Vice President Vance Explains the Faith Journey That Led Him to Catholicism

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Vice President J.D. Vance joined me on the program today to talk about his new book “Communion.” The audio is over at my YouTube Channel, but the transcript is here:

HH: Special program today. I’m pleased to welcome back Vice-President J.D. Vance to the program to talk about his brand-new book, "Communion." Mr. Vice-President, welcome back and congratulations on your book, your memoir about crossing the Tiber. I found it very winsome, very revealing. I found it very frustrating that on your book tour, no one talked to you about it. Were you surprised by that? They talked about everything but "Communion."

JDV: Yeah, it’s amazing anybody bought the book, Hugh, because I was talking about, of course, the Iran situation. I was talking about economic issues. I think it kind of comes with the territory, though, Hugh, when you’re the vice-president, and you’re out there talking about a book. People are going to ask you about the news of the day and whatever else is going on. So I appreciated it. It certainly was, you know, for me, what I wanted to do was just write a book about, obviously, my own faith journey, but try to write something that was not kind of a traditional political book, right? It’s not ‘here are 10 problems in America, and here are 30 policy proposals for how to fix it’. It’s very honest. I think in some ways, it’s very self-critical. But I think any honest account of how a person finds their way to Christ is going to be exactly that. And hopefully, some people pick it up and find some meaning in it.

HH: I want to make sure that at least the Catholics who are listening today, or those who are Catholic adjacent, get out there and read it. Or they can get the audiobook. I got both. You did a very fine job reading it. I want to start, though, with Father Harry Stephen. How do you pronounce his name?

JDV: Henry Stephen.

HH: All right. Father Stephen is exactly the sort of priest every Catholic-curious person would be blessed to run into. Please tell the audience about him.

JDV: Yeah, so I’ll tell you a story about Henry Stephen, Father Henry, as I call him. So, very early in my own faith journey, he is the priest who baptized me, but I don’t believe I had been baptized at this point. I met him at a Cincinnati waffle restaurant, and he walks in. It is October the 31st, and he is a Dominican friar, so he always wears this sort of gigantic white frock.

HH: Yup.

JDV: And I say gigantic, because Father Henry is probably 6’ 5”, 250. He’s just a very big dude. And he walks in, and the entire restaurant stops and stares at him. And Father Henry, without skipping a beat, says, “Don’t worry, everybody. It’s not a Halloween costume. I actually do believe in Jesus.” And everybody laughs, and he sits down. He’s just this amazingly gregarious, funny, but just a good human being, a good priest. He cares a lot about the faith, but he’s also very thoughtful. He’s a brilliant guy who went to Princeton, who, he feels it, but he also thinks about it. And I think he was the exact kind of person that I needed to be connected to in order to find my own way back to Christ, because you know, I had a lot of questions. I had a lot of, you know, I was very interested in the intellectual tradition of the Catholic faith, but I also needed somebody who could steer my in my own practice of it. And Father Henry did all of those things. He’s a great, great guy.

HH: There, I’m going to come back to him in a second, but I want to lay the groundwork. You’re a Young Life kid, which is a reveal to me. I’m a big fan of Young Life for high school kids. It’s better than having them out drinking beer and chasing the other sex. But did you go to Young Life camp? Do you remember the names of your area directors, anything like that?

JDV: No, I never went to the camp, but I always went to the high school meetings. Look, it was very, very good for me. To your point, it kept me out of some other trouble that I’m sure I would have gotten involved in as a teenager. And you know, it’s one of these ways in which I did have a foundation in faith that eventually came back to me in a big way. As I talk about in the book, I kind of fell away from it, right? I called myself an atheist for a time. But when I look back at my own journey coming back to the faith, I don’t think that I would have had quite the same trajectory if it had hadn’t been for that original foundation. So even though it didn’t take, you know, sometimes these seeds get planted and then lay dormant for a while. But for those of you who don’t know about Young Life, I mean, you know, you show up, you read the Bible, you do some singing, and it’s just a really good way for high schoolers to engage with their faith at their level, because I think as everybody knows, you know, the way a 65-year-old engages with the Christian faith is going to be different from the way a 45-year-old and certainly different from the way a 15-year-old engages with the faith.

HH: And it’s a great entry level, and it does lay seeds, so good on Young Life. I want to go back to Father Stephen now, because if anyone picks up the book in the bookstore, go to Page 163. It’s a very concise statement of how one comes to religious belief. “You don’t feel God’s presence and then change in an instant,” the Father told you. “There’s a roadmap to God, and you’ve got to travel, because for most of us, grace is not something that happens in a moment.” I thought that is exact, by the way. Billy Graham wasn’t an “a-ha moment,” lightning striking, either. Father Stephen seemed to lay out the gradual path, the path upward.

