Recently, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance published a new book titled "Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith". The book tells the story of how Vance, who self-proclaimed to be an atheist, eventually became a Catholic in 2019.
Compared to "The Sad Song of the Countryman," which was written out of pure sentiment and inspired by experiences with Wanstead, this new book "Co-Integration" has a strong political purpose. It is not only used as a means of political propaganda for the author, but also an attempt to propose a new American political agenda.
But there is still much to be explored regarding how Vance believed in Catholicism. This not only reflects Vance himself but also the country and era in which he lived.
I have written several articles about this man, Vance. I think he is too "smart" to be taken at face value. Apart from "Coherence", Vance has also written many articles related to his beliefs. Some of the stories he tells reveal some interesting aspects.
When Vance was a child, like most Americans, he grew up in a Protestant community. He wasn’t really very religious, and his family didn’t particularly enjoy going to church either. It was simply because everyone else was religious, so they followed suit. At that time, Vance believed that being religious meant being ignorant.
But after all, Vance is a smart person. He grew up in a family that struggled, and in a community that also faced challenges. He has witnessed much hypocrisy and suffering. Therefore, he naturally questions those religious beliefs that teach him that good things will happen just by praying. As a result, he becomes what is called an “agnostic”.
How did Vance become a Catholic? Vance said that the moment he rekindled his faith was when he listened to Peter Dutka's speech in 2011, and he was deeply moved by what he said. Subsequently, Vance came into contact with Peter Dutka’s Catholic friends, which led him to reflect on whether he had lost his religious faith.
"Peter Thiel is the smartest person I have ever met, but he is also a Christian. He challenged the social templates I had built—stupid people are Christians, while smart people are atheists."
Now everyone knows that the right-wing faction in Silicon Valley, represented by Peter Thiel, is the major funding source behind Vance. It’s hard to say whether Vance’s later conversion to Catholicism was driven by faith or by profit. However, many of the ideas Vance expressed here do reflect his style.
Wanx is determined to be a “smart person” throughout his life, to become an elite and to escape the religious culture that he believes is full of ignorance in his upbringing environment. In his youth, atheism was more of an identity marker rather than a religious stance—it meant refusing to stand with those who are considered “ordinary people”. When he realized that the real elites he saw also had strong religious beliefs, he naturally wanted to imitate how these seemingly smarter people behaved.
What’s more interesting is that when Vance officially converted to Catholicism in 2019, he was not yet the well-known MAGA figure that people know today. He was even an opponent of the “Make America Great Again” movement. What Vance ultimately chose was not the Protestant community, which is dominant in American society and strongly supports MAGA, but rather Catholicism, which is relatively smaller in scale and has a stronger intellectual and elite character.
This choice is also highly consistent with his life trajectory, where he has been constantly redefining his identity and striving to move from the mass class to the elite circle.
In an article from 2020, Vance recalled a moment when he felt "the touch of God." That day, he was chatting with a conservative Catholic at a bar. Vance felt that the man did not respect the Pope enough, and the conservative defended himself for criticizing the Pope. While the two were arguing, a glass suddenly fell from the counter and shattered right in front of them. Vance later considered this as a manifestation of divine will...
However, since Trump’s second term in office, Vance has frequently followed Trump in publicly criticizing the Pope. This story now reads with a touch of black humor: if Vance truly believed that this was “God’s touch,” then his subsequent change in stance towards the Pope makes this incident even more ironic.
And at another moment, Wanser visited Washington D.C. one day and heard a beautiful hymn along the way. When he met a monk in Washington, that monk invited him to listen to the very same hymn.
Some might ask, aren’t these just coincidences? Vance indeed anticipated this thought and responded in this way:
Vance quoted a statement from "Fever Island," emphasizing that the key isn’t whether these experiences were truly miracles, but rather how they allowed him to truly experience “the touch of God.” You see, Vance has a very high level of debate skills. He cleverly shifted the focus of the discussion from whether these events actually happened to what these experiences meant for himself. This is also why he was able to so successfully rise in politics, and even this year he dared to comment on the theological knowledge of the Pope.
So, you can completely ignore whether these stories are true or just coincidences. But in the context of religious narratives, they represent a very typical scenario: a once-lost lamb, guided back to the herd through continuous revelations from God.
