Newspaper Reader wonders about Oxbridger snobbery, but also about the rise of Vance via Peter Thiel political manipulation, and the manuscript of Hillbilly Elegy by many hands!
Jun 20, 2026
Editor: I will just highlight some of the almost ‘literary crticism’, or more acurately that dependable Oxbridger condescension, as the preferred critical methodology. Though the reader and or listener of Vance’s self-serving chatter is echoed by his critical reviewer. Though the reader is pulled into the vortex of the mendacity, of both the author and the critic!
Culture | Resurrection on the page
J.D. Vance’s second coming
“Communion”, his latest book, shows how the vice-president fails to notice his own vices
Jun 19th 2026
Communion. By J.D. Vance. Harper; 304 pages; $35. William Collins; £20
J.D. Vance is a very godly man, as his very godly new book makes very clear. He goes to church; he is polite to priests; and he has read the Bible (twice, even the dull bits). He tries to be a very godly man in his life, too. He prays to God in intense italics to make him a “good dad”; stars out naughty words like “p***y”; and he ends his book with the word “Amen”. For him, actions matter because, as he says, quoting the Gospel of Matthew in yet more italics, “By their fruits ye shall know them”.
However if ye shall read “Communion”, the vice-president’s religious memoir, ye shall probably also feel a little confused. For which of the fruits of Mr Vance shall ye know him by? Shall ye know him as the man who prissily stars out words like p***y? Or as deputy for Donald Trump, a man who once boasted that he could “grab [women] by the pussy”? Shall ye know him as the person who predicted Mr Trump might be “America’s Hitler”? Or as the man who—as he does here—calls Mr Trump’s words “moral”? It is hard to tell.
Mr Vance used to be far simpler. This is his second literary coming; his first, published in 2016, was “Hillbilly Elegy”. Its title nodded at romantic poetry, but there was little romance here. For page after page, he chronicled the lives of the left-behind in America’s rust belt: people without jobs and with opioid habits. Its heroine, for him, was his grandmother, who he called “Mamaw”—but do not imagine her as a granny in the apron-and-apple-pie vein. When her husband irritated her, she poured gasoline over him, “lit a match, and dropped it on his chest”.
For Americans, the book’s hero was Mr Vance. Just as medieval readers were inspired by stories of saints who did battle with demons and then won eternal life, so modern ones were heartened by how Mr Vance had done battle with his own demons and drug-addicted relatives to ascend to secular sainthood—or, at any rate, a place at Yale Law School. After Mr Trump was elected in 2016, “Hillbilly Elegy” became a sensation—selling over 5m copies worldwide—and it made his name.
Mr Vance’s second coming was always going to be harder. This is not wholly his fault. Virtue, as Milton and Dante discovered, is much less fun than vice: everyone reads “Paradise Lost”; no one bothers with “Paradise Regained”. Everyone knows Dante’s “Inferno”; his “Paradiso” is an also-ran. St Augustine managed a good conversion memoir, “Confessions”, in the fourth century, but he seasoned it with ample sin, having prayed for God to make him good “but not yet”.
God made J.D. Vance good a bit too soon for “Communion” to be much fun. “Hillbilly Elegy” is filled with family tragedy, violence and uncles who do invigorating things like attacking their enemies with electric saws. By its end, however, Mr Vance is ensconced among the elite where his greatest discomfort is attending drinks events with lawyers. At these, he is first baffled by butter knives (surely that’s what index fingers are for?) then starts to doubt the meaning of life. (Lawyers can do that to a man.)
For a time, this is fine: he fills his days with work, ambition, atheism and friends. Then, as he marries and settles down, the God-shaped hole (or, arguably, given Mr Vance’s ambition, the political poll) attracts him to religion. God was not utterly alien to him: his relatives had bashed Bibles as well as each other—but he had never been devout.
Initially he is unsure on denominational differences, except that “Catholics kneeled more and the Pentecostals had better music”. At first his faith feels so anodyne it is almost Anglican: he calls Christianity “my new interest”, as if it were chess or yoga; reads a lot of C.S. Lewis; and is inspired by that great theological thinker, Aslan the lion. St Augustine this is not.
In the end it is Catholicism, with its offer of bells, smells and Satan, that most appeals. Soon he is going to confession (“like therapy, but with less whining and more guilt”), befriending priests and reading Thomas Aquinas. He was baptised in August 2019; today he evangelises with the zeal of the convert.
He quotes the archaic King James version, at length, deplores “false idols” and champions traditional motherhood. Most startlingly, he wants to weaken the traditional American separation of church and state.
But for all the fervour, his faith feels very erratic. At one point he states that Christianity demands “a constant evaluation of trade-offs”, as if Jesus were an ecclesiastical economist rather than, as Catholics believe, the son of God. When covid-19 breaks out, he realises that food might run short, so he buys “enormous bags of rice and flour” and “one thousand rounds of ammunition”. It is almost like reading about the loaves and the fishes.
Editor: The final paragraphs of this Economist Reader’ evaluations are as unimpressive as is J. D Vance political rise to power: via a well placed political actor like Peter Thiel! The cutivation of powerful political actors is indespensable!
Mr Vance is a good writer, but “Communion” is a confusing book. Which Mr Vance is he? The one who bangs on about God’s grace? Or the one who treats people like Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky—a man in need if ever there was one—with a deplorable lack of grace? He keeps repeating, “By their fruits ye shall know them”. Yet by the end of this book, ye shall probably not be much the wiser as to who J.D. Vance is, or was.
Or, most worrying of all, who he shall next become. Though even if he does ascend to the presidency, he may find that fruit is bitter, too. For, as his beloved Matthew says, “What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
https://www.economist.com/culture/2026/06/19/jd-vances-second-coming
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