JDV: Yeah, that’s exactly right, Hugh, and that gradual path really spoke to me, because you know, you’re exactly right. I think some people probably misrepresent Billy Graham as kind of an “a-ha moment,” and then all of a sudden, everything is better. I think that’s unfair to Billy Graham. But certainly in my own faith, I kind of had this idea that you know, you prayed, you accepted Jesus into your heart, and then everything was supposed to be better in your life, and everything was supposed to be easy. And I found that unsatisfying in my youth, and that’s one of the reasons why I fell away from that faith. And Father Henry explained grace as sort of a process, as sort of this process of perfection. And I don’t say self-perfection, because the idea is that you need God’s help along the way, and He’s constantly working in these subtle ways. But you also, you have to work at it. And there’s a way in which the practice of the faith forms you in the right way. There’s a way in which you know, participating in the sacraments and praying and actually going to confession and doing all these things, they slowly have this miraculous effect on a person. But for me, you know, when I was 19-years-old, Hugh, I would think of a miracle as sort of God waves a magic wand and everything is different. In some ways, I think what Father Henry was able to show to me is that true miracles sometimes are no less amazing and no less physics-defying, but sometimes they take a little bit of time. And that way in which grace works patiently was a very important insight for me, because it fit how the world actually worked. It spoke to me in a way that the a-ha moment idea of theology never did.

HH: Now I want the audience to know in the course of reading "Communion," you’ll run into St. Augustine, Chesterton, of course C.S. Lewis, Renee Girard, Pope Leo XIII, Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher in there. But I’ve got to tell you, I went out and got the symposium on theology and falsification that you reference by Anthony Flew, Hare, and Basil Mitchell…

JDV: Yeah.

HH: That’s not for me, Mr. Vice-President. That’s way above my pay grade. Did you actually get through that?

JDV: I did, though the part that I talk about in the book is very short. So I think it’s a relatively short series of essays and back and forth that was very important to me. But you know, what I write about in the book is I encountered these essays as a college philosophy kid, and there was this sort of debate, and I kind of at the time, thought the atheists had won the debate. But there was a response from Basil Mitchell that I actually thought was very, very compelling, and I kept on returning to it. And the basic idea, Hugh, I’m not going to do it justice, so I hope you and your listeners will forgive me. But it’s this idea that when you see something that doesn’t comport with what you think God should be doing, or you see something that makes you think well, maybe God doesn’t actually care about me, there, the debate is really, does that mean that God is real? Or does that mean that God is false? And what Basil Mitchell says is, no, no, no, you guys are kind of missing the point. Absolutely, when you see something happen that goes against Divine providence, or when you see bad things happen to good people, that absolutely does count against the idea that God loves human beings. But it doesn’t count definitively. In other words, it is something that should cause some skepticism. It is something that should cause some humility. But it’s not something that should lead you to disregard your faith, because the ultimate, you know, one of the ultimate truths of the Christian faith is that God knows best. Now it requires, again, some humility to believe in that. It requires some patience to accept it. But I just, this idea that you could see something that really did make you question your faith but didn’t make you discard it, the idea that it was okay to question is, have doubts, and even be angry at God, that was a very powerful thing for me.

HH: Well, it is powerful. I left the Roman Catholic Church for a dozen years. I got brought back in by Archbishop Charles Chaput, who listened to my radio show and thought, “No, you’ve got this all wrong,” because the bishops went nuts in the 80s, Vice-President Vance. They would send the Reagan White House letters on nuclear weapons and poverty. They were just nuts. They went over the left cliff, and I just couldn’t take it anymore, and the Archbishop explained, and therefore I was armored up against the priest scandal, which by the way, I want the audience to know, you deal with the priest scandal, the abuse scandal, and in a very forthright way. A lot of Catholics dodge that, and I’m very glad that you didn’t. The book would lack authenticity if you had. Do people still question you about that? Do they still have, because it still lingers in the culture.

JDV: Well, yeah, I think it’s one of those things that’s always going to linger over Catholic culture, because it was such a wounding thing for so many Catholics. It hurt so many people so deeply. And even though there were, of course, people who weren’t caught up in it directly, they were still offended by it. They were still asking questions. How could the Church let this happen? And for me, Hugh, I write about this in the book, that one of the things that happened is there was a big Pennsylvania Catholic abuse sort of report that had come out right at the point where I was talking with Father Henry about becoming baptized.

HH: Yup.

