It is not every day that the sitting vice president of the United States writes a book about his conversion to Roman Catholicism, which he calls the story of “how I regained my faith.” In fact, there have been no such days before now. With Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, JD Vance has broken new ground, and Catholics, along with others, ought to take note. They have done so. Given the fact that Vance is not only the vice president but also the leading contender to be the next presidential nominee for the Republican Party, the book has garnered a healthy number of reviews. I have read as many as I could find. On the whole, it did not make for pleasant or informative reading. Rather, more often than not, one finds politics blotting out an interesting and important story of coming to faith.

It will shock precisely no one that politically liberal outlets have trashed the book. If you, for some reason, need examples of how nasty some writers can be about a person’s story of religious conversion, you can check out the two takes of the Atlantic, here and here, and two from the New Yorker, here and here. It seems that more than one writer from these outlets wanted to get in on the fun. If that’s not enough, check out “J.D. Vance Wrote a Book to Convince You His Wife Doesn’t Hate Him” from The Cut. Although each reviewer has his or her own angle, there is a predictable commonality. Each hates Donald Trump and hates Vance for being his vice president. Even worse, they hate Vance for not sharing their hate, despite his elite education and financial success. The fact that Vance was once an articulate critic of the president, befitting his Yale background, rankles them to no end. In that sense, he is a class-traitor as well as a turncoat. 

Accordingly, they put the worst possible construal on everything he says. Some even take the opportunity to retro-trash Vance’s previous book on his upbringing in Appalachia, the highly-regarded Hillbilly Elegy. It turns out that it was not that good after all, and grossly uncharitable to the people with whom he grew up. When dealing with its sequel, the focus is on undermining the sincerity of Vance’s religious quest.