Thiel donated a record-setting fifteen million dollars to Vance’s successful 2022 bid for Ohio senator, but his largesse on this score receives no acknowledgment in “Communion,” which portrays the campaign as little more than a lark. “In some ways, my Senate run was a quirky intellectual project: an effort to make what I thought were more explicitly Christian arguments about the economy,” Vance writes. “I focused less on abstractions like the GDP and more on the dignity of workers and the jobs they did.” (As senator, Vance voted against the PRO Act, which would have banned “right-to-work” laws and bolstered protections for unionizing workers; part of why he opposed the bill, he told Politico in 2024, was because “it’s dumb to hand over a lot of power to a union leadership that is aggressively anti-Republican.”)
The invocation of “explicitly Christian arguments” is one of several instances in “Communion” when Vance’s approach to political campaigning and governance can seem borderline theocratic. One of his everyday challenges as Vice-President is to figure out “how to take an accepted moral principle and apply it in the real world as a Christian leader.” This conflation of public service with puffed-chest religious crusading is especially jarring when he writes, at length, about his 2025 visit to the Vatican, shortly before the death of Pope Francis, and his tense interactions with officials there, mainly over U.S. immigration policy. “Here I was, the most senior Catholic in the United States government,” Vance recalls, affronted, “and the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes.” He goes on, “I’m one Christian statesman who would welcome an institutional faith less focused on platitudes and more focused on reality.”
It’s hard to imagine a reality-based conversation about the intersection of Catholic ethics and immigration policy with a man who campaigned for the Vice-Presidency by spreading calumnies about Haitian immigrants eating the pet cats and dogs of their neighbors in Ohio. Or who, after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a mother of three during the agency’s siege of Minneapolis, condemned the victim as a “deranged leftist” whose death was a “tragedy of her own making.” Or whose career has been largely bankrolled by the co-founder of Palantir, which has a thirty-million-dollar contract with ICE to provide A.I. surveillance and data-mining technology for hunting and deporting immigrants. Or who uses Elon Musk, the tech trillionaire and former Department of Government Efficiency overseer whose cuts to public-health agencies and infrastructure are projected to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, as an exemplar of how “immigration can bring benefits to the host country in its own right. Just think of Elon Musk and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that trace directly to his decision to come to the United States.”
In emphasizing the supposedly Christian or Catholic nature of his leadership, Vance may be nodding to integralism, a loosely federated intellectual movement also known simply as “political Catholicism,” which holds that civil law and governance should subordinate themselves to Catholic doctrine. But, in April, when he admonished Pope Leo to make sure that his theological remarks are “anchored in the truth,” Vance seemed not to understand that a Catholic is obligated to subordinate himself to the Vicar of Christ. “What is striking about his comments, and devastating for integralism, is the breezy impertinence with which he rebukes the Holy Father,” the Scottish writer Stephen Daisley observed in the conservative religious magazine First Things. Vance, Daisley marvelled, “tells the pope not only to keep his nose out of the affairs of the state but that he is in error on Church doctrine. If this is how a postliberal Catholic, and a convert no less, speaks of the pope’s involvement in politics, the prospect of recruiting postliberal Catholic politicians, Republican or Democrat, who will agree to submit American policymaking to the magisterium of the Church is slim in the extreme.”
One suspects that Vance would have a better grasp of Catholic customs and vibes if he spent more time around rank-and-file parishioners in “fraternal sharing and in ecclesial communion,” to borrow Pope Leo’s words. But Vance admits that, about “half the time these days, we attend Mass at home.” (Your book is called “Communion,” my brother!) A surpassingly strange thing about Vance’s book, in fact, is how often he sounds not much like a Christian at all, Catholic or otherwise. “Religious beliefs are less like certainties such as the boiling point of water—which can be verified through testing—and more like claims about complex systems,” Vance writes. “Take, for example, the following: An increase in the minimum wage would raise the standard of living for low-income people.” Raising wages might sound nice, Vance goes on, but it might also “reduce the number of jobs available to low-income people. . . . The complexity counsels some humility in the face of difficult questions.”
