Vice President JD Vance’s latest book titled “Communion” received a scathing dissection Tuesday in Rolling Stone, one in which journalist Stephen Rodrick hammered the vice president’s memoir as being about “what happens when religious conviction collides with a cult of personality.”
“Vance wants you to believe that Communion is about one man finding God. It’s not,” Rodrick wrote in his write-up. “It’s about what happens when religious conviction collides with a cult of personality. Vance argues that God must come first. Vance’s political career suggests he doesn’t believe his own faith.”
Vance first rose to national prominence with the release of his 2016 book “Hillbilly Elegy,” a memoir in which Vance recounted his upbringing in a community ravaged by poverty and drug addiction. It would be that same year that Vance would also pen a brutal essay criticizing then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.
It was with great irony, Rodrick argued, that 10 years later Vance would come to embody the very traits he once condemned.
“In a decade, Vance has gone from the kid everyone roots for to a Trump-conjoined demagogue lying about Haitian immigrants, repeatedly stating he does not give a f--- about Ukraine or childless Americans,” Rodrick wrote.
“His story starts as a heartwarming tale of a young man who scrambled to safety via the traditional ladders of American escape. Now Vance is napalming the ladder and telling the poor folks below that it is better to burn.”
The memoir’s core theme is Vance’s conversion to Catholicism in 2019. Regarding Vance’s supposed religious awakening, Rodrick concurred that the vice president had, in fact, completed a "spiritual journey,” but one far different than the one described.
“Vance’s spiritual journey is now complete,” Rodrick wrote. “God may be in his heart, but Donald Trump sits on the throne.”