Communion Summary: J.D. Vance On Christianity, Success, Family, Politics And Faith

His Journey From Atheism To Catholicism And What It Means

What J.D. Vance Really Says About God, America And His Own Life

Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith is J.D. Vance’s second memoir, published by Harper in the United States on June 16, 2026. It follows Hillbilly Elegy, the 2016 memoir that turned Vance from a relatively unknown venture capitalist into a nationally recognised commentator and eventually one of America’s most consequential political figures.

The timing inevitably changes how the book is read. Vance published it while serving as Vice President of the United States and amid widespread speculation about his future beyond the Trump administration. That makes Communion simultaneously a spiritual memoir, a continuation of his personal mythology and a document explaining how one of America's most powerful politicians wants his beliefs to be understood.

The Big Idea Of The Book

The central claim of Communion is simpler than its political implications.

Vance believes that he spent years treating life as a problem of escape and acquisition. Escape instability. Earn credentials. Enter elite institutions. Make money. Become successful. Build the kind of life that childhood deprivation had made seem almost unimaginable.

Then he discovered that achievement could improve his circumstances without supplying a coherent answer to why those circumstances mattered.

His return to Christianity is presented as the answer to that absence.

The spiritual logic of the memoir therefore runs in almost the opposite direction to the conventional American success story. Vance does not deny the value of education, work, income or achievement. He argues that they become dangerous when they move from being instruments of a good life to substitutes for one.

That distinction connects almost everything in Communion: childhood religion, his grandmother, the Marines, atheism, Yale, money, marriage, fatherhood, Catholicism and eventually politics.

The book’s deepest conflict is between achievement as identity and faith as orientation.

The Story In One Flow

Christianity Comes Before Theology

Vance’s religious story begins before he has the vocabulary to turn religion into an intellectual system.

His childhood involved exposure to different forms of American Protestant Christianity, including Baptist, Methodist, evangelical and non-denominational traditions. He remembers reading the Bible extensively as a boy and taking religious belief seriously, even though the institutions surrounding that belief could be inconsistent.

The important point is that Christianity initially reaches him through people and ritual rather than sophisticated theology.

Family members sing hymns. Churches provide structure. Scripture belongs to the cultural environment of his childhood. Religion is tied to memory, belonging and the possibility that the turbulence around him exists inside some larger moral order.

That distinction becomes important later.

Vance writes that his faith was never merely intellectual. An account discussed in the Washington Examiner emphasises his memory of relatives gathering around his dying great-grandmother and singing hymns, and his sense that religious practice was rooted in ritual and emotion as much as abstract propositions.

Yet childhood Christianity also arrives alongside instability.

Readers familiar with Hillbilly Elegy will recognise the background: a turbulent family, his mother’s addiction, an intermittently present father and the enormous influence of his grandmother, Mamaw.

Religion cannot be detached from those experiences because Vance’s eventual rejection of Christianity is not presented as the result of winning an intellectual argument against God.

It is partly emotional.

Mamaw Gives Him Something To Stand On

Vance’s grandmother remains one of the central figures in his internal world.

She supplies the kind of stability that other parts of his childhood fail to provide. Whatever her imperfections, Mamaw represents permanence, loyalty and a moral centre.

Her importance also explains why her death damages more than Vance’s family life.

According to Vance’s account, after she died there was no longer anybody exerting much pressure on him to maintain his faith. Christianity gradually became irrelevant to him, including during his Marine service in Iraq. By the time his military service ended in 2006, he says he was no longer meaningfully Christian.

This is one of the most important details in Communion because it complicates the usual believer-versus-atheist story.

Vance does not describe himself reading one devastating philosophical argument and suddenly deciding God cannot exist.

The bond weakens before the doctrine does.

Religion had been connected to relationships, memory and community. When some of those structures disintegrate, belief becomes easier to discard.

Vance describes the path toward atheism in terms of sadness and betrayal rather than intellectual liberation. In that telling, disbelief becomes another stage of personal dislocation.

The Marines Give Him Discipline, But Not Faith

The Marine Corps matters in Vance’s story because it demonstrates a recurring pattern.

External structures can change him.

The military gives him discipline, responsibility and exposure to a world larger than the chaotic environment from which he came. Those lessons help make his later ascent possible.

But structure alone does not restore belief.

Even serving in Iraq does not produce a battlefield conversion.