JDV: And becoming received into the Catholic Church. And you know, my wife, Usha, who, as you know, Hugh, is this brilliant lawyer, there was a point where we’re sitting at home late one night, and she just absolutely interrogates Father Henry about this, because you know, she’s like “If J.D. does this, then he’s going to want to raise the kids in the Church.” And we had, you know, at the time, two little boys, and obviously love them very much and didn’t want anything like this to happen to them. And Father Henry later would describe it as the most difficult set of questions he’s ever faced in his entire life. But his, again, his point was if you read the Bible, like if you read the foundational text of the Christian faith, it tells you that God works through humans who are deeply imperfect, who are murderers and liars and all manner of bad things. And it’s kind of one of these very unique, but also, you know, requires some humility to believe in that God works through imperfect people. And so the argument is not that the Church is perfect. The argument is not that the Church always succeeds in its effort to help people and to serve people. The argument, though, is that this institution, in its very imperfect way, does reveal some things about Jesus Christ and His love for people. And you have to be able to accept the good and the bad in the same way that you have to be able to read the Bible and say, " Well, King David was this terrible guy, and yet he was the chosen person to kind of implement God’s kingdom at that time in history. And that is an interesting claim, Hugh. I’ve always been fascinated by this, by just the philosophy of it, that God doesn’t sort of say oh, I’m going to come in and make everybody perfect, and everybody who serves Me is going to be perfect. He makes a much different claim about human beings, that He is the one true God, that His grace can transform people, but that He’s going to work through these incredibly imperfect people who constantly fail to follow Him. I think for a lot of people, they say that’s absurd. But for me, I say that actually fits with the human nature as I’ve encountered it.

HH: No, it’s persuasive if you adopt an intellectual approach to Catholicism or to Christianity in the beginning, and work through the various writers that you do. You’ll get there. Before I go back to that, I want to ask you about your level of practice. I know you’ve been baptized. You’ve had your first communion. You’ve had your first confession. Did you get confirmed, Mr. Vice-President?

JDV: Well, it’s a good question, Hugh. I mean, I believe that that happened as part of getting baptized, because I had never been baptized before. And so I actually didn’t do a first confession, because as you know, you know, when you do the baptism, if you’ve never been baptized before, that kind of washes away all those sins. And so the first confession I did was probably four or five, six weeks after that. So you know, I basically just followed Father Henry’s lead and did the things that he said I needed to do. And you know, what we do is we go to church every week. Sometimes, the travel or the duties of vice-president make that harder, but we still try to make it work. And you know, I try to go to confession every four weeks, every six weeks. And I try to just follow the sacramental life as much I can. And I found that it’s become easier over time, and it’s actually one of these things where you get better at it the more you practice at it.

HH: Oh, the most winsome part of the book is getting your three, now four babies ready to go to church, or smalls, because they wriggle, they yell, they pinch, they punch. I was one of those families, and my mom somehow managed to get through it. My dad was a Presbyterian, so he didn’t often go to church with us. He was at his own church. But I thought that was the, every Catholic family is going to recognize that story, so well done. I was wondering, though, if you had a confirmation name, and you obviously don’t recall it or you would know you were confirmed.

JDV: Well, yeah, so my confirmation name is Augustine.

HH: Oh.

JDV: So I guess I was confirmed…

HH: Oh, yes.

JDV: But it’s funny, that exact word just never came up in the process where Father Henry said alright, we’re going to choose a confirmation name. He just, you know, we chose the name Augustine for my baptism, and that’s what we did.

HH: Good choice. I mean, that’s reaching. That puts a lot on your shoulders. That’s reaching.

JDV: That’s Christianity for you, Hugh. It demands a lot of you, high expectations.

HH: Do you do things like…you’ve got to read [Augustine’s] “Confessions” at least once a year. Do you observe, for example, All Saints Day and the week of the Octave of All Souls, where you can —for the benefit of the non-Catholic audience, Catholics believe in the Church Militant on Earth, the Church Suffering in purgatory, and the Church Triumphant in Heaven. And the Church Militant can help out the Church Suffering during the week of All Saints and the Octave of All Saints in November. Do you do that for, say, Mamaw or any of your family? Or do you do any of that work? Is that something that’s come across your radar, yet?

JDV: Yeah, I mean, I go to church during the required days during All Saints Day, and obviously, I do the prayers for the dead, and that includes the prayers for a lot of the people that I know and love, but also just general prayers for the dead. I try to, you know, what Father Henry has told me, Hugh, is that you try to treat the Church as a witness, and you try to follow as much as possible. And I don’t want to say that I’m perfect about it, because I’ve found, for example, you know, there are certain days of obligation, Hugh, where I will find out afterwards that it was a day of obligation and I didn’t even know. I didn’t even try to go to church that day.

