Are You There, God? It’s Me, J. D. Vance, and I Have Some Notes.

D. Vance writes in his new book, Communion. “Even as a child, I never feared hell.” Charming sentences to find in a book by the sitting vice president of the United States! One that in no way makes me want to run screaming off a cliff!The book is full of many such humdingers. Here’s Vance, explaining why he prefers Catholicism to therapy: “I found liberation in guilt.” (Men would literally rather … well, you know.) Here’s Vance, explaining why he felt ready to join the Catholic Church even as it was “going through a tough time,” when headline after headline was recounting all of the ways it had “screwed up” in covering up child sexual abuse: “If the Titanic is going down, I’d rather be on board than hop on a lifeboat.”Here’s Vance on the one kind of acceptable immigration: “It is true that immigration can bring benefits to the host country in its own right. Just think of Elon Musk and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that trace directly to his decision to come to the United States.” He adds: “Some populations assimilate more easily than others.”Here’s Vance’s gloss on the Book of Job and the problem of suffering: “We are like golden retrievers trying to understand how an iPhone functions.” Well, the Book of Job left me troubled, but that golden-retriever analogy has fixed things!“People sometimes talk about the size of the universe and how small they feel compared to the infinite stars many light-years away,” Vance writes. “I had never shared that feeling.” This, you can certainly tell. For a man who so often professes to be humble—what made him change his mind about Donald Trump? “Well, Joy, a little humility, actually,” he told Joy Behar on The View—he has very little actual humility on display. Put it this way: Vance’s book is about how he finally decided that Catholicism met his exacting standards.Whenever he experiences regret, it is for saying something the wrong way. His sister tak