This matters because Communion repeatedly refuses the dramatic conversion template. Vance does not claim that one supernatural moment turns an atheist into a committed Catholic.

There are moments he later interprets spiritually, including a frightening car incident after his grandmother’s funeral. Returning to base on a rain-slicked road, he lost control of his vehicle but stopped before what he feared could have been a catastrophic crash. Yet even an experience that might have been retrospectively framed as divine intervention does not immediately return him to Christianity.

The journey is incremental.

He keeps moving.

Atheism Becomes Part Of Reinvention

Leaving the Marines is followed by the educational ascent that eventually becomes central to the Vance public story.

Ohio State leads to Yale Law School.

The movement is extraordinary in conventional status terms: a boy from a deeply unstable working-class background enters one of America’s most prestigious institutions.

But Communion treats this success with greater suspicion than Hillbilly Elegy did.

The more Vance enters the meritocratic world, the easier it becomes to understand existence through measurable achievement.

Credentials matter.

Money matters.

Professional access matters.

Being accepted into institutions that once seemed impossibly remote matters.

Atheism fits comfortably into this phase because the world can increasingly be understood as something he has learned to manipulate successfully.

He does not need transcendence to explain a promotion.

He does not need God to explain a law degree.

He does not need religious belief to demonstrate that he has escaped the circumstances into which he was born.

But an unresolved problem remains: the better Vance becomes at winning the game, the less certain he becomes that winning it answers the larger question.

Ayn Rand Offers An Alternative Religion Of Achievement

One of the revealing intellectual stops in Vance’s journey is Ayn Rand.

Rand’s philosophy has attracted generations of ambitious readers because it provides a morally charged defence of individual agency, production and self-reliance. For somebody escaping dysfunction, its appeal is easy to understand.

If dependency and disorder have caused enormous suffering, then independence looks not merely useful but virtuous.

Vance was drawn toward that worldview during his secular period. Yet Communion ultimately presents it as unable to satisfy what Christianity eventually supplies.

The problem is not ambition itself.

It is the attempt to construct a complete moral world out of ambition.

Randian individualism can tell an ambitious young person that achievement should not produce guilt. It is less equipped, in Vance’s account, to explain sacrifice, unconditional obligation, mercy or why somebody's worth should survive their economic uselessness.

The contrast becomes one of the book’s recurring tensions: What are people for?

If their value is fundamentally tied to autonomy and productivity, then dependency becomes failure.

Christianity gives Vance a different answer. A person has worth before demonstrating usefulness.

That becomes particularly important once he becomes a husband and father.

Yale Gives Him Access To The Elite World He Wanted

Yale is another major threshold.

Vance enters a world populated by people who understand professional institutions and social codes that had once been foreign to him.

This creates opportunity, but it also sharpens his suspicion of elite culture.

He becomes increasingly conscious that prestigious institutions can create their own moral orthodoxies. Their members may think of themselves as liberated from traditional religious conformity while imposing other forms of conformity through status, professional incentives and social approval.

That argument later becomes political, and sometimes much less persuasive. But autobiographically it serves an important function.

Vance has reached the territory he once imagined successful people inhabited.

He discovers that they are not necessarily more certain about how to live.

Elite education can increase intelligence and opportunity without resolving the human questions religion addresses: suffering, obligation, mortality, family, sacrifice and meaning.

The ladder works.

The destination disappoints.

Usha Changes The Equation

Marriage is one of the quiet turning points in Communion.

Usha Vance does not function as somebody who simply converts her husband. She was raised in a Hindu family, making Vance’s eventual Catholicism the product of a more complex household than a straightforward Christian marriage narrative might suggest.

What marriage does is shift the centre of Vance’s life away from individual advancement.

A spouse creates obligations that cannot be reduced to career optimisation.

Children intensify them.

The person who has spent years building himself now becomes responsible for people whose needs may conflict with his own.

That changes the meaning of success.

Vance increasingly notices that people around him whose lives are structured by faith appear to possess something he lacks. In interviews surrounding the book’s release, he described looking at Christians who seemed to have important elements of life better ordered despite lacking whatever secular advantage was supposed to make them superior.

This is the psychological hinge of the conversion.

Vance does not return to Christianity because he suddenly becomes less ambitious.

He returns partly because ambition has succeeded.

He has enough evidence to know its limits.

More Money Does Not Resolve The Problem

The chapter title “More Money, More Problems” makes the argument unusually explicit.

