Driving back to his Marine Corps base in North Carolina alone after attending his grandmother’s funeral, a despondent J. D. Vance was steering through Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains when a combination of slippery roads and bad luck sent his car hurtling toward a guardrail. What came next, he describes as an almost “supernatural experience.” Instead of crashing through the guardrail and sliding off the mountain, the car, he says, mysteriously stopped.“Even during my later years as a strident atheist, the experience sat there inconveniently in the back of my mind,” Vance writes in his new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. “It was as if it existed to annoy me, to challenge the confidence I had in the laws of the universe and the idea that I sat firmly—and alone—in life’s driver’s seat.”Communion, a copy of which I obtained in advance of its release tomorrow, reads as a sequel to Vance’s first book, Hillbilly Elegy. It is billed as a conversion narrative, a reflection on Vance’s 2019 embrace of Catholicism. In an interview, Vance told me that he believes it is appropriate for political leaders “to talk about what influences them, what motivates them, what inspires them.” He added that there is a certain “humility and grace” required of political leaders and said it was his aim to project those things in the book.A memoir is a rite of passage for anyone contemplating a run for president. Vance’s first book catapulted him to prominence with its portrait of working-class white America. In the decade since it was published, however, much has changed—both for the country and for Vance.Communion also tells the story of Vance’s other conversion: from ardent Never Trumper to Donald Trump’s vice president, a shift that he argues was driven not by ambition but by the belief that Trump had proved himself an effective president. Not that he expects everyone to believe that. “To my critics, it was a politically cynical maneuver to gain political power. I doubt I’ll ever change their minds,” he writes.Much of the book is a rumination on matters ethical and spiritual—a perhaps not-so-subtle way to show how he’s different from the man currently in the White House, whose office Vance is widely expected to seek two years from now. Although the book doesn’t directly address whether the vice president intends to run in 2028, it offers some clues, including a notably softer… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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