(RNS) \u2014 The Catholic vice president of the United States did not come from a well-born or wealthy beginning \u2014 yet, through hard work and determination, he rose to high office. His Catholic faith both guides his public life at the highest levels of government and also maintains his connection to the people he knew growing up.<\/p>\n
I am talking about Joe Biden. And the comparison with JD Vance is instructive.<\/p>\n
Consider for a moment how Biden has talked about his Catholic faith. \u201cMy religion is just an enormous sense of solace. And some of it relates to ritual, some of it relates to comfort and what you\u2019ve done your whole life.\u201d For Biden, faith is rooted in family, memory and long practice \u2014 and shaped by profound loss. Empathy, Biden once told Stephen Colbert on The Late Show<\/a>, is what we gain from loss.\u00a0Biden wears his faith easily in an unfussy way, like his own skin.<\/p>\n JD Vance has a different way. The words \u201crelevant\u201d and \u201crelevance\u201d recur with disconcerting frequency in Vance\u2019s new memoir, \u201cCommunion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,\u201d much as though he is searching in religious faith for the solution to some practical problem.<\/p>\n Parenthood, Vance tells us, made him want \u201cto build a culture of virtue, within my own family, within my community, and within our entire society.\u201d He laments how world leaders had \u201ctaken God out of their postwar oaths and alliances, and they wondered why so much else had been lost as well.\u201d He confesses that \u201cMy big fear isn\u2019t death but that we inherited a great civilization and are slowly letting it fall into disrepair.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201c<\/span>Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith\u201d<\/span> by JD Vance. (Courtesy image)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n For Vance, Catholic faith provides the solidity he sees slipping away everywhere around him.<\/p>\n Long stretches of \u201cCommunion\u201d do not touch on religion almost at all except so far as the case for religion generally is reinforced by the challenges faced by workers, by families, by children, by parents or anyone else who is suffering under the economic system that has rewarded Vance so well for critiquing it. And to Vance\u2019s credit, the passages where he describes the Catholic Church\u2019s teachings about labor, economic justice and human dignity are quite good. Even his exploration of the migration issue\u2019s complexity is evenhanded and thoughtful. I recognize a Catholicism I know in those pages. But there remains a fundamental problem.<\/p>\n Near the book\u2019s end Vance recounts coming upon a crumbling old church building and wondering, \u201cHow long would its current congregation last?\u201d His diagnosis is an impending \u201ccivilizational death,\u201d and here is where Vance\u2019s way reveals itself. Though Vance does not name it, Samuel Huntington\u2019s \u201cclash of civilizations<\/a>\u201d thesis haunts his book. In particular, Vance seems to agree with Huntington that civilizations are fixed things with \u201cobjective elements\u201d that do not change, and so conflict is built into history.\u00a0<\/p>\n It does not enter Vance\u2019s mind that what looks like \u201ccivilizational death\u201d might just be civilizational change, or that the Catholic Church has weathered countless changes across 20 centuries. Instead, Vance seems to feel personally responsible for preventing anything from challenging his civilization or changing the church. Things must remain as they are.<\/p>\n I could be tempted to read Vance\u2019s desire for a solid, unchanging world as a response to the traumas he has described from his younger life. While those traumas certainly are part of the story, I think Vance\u2019s strange account of Catholic faith is more closely related to where he finds himself today.<\/p>\n Vance is preoccupied by the distance he traveled from Appalachia to Silicon Valley. Questions of status and cultural distance pervade his thinking. Mere pages after praising the authenticity of his Ohio family and friends, he shares the unnecessary detail that he got news of the Pennsylvania grand jury report<\/a>\u00a0\u201cwhile we played with our toddler on a Lake Annecy beach,\u201d underscoring how Meemaw\u2019s grandson knows the\u00a0Haute-Savoie<\/a>.<\/p>\n Vance both craves elite status and is repelled by it. His life today is built on defending the working-class people he grew up with from an elite class he has jumped in with both feet to join. He writes about being uncomfortable talking to a therapist because he didn\u2019t like talking \u201cto a stranger\u201d about \u201chow crazy my homelife was.\u201d Later he wrote a book to tell every stranger who would read about it. He knows his children will join \u201cour country\u2019s ruling class\u201d because of the privilege they were born into. Yet he complains that those \u201celite institutions\u201d he is leading them toward are \u201cintellectually and spiritually broken.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n It is obvious Vance is conflicted, and he seems to be using faith to reconcile the tension. Vance, whose intelligence got him an education that lifted him from rural poverty, takes the same stubbornly intellectual path in his return to faith. He read and discussed his way into the Catholic Church, name-checking Augustine, Aquinas, Chesterton and Lewis along the way. Vance praises the \u201chierarchy and sense of authority\u201d he found in the intellectual richness of Catholicism.<\/p>\n I would like to think Vance can find some lasting comfort in all of this. I wish him well. But Vance\u2019s Catholicism seems a little too instrumentally useful to nurture the deep \u201csolace\u201d Joe Biden once talked about with such peaceful conviction. The restlessness is not gone from Vance\u2019s story. The telling of it finds him trying a little too hard to exert too much control over everything around him.<\/p>\n C.S. Lewis wrote in \u201cMere Christianity\u201d: \u201cNothing that you have not given away will really be yours.\u201d That means giving up not only money and possessions, but the whole illusion of control that tells us we can save civilization or keep the church right where we want it. This is the \u201clittle way<\/a>\u201d of humility \u2014 of a faith that believes civilization\u2019s questions were settled on a hill outside Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. The gates of hell shall not prevail (Matthew 16:18).<\/p>\n The emphasis of \u201cCommunion\u201d is a little too much on \u201cMy Way.\u201d I think that is not the way that leads toward solace.<\/p>\n (Steven P. Millies is the author of \u201cJoseph Bernardin: Seeking Common Ground<\/a>\u201d and \u201cA Consistent Ethic of Life: Navigating Catholic Engagement With U.S. Politics<\/a>.\u201d The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)<\/em><\/p>\n \n <\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/religionnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/webRNS-Vance-Communion1-244x369.jpg\")
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