance’s Contemptuous Conversion Memoir

D. Vance is feeling in “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith.” His second memoir, released on June 16th, recounts the erratic Baptist and Pentecostal churchgoing of his boyhood, his wallow in atheism as a young man, and his eventual Catholic baptism, at the age of thirty-five, but it renders this years-long religious reckoning in impassive, even indifferent, terms. “I didn’t meet Jesus on my way to Damascus,” Vance writes, as if to manage the reader’s expectations. The Vice-President’s book does not stage an Agony in the Rose Garden or a wrestling match with an angel in a steel cage on the South Lawn; it communicates little of spiritual hunger, of crises of faith, of temptation or redemption or awe, or whatever else one might want or expect from a conversion tale.

Often, the strongest emotion Vance seems able to express in “Communion” is his distaste for the tenets and rituals of the faith he has elected to join. “For an evangelical, the weirdest Catholic sacrament may be the rite of confession and reconciliation,” Vance writes. “The idea of speaking of my sins to a stranger mortified me.” Of the Eucharist—the culminating sacrament of the Catholic Mass—Vance observes, “This was always a little weird to me as a Protestant: You guys actually think this bread converts to the body of Christ?” He tells us that some Protestants he knows “really don’t like the Catholic practice of praying to saints.” Asking a friend to say a prayer for a loved one is normal, Vance explains, “but they draw the line at consulting dead people—‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.’ ” Vance doesn’t bother glossing what, precisely, is odd about the Ave Maria, a prayer which the median cradle Catholic has uttered hundreds or thousands of times; its line-crossing weirdness, it seems, can speak for itself.

Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.