As Vance moves into professional success and venture capital, the material conditions of his life change dramatically from childhood.

That should, according to a crude version of the meritocratic promise, complete the story.

It does not.

Money reduces many forms of insecurity. Communion is not making the absurd claim that poverty and wealth are equivalent.

Instead, Vance challenges the idea that wealth possesses unlimited explanatory or psychological power.

Once basic insecurity recedes, money can become a scoreboard.

More ceases to have a natural stopping point.

The question changes from “Do I have enough?” to “How do I compare?”

Professional life encourages the same expansion. A prestigious qualification creates demand for a prestigious job. One success establishes a new baseline. A higher income changes the peer group against which income is measured.

The mechanism has no automatic endpoint.

That is why Vance’s criticism of materialism is more interesting when kept personal than when expanded into politics.

He knows what upward mobility feels like from inside.

His problem was not that the ladder failed him.

It was that the ladder worked and still could not tell him where to stop climbing.

Peter Thiel And René Girard Open Another Door

Peter Thiel becomes important not merely as Vance’s later political and professional patron but as an intellectual influence.

Through ideas associated with French thinker René Girard, Vance encounters a framework for understanding human desire as imitative.

Girard argued, in simplified form, that human beings frequently learn what to desire by observing what other people desire. Competition therefore develops not only because two people independently want a scarce object, but because each person's desire reinforces the other's.

For somebody immersed in elite education, venture capital and later politics, the attraction is obvious.

Status systems are mimetic machines.

People compete for the credential because other high-status people value it.

They want the prestigious job partly because it is prestigious.

They seek wealth partly because wealth signals victory relative to peers.

The result can be an extraordinary accumulation of achievement without an independently chosen definition of enough.

Kirkus identifies Girard as one of the significant intellectual influences Vance discusses in explaining his conversion, alongside Thiel's role in exposing him to those ideas.

Christianity provides a potential exit from that competition because it relocates value outside the status contest.

At least in theory.

That qualification becomes increasingly important once Communion reaches politics.

Catholicism Begins To Feel Like Home

Vance’s movement back toward Christianity eventually becomes a movement toward Catholicism.

Again, the process is gradual.

He reads.

He encounters Christian thinkers including Augustine and C. S. Lewis.

He reconsiders the philosophical assumptions underlying his atheism.

Family life alters his priorities.

Christianity starts to appear less like a discarded remnant of childhood and more like an explanation for aspects of life his secular worldview has failed to organise.

During a family trip to France in 2018, Vance experienced a significant moment in a cathedral that helped consolidate the direction he was already travelling. The following year, aged 35, he entered the Roman Catholic Church.

What attracts him is not merely ceremony.

Catholicism offers institutional memory.

It offers intellectual tradition.

It possesses doctrines that do not have to be reinvented every time culture changes.

For somebody whose childhood involved disorder and whose adulthood exposed him to institutions he considered intellectually fashionable but morally unstable, that permanence is deeply attractive.

Catholicism tells him that truth does not require his generation's approval.

It also imposes something harder: belonging to a church whose teachings will not always agree with his politics.

That becomes the unresolved conflict at the centre of the second half of the book.

The Main People Inside The Story

Mamaw

Mamaw represents the bridge between Vance’s childhood and his moral formation.

Her importance goes beyond affection. She demonstrates how belief is transmitted socially.

When she disappears, part of the structure supporting his Christianity disappears with her.

The lesson is uncomfortable for anyone who imagines faith as purely intellectual: people often believe through relationships before they learn to defend belief through arguments.

Usha Vance

Usha is crucial because marriage forces Vance beyond the logic of individual advancement.

She is also important precisely because she does not fit an easy conversion narrative. Vance’s Catholicism emerges inside an interfaith marriage rather than a household in which one partner simply reproduces the other's religion.

By 2026 the couple had three children and were expecting a fourth, and Vance increasingly connects family with his broader belief that modern societies have undervalued parenthood and created structures hostile to family formation.

Peter Thiel

Thiel matters as a gateway between Vance’s intellectual and professional lives.

The connection to René Girard gives Vance language for explaining why ambition can become self-reinforcing and why supposedly independent people may actually be copying each other's desires.

That influence also complicates the book. Critics have questioned how much of Vance’s philosophical framework reflects ideas circulating through Thiel's intellectual world rather than a purely independent theological evolution.