However, what really made me want to complain is that after Vance converted to Catholicism, he seems to attribute all his good qualities to "Catholicism shaping him."
I have no objections to most of the virtues advocated by religion. Of course, whether one believes in religion or not, it is important to be kind to others. However, Vance's claim that his patience towards his son is due to Catholic teachings raises concerns about the relationship between father and son in his family. Do you really need religion to be a good father and husband? If a person needs some external influences to be a good person, then perhaps he isn't really a good person after all.
More importantly, as a political figure, after converting to a religion, Vance is not only concerned with his own salvation, but also tries to elevate this personal salvation into a political plan to transform American society and reshape American culture.
Therefore, in his renowned work 'The Ballad of the Countryman', we can already see the beginnings of this approach. Vance always emphasized the decisive role of culture in society. He believed that to address the decline of the Rust Belt and the tragedies of low-income communities, the key wasn’t to increase welfare, but to reverse the decadent and degenerate social culture, and to reclaim the spirit of struggle and self-responsibility that America once admired.
JD Vance's autobiography *Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis* (HarperCollins)
After all, in Vance's view, it was through hard work that he was able to achieve a class leap. Since he could do it, those who have not made the leap from his hometown can easily be dismissed with one sentence: "It’s because you weren’t hard enough."
When Vance completed “The Melodrama of the Countryman” and officially converted to Catholicism, he did not abandon this mindset. Instead, he further incorporated Catholic ideas into his solutions to the problems of America.
Wanx believes that 'left-wing intellectuals' focus too much on structural external issues—such as job opportunities and resource distribution—while ignoring individual responsibilities. In his view, while people are indeed products of their environment, they also bear the responsibility to change that environment. How you act determines how America will be. When Wanx thinks about what kind of worldview should be used to understand the current situation in America, he recalls the Christianity that he once rejected.
That is to say, after going through a long process of listing various problems in American society, the solution he proposed at the end is still to return to religion.
Actually, this solution is indeed very Americanized. After all, the United States is a religious society. When Vance constantly accuses poverty, drugs, and divorce of being “sins,” isn’t that exactly how American society views these issues? Even without considering the tradition that influenced the founding of the United States—one based on Protestant ethics, which emphasized hard work, frugality, and personal responsibility, and viewed poverty as a moral failure—even in this seemingly secular modern America, the “American Dream” still sanctifies individual struggle. Consequently, individual suffering is also naturally considered a sin.
To some extent, I agree with some of Vance's judgments. Many social problems are not just issues related to material and institutional aspects; culture, values, and even sense of community can have a profound impact. Especially for a Western society that has believed in Christianity for thousands of years, even after experiencing secularization, it remains difficult for social consciousness to fill the spiritual void left by the belief that “God is dead”. After all, not everyone is able to face a world devoid of any supernatural influence alone.
Therefore, for Western societies, the ultimate solution is not to completely abandon religion, but to maintain secular systems while re-packaging old religious logic in new language—just replacing those religious concepts with modern political and cultural discourse.
This is also why many of the "smartest" Silicon Valley elites in Vance's eyes eventually turned to religion—or, more precisely, began creating their own religions. Just as AI companies like Anthropic actively communicate with the Pope and the Vatican, what they truly care about isn’t necessarily the religious authority of the Pope himself, but rather who can redefine morality, give meaning, and become a new spiritual authority in this new technological era. In other words, they aren’t submitting to the Vatican, but rather testing: how heavy is this Vatican? If it’s heavy enough, can it be moved to Silicon Valley?
On April 20, 2025, Pope Francis met briefly with US Vice President Vance. The next day, the Pope passed away. Reuters
But the problem with the United States is that former Americans not only had religion, but also a relatively stable material life. Manufacturing jobs, high wages, and growing incomes all contributed to that religious and moral order. Today, with manufacturing workers in the United States having lost their former material guarantees, Vance demands that they maintain that past morality, which is akin to “motivating employees through corporate culture without discussing salaries,” a rather humorous approach.
But we can also think in reverse: With Wans's intelligence and talent, if there really is any solution in the United States that can rebuild manufacturing and restore class mobility, why would he act like an incompetent leader, using corporate culture as a panacea?
