I want to talk about why JD Vance must NEVER become President of the United States.
I have just read his book, Communion, about his so-called conversion to the Roman Catholic Church, and I’d like to share a short response I wrote after reading it.
What makes Communion so disingenuous is not that JD Vance found faith. It is that throughout the book, he presents himself as a humble seeker while displaying remarkably little actual humility.
Vance writes that he never feared hell, that he found “liberation in guilt,” and that when the Catholic Church was reeling from child abuse scandals, he would rather have been aboard the sinking Titanic than in a lifeboat.
He explains suffering through the Book of Job by comparing human beings to golden retrievers trying to understand an iPhone. He casually notes that, unlike most people, he’s never looked at the vastness of the universe and felt small.
You can tell.
That same pattern runs throughout the book. Vance invokes Christ, charity, faith, and Catholic social teaching, yet somehow the practical implications of those teachings always seem to align perfectly with his political ambitions and those of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement he now serves.
The truths of the Church never make him feel “small.”
Vance praises immigration when it produces an Elon Musk, but warns darkly that some populations assimilate more easily than others. He acknowledges the suffering caused by immigration enforcement, only to retreat into abstractions about “trade-offs” and “competing values.”
Reading Communion, what struck me was not Vance’s intellectual engagement with Roman Catholic tradition, but how conveniently his faith arrives at conclusions that support Trump’s violently anti-Christian political project.
Like many partially educated converts, Vance is fascinated by theology, systems, and arguments. He can discuss Augustine and Aquinas, natural law, abortion, immigration, and social order at some length.
Yet the simpler, more demanding teachings of Jesus—mercy, humility, loving enemies, welcoming strangers, caring for the vulnerable, and the Beatitudes—keep fading from view.
It is as if the parable of the Good Samaritan had never existed.
Vance attempts to reconcile his nationalism with the universal claims of the Church, but the contradictions are impossible to miss.
This is the same Vance who felt comfortable correcting Pope Leo XIV while dismissing the Pope’s concerns about migrants and human dignity.
It takes a remarkable degree of confidence for a recent convert to explain Catholicism to a pope. It takes even more confidence to serve Donald Trump—a man whose public life has been a running insult to nearly every Christian virtue—and then present oneself as a guide to Christian renewal.
The deepest problem in Communion is that Christianity functions less as a source of judgment than as a source of personal justification.
Whenever the teachings of Jesus collide with power, nationalism, cruelty, political ambition, or loyalty to men such as Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or Peter Thiel, it is never much of a contest.
Power always wins.
The Gospel is welcomed when it supports the agenda, and reinterpreted when it does not.
The Jesus who warned about wealth, power, hypocrisy, and the seduction of empire disappears completely, replaced by a “Christianity” that seems remarkably comfortable blessing the ambitions of billionaires, strongmen, and aspiring rulers while picking on the weak.
Vance has chosen to tie his future to men whose public lives are marked by conduct Christianity once regarded as disqualifying: serial adultery, sexual misconduct, contempt for the vulnerable, contempt for women, support for figures like alleged rapist Andrew Tate, and the worship of wealth.
In Musk’s case, there is also a techno-utopian obsession with engineering the future—including genetic engineering through selective reproduction, a process that depends upon the creation, screening, and destruction of countless “imperfect” embryos.
For JD Vance, who writes passionately about the sanctity of life, that omission is striking.
Yet none of this appears to trouble Vance nearly as much as immigration or the latest culture-war grievances.
Nor does he ever reckon with some of his own most reckless and outright lies, including helping spread the absurd claim that Haitian immigrants were kidnapping and eating people’s pets.
A Christian memoir worthy of the name might have paused over what it means to bear false witness against the vulnerable stranger.
Indeed, many of the people against whom Vance and Trump bear false witness are fellow Catholics.
Instead, as throughout the book, the issue is never whether he was wrong, but whether he was politically effective.
Christianity is supposed to humble us.
It is supposed to place limits on power, beginning with our own.
It is supposed to make us less certain of ourselves, not more.
It is supposed to teach us to repent when we have harmed others.
In Vance’s hands, Christianity becomes something else entirely: a defense brief for power dressed up as a spiritual memoir.
Somewhat facetiously, I’d like to end on this note.
Were the Most Holy Tribunal of Spain—in other words, the Spanish Inquisition—to examine Communion, they might render this judgment:
“We find that the accused professes the Holy Faith with great eloquence and learning, citing the Doctors of the Church with diligence. Yet a grave disorder appears throughout his testimony, in that the accused bends doctrine toward power rather than toward Christ.
He invokes Christ while excusing princes, praises humility whilst courting the mighty, and speaks of charity whilst defending severity toward the stranger.
He approaches the Gospel not as a penitent seeking mercy, but as an advocate seeking authorities to justify conclusions already reached in his own favor.
Thus we find a corruption of the faith’s purpose, in that religion has been enlisted into the service of worldly ambition.”