HH: Doesn’t count as a sin if you didn’t know. Yeah, it doesn’t count.

JDV: Well, that’s good. That’s good to know, but I still try to go to confession and try to be responsive to it. You know, I just, my attitude towards it, Hugh, is you try to follow the lead of the faith as much as possible, recognizing you’re going to be imperfect about it. There are a lot of things I will say, Hugh, as a sort of Evangelical convert to Catholicism, there are certain things about it that I find, you know, culturally distinct. I mean, even confession, right, the idea that you’re going to go in and talk to a strangers about every bad thing that you’ve done over the last four, six weeks, I find that a little unusual. But I just try to follow rules, and I find that the more that I follow the rules, the better I get at following those rules. And the more I start to realize that there’s a real purpose to it.

HH: Now you are now —it used to be President Biden, and before that, Nancy Pelosi— you are now the highest-ranking secular Catholic in America, and with that comes a certain obligation to conduct yourself as every Catholic would wish you would conduct yourself. Have you felt that pressure, yet?

JDV: Oh, all the time. All the time. And I fail all the time, Hugh. Look, it’s, you know, you have debates with people, and you try to be charitable. I certainly fail to be charitable. And you try to make the best version of any argument as possible. And you know, you try to conduct yourself in public life with maximal patience and humility. I think you try to do the best you can, and you recognize that you fail from time to time. And when you fail, you try to do better. And I write about this in the book. You know, there was the famous cat lady comment that…

HH: Yes.

JDV: …I got the campaign, I got myself in trouble during the 2024 campaign. And I sort of realized that there two problems there. Number one, I just pissed a lot of people off so they weren’t sort of really able to hear the message that I was trying to make. And that, to me, was maybe the most important thing is I was trying to make an argument that was very real, which is that America, I think, in the last 20 or 30 years has become more hostile, and our leadership has become more blind to the plight of young families. I think that’s why the COVID thing was such a disaster, is you had a lot of people in positions of leadership who they weren’t asking themselves questions like what happens when we mask 3-year-olds indefinitely? What effect does this have on young families when we try to force kids to sit at a computer screen instead of go to the classroom? I just, I felt there was an important point to make, and part of the error that I made is that I didn’t make it in the right way. I turned people off instead of actually leading to some insight and some wisdom.

HH: So you and I, when you lived in Virginia, belonged to the same parish. And I always went to the 7AM Mass. I think you rolled in at 9:30 or 11:00. I never crossed paths with you there, but I know it was your church.

JDV: I think we try to do the, we try to do the 8:30.

HH: Okay, I was at 7:00 – no music. Bad Catholic music drives me crazy, so it’s a silent Mass. But in that church is Marc Thiessen.

JDV: Oh.

HH: Yesterday, you took a punch at Marc online.

JDV: I did.

HH: On the burrito thing. So I’m curious, do you ever regret that night that you took a punch at a fellow Catholic in your parish?

JDV: You know, it was a joke, Hugh.

HH: I know, but it’s…

JDV: I think there are ways in which you’re allowed to punch back, and you’re allowed to be a little bit humorous. I’m sure it was not as charitable as I should have been, but you know what? Look, I’m sure that he is a good Catholic. I certainly wish him the best. I think he’s been a little bit unfair to me over the last couple of weeks, and so I decided to hit back with a little bit of spice. I will say that if you read the Gospels, you know, Jesus has remarkable humility, but he also has a remarkable way with words. And so I’m always going to fall short of that example, but I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with being a little spicy from time to time. And you know, maybe in two years, Hugh, I’ll look back and say I wish I hadn’t said that. But right now, I feel pretty good about that one.

HH: Okay (laughing). That’s not going to be in that confession. I want to cover two big things. One of the best lines in the book, “One of the jobs of the Christian statesman,” you write, “is to preserve the social cohesion that makes charity and generosity possible.” That is an ideal that’s pretty hard to reach. Charity and generosity is something that should be expected of each person. How do you try and do that?

JDV: Well, I think one of the things, Hugh, is you have to have an immigration policy that promotes social cohesion. You know, when you send your kid to school, when you want them to share the same language with the people that are in that classroom, you want them to have something in common with the people that are in that classroom, and I do think that’s possible with the tradition of immigration like the United States of America has. But one of the criticisms I’ve had of some of the Church leadership that’s attacked our immigration policies, and again, I’m not saying that we’re always perfect, but the simple reality is that if you have too many immigrants that come in too quickly with no proper procedure and no proper vetting, it actually does erode social trust. It erodes the very foundation of cohesion that allows us to be generous to the poor and ensure that you know, poor kids in America don’t go hungry and don’t lack medical treatment. Those are important and good things, but those things exist on a foundation of social trust that sky-high immigration actually erodes. And so I’ve actually made this point in some of my conversations with the Catholic leadership who have criticized our immigration policy. I’ve said, “Guys, look, you know, I’m all for being charitable, and I’m all for, you know, you guys have a moral witness, and I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t exercise that moral witness. But you’ve got to recognize that our immigration policy is geared not just towards law and order, but towards ensuring that America has a functioning social fabric.” You can’t do that with too much and too rapid demographic change.