The Church

The Catholic Church effectively becomes another character.

At first, it appears as the institution capable of giving Vance continuity, discipline and intellectual depth.

Later, it becomes something more troublesome.

A church is useful as moral authority only if it retains the ability to say no to you.

That becomes the test Communion never completely resolves.

The Moment Everything Changes

The obvious turning point is Vance’s conversion in 2019.

The more consequential one comes earlier.

It is the recognition that achievement cannot provide the thing he has been asking achievement to provide.

That changes the direction of his story.

Before that realisation, the solution to dissatisfaction can always be another accomplishment.

Another qualification.

More money.

More influence.

A better professional circle.

After it, the problem is no longer how to acquire more.

It becomes how to determine what deserves to be desired at all.

That is a much harder question because it means the successful person can no longer assume success validates the values used to pursue it.

From Personal Faith To Political Belief

The later sections of Communion move beyond conversion and ask how Christianity should shape public life.

This is where the book becomes both more consequential and more vulnerable.

Vance worries about low birth rates, weakened families, social fragmentation, technology, economic systems and cultural individualism.

His concern about birth rates is connected to his controversial 2021 remark attacking Democratic leaders as “childless cat ladies.” In Communion, he explicitly calls that comment boneheaded and acknowledges that deliberate provocation obscured rather than strengthened the argument he wanted to make about societies becoming hostile to family formation.

That admission is important.

It demonstrates at least one moment where Vance applies the Christian language of failure to himself rather than exclusively to his opponents.

But it also exposes a recurring problem.

The interesting question is not whether insulting childless people was politically unwise. It is whether Vance’s underlying analysis adequately distinguishes voluntary childlessness, infertility, delayed family formation, economic pressure, cultural change and the many reasons adults may not have children.

A moral concern can become less useful when compressed into a political tribe's slogan.

Communion is strongest whenever Vance resists that compression.

It weakens whenever he embraces it.

When In Rome

The tension becomes clearest in Vance’s account of his relationship with the institutional Catholic Church.

In April 2025, during a trip to Rome, Vance met Vatican officials amid disagreement over the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

He later described aspects of those discussions as unsatisfying, objecting to what he regarded as clichés and insufficiently specific moral arguments. He briefly met Pope Francis the following morning. Francis died the next day.

The episode is unusually revealing because Vance has chosen a church partly because it represents authority beyond contemporary fashion.

But what happens when that authority disagrees with him?

Immigration supplies the test.

Vance has previously invoked the Christian concept of ordo amoris — an ordering of love and obligation — when arguing that people possess stronger duties toward family, neighbours and fellow citizens than toward distant strangers.

Critics within Catholic theology argue that this interpretation risks transforming an order of responsibility into a permission structure for excluding outsiders. Pope Francis publicly offered a contrasting emphasis, pointing toward the Good Samaritan and a fraternity that crosses boundaries.

One does not have to settle the entire theological argument to understand why it matters to Communion.

Vance’s conversion is partly a rejection of radical individual sovereignty.

Catholicism means accepting that truth does not belong entirely to the self.

Yet in the political sections, critics argue that Vance sometimes appears willing to subordinate the church's inconvenient social teachings to conclusions he already holds politically.

America Magazine’s review captures this tension particularly sharply: it takes Vance’s conversion testimony seriously while arguing that he understands the individual transformation of Christianity more completely than the communal obligations implied by Catholicism itself.

That may be the central unresolved contradiction of the book.

What The Book Is Really About

On the surface, Communion is about religious conversion.

Underneath it, the book is about authority.

Who gets to tell you what a good life is?

Your family?

Your childhood community?

Your employer?

Yale?

The market?

Your political tribe?

Your desires?

Your church?

God?

Vance spends the first part of his life escaping authorities he has reason to distrust.

That makes him unusually successful at self-direction.

But complete self-direction eventually becomes its own problem.

If the individual alone decides what matters, then desire has no external referee.

Money can always become more money.

Achievement can always become another achievement.

Politics can always demand another victory.

Catholicism attracts Vance partly because it establishes a moral order that the individual did not create.

That is why the conflicts between Vance and the church are not side issues.

They are the test of the entire argument.

The Strongest Idea In Communion

The strongest idea is Vance’s attack on success without a stopping rule.

Modern meritocracy teaches people how to compete much more effectively than it teaches them what victory should mean.

A talented person can spend decades making rational short-term decisions that collectively produce a life he never consciously chose.

