CHARLIE KIRK’S MENTOR REVEALS WHAT LATE TPUSA FOUNDER ‘WANTED PEOPLE TO KNOW’ ABOUT THE GOSPEL

Communion, Vance’s second book, is a believer’s tract. It belongs less to the category of campaign literature than to the tradition of spiritual autobiography, a genre that stretches from C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy to the candid confessions of ordinary converts. In fact, I cannot think of another book by an incumbent politician — let alone someone occupying the second-highest office in the world’s most powerful country — that lays bare, so intimately and guilelessly, its author’s spiritual anxieties, worldly disaffections, personal defects, failings, and doubts.

Hillbilly Elegy introduced us to Vance’s hardscrabble early life, and most readers closed the book admiring the resolve with which he emancipated himself from it. In Communion, we discover the spiritual vacancy that haunted him at the height of his success as a public intellectual. Outwardly, he was the model of achievement — inundated with invitations to dine with billionaires, opine on television, and comment in newspapers. Inwardly, he was adrift. Elite institutions such as Yale, which gave Vance access to high society, incentivized conformity and punished intellectual and political heresy. There is an echo of William F Buckley in Vance’s disenchantment with Yale.

Vance details his slow hegira from the Pentecostalism of his youth, interrupted by a brief spell of atheism in his twenties, to his conversion to Roman Catholicism in his mid-thirties. Along the way, there are supernatural experiences — events that cannot easily be explained away — such as the moment when his speeding car mysteriously came to a halt just inches from a barrier at the edge of a mountain. Had it not, the vehicle would have tumbled down, almost certainly killing its occupant.

I suspect Vance’s faith — part inheritance, part way of life — never truly disappeared. It became dormant. The Catholic Church, with its rich spiritual heritage, institutional continuity, and ancient pedigree, reawakened it and endowed it with renewed purpose. As a member of the Serbian Orthodox Church, I recognize this instinctively. Faith is deeper than doctrine alone: it is sustained by memory, community, liturgy, and the accumulated wisdom of generations. GK Chesterton famously described tradition as “the democracy of the dead” because it refuses to disenfranchise those who came before us. Vance’s attraction to Catholicism reflects the same yearning: to belong to something older and sager — a civilization that binds the living to those who came before and those yet to come.

Remarkably for a recent convert, Vance is not partisan. And his Catholicism is neither self-righteous nor small-minded. It is humble and capacious. Material success, achieved against impossible odds, might easily have turned him into a narcissist inclined to boast of being “self-made.” Instead, faith appears to have sharpened his awareness of his own shortcomings. He describes his Hindu wife, Usha, as being “truer and purer and more just” than himself. This is more than a perfunctory display of uxoriousness: Vance credits her with guiding him to “the path that led me back to God.”

Religion inspires Vance’s politics in ways that make him sound, at times, more like George Orwell than a run-of-the-mill American conservative. In Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell wrote of the degradation of certain professions and the indignities imposed by capitalism. Vance, while emphasizing the dignity of work, questions the consumerism that forces workers to sacrifice holidays with their families and drives otherwise decent people to violence in pursuit of discounted goods. His chapter on economics, “The Dismal Science,” offers an original and unabashedly moral account of work, consumption, and the purpose of human flourishing, viewed through the lens of religious belief.

As the president of what economists call a mid-sized, upper-middle-income country, I cannot dismiss the importance of growth. Still, it is bracing to see a Western politician place Christ’s radical teachings at the center of an argument about economics — to refuse to reduce human beings to statistics or human fulfillment to GDP.

At one point, Vance likens human beings trying to comprehend the divine to a golden retriever attempting to understand an iPhone. Here lies the profound challenge of faith. Human beings are inherently curious, and to be told that there are limits to what we can know is almost to invite disbelief. Perhaps faith cannot ultimately be understood, and if it can, that understanding cannot easily be transmitted from one person to another. It can only be felt and described.

The religion of Vance’s spouse says that an obsessive attachment to outcomes can undermine the very act of striving. I was taught this decades ago by an Indian family in London. There is wisdom in that insight. Perhaps the greatest service a religious believer can perform is not to argue, but to explain. To describe one’s faith with fidelity is more persuasive than to defend it with zeal. That is what Vance does.

THE SPIRITUAL SICKNESS BEHIND TRUMP’S BLASPHEMOUS JESUS POST

The man who can appear pugnacious on social media emerges on the page as a person of profound depths. I felt a faint kinship with his struggle as I finished the book. I, too, was once a man of scalding temper. But age, tragedy, suffering, and the burdens, compromises, and trade-offs of governing have a way of softening us and teaching us humility. The challenge on this journey is not to squander or shed our convictions.

Communion is a deeply affecting book. And even those who disagree with Vance will find it reassuring because it shows us that, while we have not lost a writer, America has gained a politician animated by something much greater — and nobler — than raw ambition.

Aleksandar Vucic is President of the Republic of Serbia. He is currently working on a book that is part history and part memoir.