HH: I thought it was well-argued in the book, and I encourage people to read that. Here’s the most delicate, and I want to make sure I put this the right way. Ariel Whitman will be on later today. He’s an Israeli blogger and podcaster that I’ve been on his program. I have a lot of Israelis on this show – Haviv Rettig Gur, Amit Segal, Nadav Eyal, because I want to figure out what they think. There is a recurring thing. They are afraid that you, you, J.D. Vance, are anti-Israel or antisemitic, and I tell them “No, no, no. I’ve talked to the Vice-President since he ran for the Senate. You are getting that wrong.” Part of that is the Catholic Church’s tradition. You know, John Paul in 2000 went to Jerusalem to make atonement. Benedict wrote a book in 2011 saying, “We are sorry, because we caused the pogroms. We’ve got a special obligation to the Jews.” But I tell them that’s not the Vice-President. Are you frustrated by that? Have you heard that suspicion that you’re anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish, antisemitic? And what do you do about it?

JDV: Yeah, I’ve certainly heard that criticism, Hugh. I mean, obviously, think that it’s unfair. Do I, am I frustrated by it? I mean, no, I think people are entitled to their opinion, and I just have to do as good of a job as I can recognizing my imperfections. I have to do as good of a job as I can at actually articulating what I think and what I believe. And you know, my argument, Hugh, on Israel is one, it’s a great country. I love the country. I love a lot of the people in it. I have some very, very dear friends who are there. I also recognize that there are times when a given Israeli government is going to have interests that are different from the United States of America. And I think that, Hugh, a lot of young people in particular, young Republicans, but young people everywhere are looking at the U.S.-Israel relationship, and it’s really, as you know, Hugh, built on a foundation of 70-80 years of common values and common interests. But I also think that sometimes, when people defend the United States-Israel relationship, it’s very easy to get trapped in slogans. And you hear the same phrases, and those phrases lose their meaning. And so what I’ve tried to do is say when we have shared interests with the Israelis, they’re a great partner and we’re going to work together. And when we don’t have shared interests with the Israelis, we’re going to pursue our interests distinctly with no animosity, of course, in the same way that we would do with the French or the British, two other allies where we have a great historical tradition of shared interests and shared values. So I really think that it’s important for us to articulate why we work with a country, why we don’t work with a country. And I think there are some Israelis who are just so used, at least some people in Israeli media, who are so used to politicians just taking as a given that America and Israel always have shared interests, when I think the reality is that we often have shared interests, but we don’t always. And I don’t think that makes me antisemitic. And I don’t think it makes me anti-Israel. I think it just makes me honest.

HH: It doesn’t, and by the way, that is exactly the answer you gave to me when you were running for Senate, I don’t know how many years ago, so you haven’t changed. And that’s what I explained to my Israeli friends. I want to close with a suggestion, Mr. Vice-President. A) the end of our book about my former colleague, Charlie Kirk, I was not close to him the say you are, but I’m the next generation older than you. You could be my kid, so I’m not surprised. But’s it’s a very generous thing that you wrote about Charlie and what he was talking to you about, so I would encourage people to read that. But there are a lot of young Catholic writers out there, and you mentioned Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher, who’s not Catholic but Orthodox. But you’ve got Ryan Anderson, and you’ve got people a little bit older like Arthur Brooks and Fran Maier and Charles Chaput. Would you ever convene the younger ones and sort of get them talking about the Church, because you’ve got this great convening authority as the vice-president? Nobody turns down an invitation to chat with the vice-president about the Church. Is that part of the job, do you think?

JDV: Absolutely. Let’s do it, Hugh, and I will talk to you offline, and we’ll get a good group together, and I’d love to get everybody together and chat about things.

HH: Well, start with Ryan Anderson and everyone out there listening, start with Communion. It’s a fabulous book, and it’s very well-read, Mr. Vice-President. Thanks for the extra time today. I appreciate it. Have a good week.

JDV: Absolutely, Hugh. Good to talk with you.

HH: Thank you.

Photo Credit: ©Getty Images/Kent Nishimura/Stringer

Interview originally appeared on HughHewitt.com; used with permission