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I read JD Vance’s new book. It reveals more than he realizes.

The vice president pitches himself as a humble Catholic convert in a new memoir — but somehow skips the humility part when it comes to politics.

Every few years, presidential hopefuls go through certain rites of passage. They ramp up fundraising, start visiting early primary states, and bulk up their foreign or economic policy credentials.

And, of course, they drop their memoirs.

This week Vice President JD Vance released Communion, a book tracing the arc of his faith and relationship with Christianity. It’s a big, introspective effort to define what he believes, lay out the role he sees for religion in public life, and even offer some hints of what a President Vance might do in office.

For Americans wondering how — or if — Vance can reconcile his Christian faith with serving President Donald Trump and leading his unruly right-wing political movement, it’s a revelatory read, and one that offers a telling look into the movement he may try to reform.

It’s always easy to dismiss a book like this as just another political PR effort (or, as Vanity Fair described his press tour, part of an effort to “sand off his rough edges”), but in Vance’s case there’s reason to mine it for a bit more meaning. Books are part of his origin story as a public figure. His blockbuster 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy was a thoughtful reckoning with the malaise in a wide swath of Middle America. As he acknowledges in Communion, it was that book that established him as a serious political thinker.

A conversation with J.D. Vance, the reluctant interpreter of Trumpism

Vance is a good writer — and reading it as a cradle Catholic myself, I found his faith journey moving. And indeed his book matters, not just because it helps us understand him, but also because it provides answers to some of the big questions about his future, and the future of American conservatism. Can an intellectual Christian really step in to lead a movement birthed by a very un-intellectual, un-Christian president? How sincere is Vance — already an accomplished shapeshifter — about anything he purports to believe?

Spoiler alert: In Communion, Vance doesn’t really resolve the contradiction between his faith and his politics. Instead he lays bare a problem he shares with millions of Republican voters, including the young, drifting men he claims to speak for, and whose faith journeys in many cases mirror his own. In the course of explaining how he came to serve God, he also shows how easy, if not necessary in modern America, it is for him — and for them — to subordinate that faith to politics.

JD Vance’s internal contradictions

If there’s a thesis statement for Vance’s memoir, it comes in a parable that the vice president returns to: In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells a story of how faith is shown through actions and behavior:

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring........

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