‘Read Hillbilly Elegy,’ a friend messaged me a decade ago. ‘The author really gets it.’ So I did, and indeed he did. The young and then obscure J.D. Vance showed, through his family travails in Appalachia, how both Republicans and Democrats had in their different ways screwed blue collar, just-about-working-class families like his. The book went platinum and launched his public career.
Three things saved the young Vance from the fate that awaited people like him: a fiercely defensive and religious grandmother (‘Mamaw’), enlisting in the US Marines, and evangelical Christianity. He fell away from this last, however, as he discovered that his fundamentalist faith may have had community love in spades but was very short on good answers to big questions.
The same man who obsesses about virtue is happy to work as chief henchman for a venal moral gargoyle
Communion is the story of his return to faith, this time in the form of Catholicism, a kind of Parable of the Prodigal Veep. It’s really two books in one. Vance reveals that he finished the initial draft seven years ago, when he was received into the church and not long after he considered running for the Senate. Accordingly, the first 175 pages tell the story of his journey in, from and back to faith, while the rest of the book focuses more, if not exclusively, on the public and political implications of that faith. The parts do cohere, however, as Vance’s meta-theme is how Christianity offers the redemptive structure and hope that can put a life (like his) and a civilisation (like the West) back together again.