Study harder.

Get into the better university.

Take the prestigious job.

Earn more.

Move into the higher-status network.

Accept more responsibility.

Acquire greater influence.

Every step makes sense.

Then one day the person discovers there was never an agreed destination.

Vance’s spiritual answer is that human desire needs an external order.

You need some principle capable of telling you that an available promotion is not automatically worth taking, that a larger income can cost too much, that family obligations outrank professional vanity, and that another person's value does not depend on their contribution to your ambitions.

Whether the reader accepts Catholicism or not, the diagnosis survives.

A life organised solely by optimisation eventually needs to answer: optimisation for what?

What The Book Proves

Communion convincingly demonstrates that Vance’s religious conversion cannot be adequately understood as a sudden political branding exercise.

The trajectory predates his vice-presidential career.

The intellectual and emotional movement runs through his childhood, grandmother, atheism, professional success, marriage, fatherhood, Girardian influences and eventual baptism in 2019.

That does not prove every contemporary political claim Vance attaches to Christianity.

It does make dismissing the faith itself as obviously fake too simplistic.

Several critics hostile to Vance politically have nevertheless conceded that portions of the conversion narrative contain genuine introspection. Kirkus calls the religious exploration thoughtful even while criticising the politics; America Magazine similarly argues that the early evidence supports taking the conversion seriously.

What The Book Does Not Prove

It does not prove that Christianity automatically validates Vance’s politics.

That distinction is essential.

A person can sincerely become Catholic and still interpret Catholic teaching selectively.

A political programme does not become Christian merely because its advocate is Christian.

Nor does Communion demonstrate that secular people cannot construct meaningful lives, that economic success is inherently corrupting or that social breakdown can be reduced to declining religious belief.

These are much larger claims than autobiographical testimony can establish.

Vance is strongest when saying: this is what happened to me.

He is weaker when implying: therefore this explains what happened to society.

What Most Summaries Miss

The crucial transformation in Communion is not atheism to Catholicism.

It is escape to belonging.

Young Vance survives partly by learning to leave things behind.

Chaos.

Poverty.

Instability.

Limited expectations.

Cultural isolation.

Professional marginality.

Escaping those conditions requires exceptional agency.

Yet religion eventually asks him to develop almost the opposite capacity: to accept limits, commitments and obligations he cannot simply abandon when something more advantageous appears.

Marriage works that way.

Parenthood works that way.

Serious religious membership works that way.

Even citizenship, in Vance’s political philosophy, works that way.

That creates the paradox at the centre of his worldview.

The man formed by escape becomes an advocate of attachment.

What Most People Misunderstand

A shallow reading of Communion treats it either as proof that Vance has found ultimate truth or proof that his religion is cynical political marketing.

Neither interpretation is very useful.

The more interesting reading is that Vance appears sincerely converted and still internally unresolved.

Conversion does not eliminate contradiction.

It gives contradiction a language.

The book repeatedly reveals a person attempting to determine where Christian obligation ends and political responsibility begins.

Sometimes those two reinforce one another.

Sometimes they clash.

And the clashes tell the reader more than the easy agreements.

The Dangerous Misreading

The dangerous reading of Communion is that religious conviction automatically makes political judgement morally superior.

Vance himself gives readers reasons not to make that mistake.

His apology for the “childless cat ladies” remark demonstrates that somebody can believe he is defending an important moral principle while communicating it badly and unfairly.

The broader principle applies elsewhere too.

Conviction increases confidence.

It does not guarantee correctness.

Faith can constrain power.

It can also be recruited to justify power.

The difference depends partly on whether the believer allows the religion to challenge conclusions he already wants.

The Book’s Weakest Point

The weakness is the transition from personal diagnosis to social prescription.

Vance knows himself better than he knows entire societies.

His account of how ambition, money and status failed to provide him with enough meaning is psychologically specific.

When similar reasoning expands toward immigration, demographics, economics and national identity, the causal chains become much harder to establish.

The critical reception reflects that divide.

Book Marks currently aggregates a heavily negative group of major reviews. Slate's assessment, as summarised there, regards the earlier portion as thoughtful before seeing a deterioration when the book becomes conventionally political; the Wall Street Journal criticism focuses on straw-man versions of opposing economic positions. Rowan Williams, writing in The Guardian, is considerably more sympathetic to the seriousness of Vance’s spiritual questioning while still identifying shaky argument and unresolved tensions.

