Vice President JD Vance, once a self-described “angry atheist,” details his path to Roman Catholicism and argues for a Catholic-influenced third way in American politics in his memoir “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” according to a report by The Guardian.
The Guardian reported that Vance was received into the Catholic Church in 2019, about five years before he was elected vice president alongside Donald Trump — a running mate Vance once described as unworthy of Christians’ support. His conversion was guided by two Dominican friars, Fr Dominic Legge and Fr Henry Stephan, whom Vance was drawn to, he wrote, because both were academic achievers who had left secular careers for the holy order. He chose the early Christian philosopher Augustine of Hippo as his patron saint, citing Augustine’s treatise “The City of God” as an influence on his conversion.
The book traces Vance’s religious evolution from the “casual and unchurched Christianity” of his grandmother Mamaw, through the Pentecostalism of his father, through atheism during his college and Marine Corps years, to orthodox Catholicism. In the memoir, Vance writes that his grandmother believed abortion was “an individual moral matter and should remain legal.” As a teenager in his father’s Pentecostal church, he wrote, “The Christian faith I’d developed by the time I was fifteen was adversarial: disengaged from mainstream culture, even terrified of it.”
By the end of his deployment in Iraq in 2006, Vance writes, “I was no longer, in any real sense, a Christian.” At Yale Law School, an encounter with venture capitalist Peter Thiel — whom Vance called “possibly the smartest person I’d ever met” and who “identified very openly as a Christian” — helped rekindle his interest in faith.
The Guardian noted that Vance has become “the country’s most prominent avatar of a revitalized conservative Catholicism” whose alliance with the MAGA movement has led to public clashes with the Vatican. Vance tangled with Pope Francis over immigration policy and earlier this year took issue with Pope Leo XIV’s anti-war stances.
In his book, Vance walks back some of his more controversial remarks. He refers to his 2021 comment about “childless cat ladies” as “a boneheaded comment, intentionally (and successfully) provocative rather than illuminating,” according to The Guardian. He also writes, “If your political argument on the abortion question — or any other — fails to persuade your fellow Americans, you have to make a better argument.”
The Guardian reported that Vance’s book argues for an approach inspired by “integralism,” a political theory that Catholic morality should influence government. “My big fear isn’t death,” Vance writes, “but that we inherited a great civilization and are slowly letting it fall into disrepair.”
The profile comes amid broader shifts in American Catholicism. The Guardian cited a 2025 survey showing that 40% of priests ordained in the US between 1980 and 1989 identified as liberal, but only 11% of priests ordained since 2020. White Catholics, who were evenly split between Democrats and Republicans in 2009, now tilt Republican, The Guardian reported.
Political scientist Ryan Burge, author of “The Vanishing Church,” told The Guardian that Vance “is, statistically, a weirdo” because only a tiny percentage of Catholics are converts and people leave the faith at a far higher rate than it gains new members. “If there’s a revival in the Catholic church, it’s a bougie revival,” Burge said. “It’s people with college degrees, people who want an intellectualized faith.”
Leah Libresco Sargeant, a 36-year-old former atheist who converted to Catholicism in 2012, told The Guardian that an orthodox Catholicism that refuses to bend to ideological currents will prove more enduring. “When people are seeking a church, but the one they encounter is very flexible, or doesn’t ask things of them, or doesn’t mark them out as distinct from the culture as a whole, I feel like they’re less likely to come or to stay,” she said.
Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at Trinity College Dublin, told The Guardian that American converts such as Vance tend to have a conservative and totalizing view that rests uncomfortably within a global church. “It’s one thing to become a Catholic via baptism; it’s a little different to become part of the church in a way that accepts the messiness of Catholicism,” Faggioli said.
The Guardian also reported on a growing young adult Catholic scene in New York, with Kate DePetro, a 27-year-old organizer of weekly pizza-and-mass events, saying, “Our generation is realizing that they want that sense of purpose, want that sense of community, want to have faith, want to have hope in something.”
If Vance runs for president in 2028, he would be only the third Catholic president and the first to hold office as a Republican. The Guardian wrote that he “will be seen by many Americans to represent the American Catholicism of the century to come.”