JD Vance released his new memoir this week with a provocative origin story about his religious journey. In 2019, as he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, Vance felt the presence of his late grandmother Mamaw urging him forward with one of her favorite phrases: "Time to shit or get off the pot." It was an earthy benediction for a conversion that would eventually position him as the most senior Catholic in the United States government and a probable 2028 presidential candidate.
The conversion marks a striking reversal from his earlier years. Growing up in Appalachia, Vance absorbed a Protestant skepticism toward Catholicism, seeing its rituals, foreign leadership, and veneration of Mary and the saints as exotic and even alien. By college, he had shed Christianity altogether, becoming what he describes as an "angry atheist" influenced by Christopher Hitchens and other anti-religion writers of the 2000s.
What pulled him back was not a sudden moment of crisis but a creeping sense of absence. At Yale Law School, pursuing achievement and credentials in a secular environment, Vance felt something missing. An encounter with venture capitalist Peter Thiel, whom he considered "possibly the smartest person I'd ever met," shattered his conviction that intelligent people rejected faith. Thiel identified openly as Christian, defying the equation Vance had constructed: dumb people were religious, smart people were atheists.
His intellectual curiosity about faith intensified after he married Usha Vance and began thinking about children. He gravitated toward Catholicism not for emotional comfort but for its intellectual rigor. Two Dominican friars, Fr. Dominic Legge and Fr. Henry Stephan, guided his conversion. Both had abandoned promising secular careers to join a religious order dedicated to preaching, which appealed to Vance's respect for intellectual seriousness applied to spiritual matters.
When Vance was received into the church, he chose Augustine of Hippo as his patron saint, the early Christian philosopher whose treatise "The City of God" frames human history as a spiritual battle between forces aligned with God and those corrupted by selfishness and materialism. That choice hints at how Vance views his current role.
A Shift in American Catholic Power
Vance's conversion arrives at a pivotal moment for American Catholicism. Despite representing only about 20 percent of the adult population, Catholics have wielded outsized influence on American conservatism. William F. Buckley Jr., the intellectual architect of the modern right, was a devout Catholic, as are many of the writers, activists, politicians and jurists who shaped the movement. Today, six of the nine US Supreme Court justices are Catholic, including nearly all the court's conservatives.
Vance has become the face of a revitalized conservative Catholicism whose alliance with the Trump movement has created friction with the Vatican itself. He tangled with Pope Francis over immigration policy and took issue with Pope Leo's anti-war stances, putting him in an awkward position between his political leader and the head of his adopted faith. The clashes have shocked many American Catholics.
The broader religious landscape is shifting beneath these power struggles. American Catholicism is in flux. Some parishes have recently reported booms in new converts, often young adults disillusioned by modern secular life. Yet this modest resurgence appears unlikely to arrest the church's decades-long membership decline. Instead, the conversion of highly committed believers like Vance suggests Catholicism may survive in a leaner, more fervent form.
Political scientists have documented a dramatic realignment. A 2025 survey found that 40 percent of priests ordained between 1980 and 1989 identified as liberal, compared with only 11 percent of those ordained since 2020. White Catholics were evenly split between Democrats and Republicans as recently as 2009; they now tilt Republican. This shift reflects a broader "selection effect," according to Ryan Burge, a political scientist and author of "The Vanishing Church." As society has become more secular, those drawn to active religious commitment tend to be more conservative, while "cradle Catholics" raised in the faith but rarely attending church are more likely to be liberal and to drift away.
Vance's memoir "Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith" attempts to frame his conversion as a path beyond the left-right divide, offering what he calls a "third way" rooted in Catholic thought. Yet his tenure as vice president has involved defending hardline stances on immigration and law enforcement, spreading false rumors about Haitian migrants, and seeming to court online Christian culture warriors more than to represent the broader American electorate.
In his book, Vance does walk back his 2021 comment about "childless cat ladies," calling it "a boneheaded comment, intentionally (and successfully) provocative rather than illuminating." But he gestures at a larger vision of himself as a civilizational voice delivering hard truths to a decadent West, much like Augustine. "My big fear isn't death," he writes, "but that we inherited a great civilization and are slowly letting it fall into disrepair."
If Vance becomes president, he would be only the third Catholic in the White House and the first to hold the office as a Republican. His memoir reveals a man who spent his twenties rejecting the faith of his childhood, only to return to it through intellectual conviction rather than emotional conversion. Whether that intellectual framework will guide his future politics, or whether he remains primarily a vessel for MAGA's cultural ambitions dressed in religious language, remains an open question.
Author James Rodriguez: "Vance's sudden embrace of Catholicism feels less like redemption and more like recruitment, a high-profile conversion that signals something deeper about where American conservatism is heading."
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