That split makes sense.

The autobiographical evidence belongs to Vance.

The social conclusions require more than autobiography.

The Taylor Tailored Interpretation

The most revealing way to read Communion is as the second half of the American Dream.

Hillbilly Elegy asks how somebody escapes.

Communion asks what happens after he succeeds.

The first problem is scarcity.

The second is direction.

Those problems require different virtues.

Scarcity rewards ambition, toughness, mobility and obsessive self-improvement.

Direction requires limits.

It requires deciding that some opportunities should be refused, some relationships cannot be optimised, some obligations are permanent and some measures of success are false.

That is why Catholicism makes psychological sense inside Vance’s story even before considering whether its theological claims are true.

It offers something his upward mobility never could:

a stopping rule.

It tells the person who has learned to keep climbing that climbing is not the purpose of being alive.

The irony is that Vance then enters politics — perhaps the most status-driven, competitive and mimetic arena available.

That means Communion does not end the experiment.

It documents the beginning of its hardest phase.

Can the values that supposedly rescued Vance from ambition govern him after ambition has delivered extraordinary power?

That question cannot be answered by the book.

His future conduct will answer it.

Why This Book Matters Now

Communion matters beyond readers interested in Vance because the problem it identifies is becoming common.

Modern societies are exceptionally good at measuring certain forms of progress.

Salary.

Qualifications.

Property.

Followers.

Rankings.

Promotions.

Votes.

Productivity.

Net worth.

Those metrics are valuable precisely because they are measurable.

But the things people repeatedly identify as making life worth living — love, belonging, purpose, trust, family, friendship, moral integrity — resist clean measurement.

That creates a structural temptation.

People optimise what can be counted and neglect what cannot.

Vance’s Christian answer will not persuade everyone.

His question should.

If your current definition of success works perfectly, and you achieve all of it, what exactly will the achievement have been for?

If You Only Remember Three Ideas

1. Success Needs A Definition Of Enough

Ambition is useful when it moves somebody out of avoidable limitation.

It becomes dangerous when no achievement is permitted to count as sufficient.

Without a stopping rule, success simply upgrades the standard against which the next success will be measured.

2. Beliefs Are Sustained By Communities As Well As Arguments

Vance’s loss of faith after the death of Mamaw illustrates how supposedly intellectual convictions are often embedded within relationships, rituals and communities.

Human beings rarely construct themselves from propositions alone.

3. A Moral Authority Matters Most When It Disagrees With You

Joining a religion because it confirms your existing views proves very little.

The meaningful test arrives when doctrine, community or moral obligation obstructs something you already want.

That is the unresolved test hanging over Communion.

The Sentence That Explains The Book

J.D. Vance spent his youth learning how to escape the world that formed him, then discovered that a meaningful adult life required choosing what he was willing to belong to.

The Real-Life Test

You do not need to become Catholic to test the strongest argument in Communion.

Take whatever you currently want most.

A salary.

A promotion.

A relationship.

A business.

Recognition.

Political influence.

A larger house.

More followers.

Then ask two questions.

First: What problem do I believe obtaining this will solve?

Second: What happens if it works?

The second question is harder.

If earning £100,000 produces the desire for £150,000 rather than satisfaction, income may have changed without the underlying mechanism changing.

If professional recognition only moves you into a more prestigious comparison group, status has increased while insecurity survives.

If one million followers produces anxiety about reaching two million, visibility has not solved the need for validation.

That is where Vance's memoir is most useful.

Achievement is not the enemy.

Unexamined desire is.

Five Questions To Test Whether You Understood The Book

1. Why does Vance present his atheism as an emotional and social development as well as an intellectual one?

2. What did professional and financial success give Vance, and what does he believe they were incapable of giving him?

3. Why are marriage and fatherhood important to his religious return rather than merely biographical background?

4. How does René Girard’s understanding of imitative desire help explain Vance’s criticism of status competition and meritocracy?

5. Why do Vance’s disagreements with Catholic authorities over issues such as immigration create a more important test of his conversion than the teachings with which he already agrees?

The Final Lesson

Communion begins with a man trying to explain why he believes in God.

Its more interesting achievement is exposing the limits of everything he once tried instead.

Vance escaped a difficult childhood, served in the Marines, reached Yale, entered venture capital, wrote a bestseller, became a senator and ultimately Vice President of the United States.