Vice President JD Vance wasn’t always a devout Catholic. He started as a Protestant and after losing his grandmother, reading Ayn Rand novels, and serving four years in the military, he became an atheist.
It was only through a near-death experience, marrying his now-wife Usha, and visiting monuments in France that he became inspired to convert, according to his new book “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith."
“I didn’t care about God’s will,” he writes. “I cared about my own.”
His first book, "Hillbilly Elegy," released in 2016, was a best-seller.
In this new book, Vance writes about how his Christian beliefs shrank when his grandmother passed away because she was a central figure in his life.
Her death, combined with serving in Iraq in the Marine Corps until 2006, caused Christianity to become "completely irrelevant" to him, and Vance wrote that he "was no longer, in any real sense, a Christian" during that time.
“With her gone, no one really cared about my faith, and soon I stopped caring, too,” he said.
Following his grandmother’s funeral, Vance recalls surviving nearly crashing into a guardrail and almost driving over a cliff while losing control of his car on a wet road.
He describes it as "the closest I’ve ever come to a supernatural experience," and the feeling remained "even during my later years as a strident atheist."
His atheism phase of life was partly influenced by the author Ayn Rand, who wrote about the virtue of selfishness. Although Vance said Rand’s philosophy stood "in as stark opposition to Christian morality as anything I’d ever read," it simultaneously appealed to him.
Rand's books include "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead."
After completing four years of military service, Vance used his veteran education benefits, including the Yellow Ribbon Program and the GI Bill, to earn his undergraduate degree at Ohio State University and law degree from Yale Law School in Connecticut, where he met his wife for whom he was immediately love-struck.
“I will marry this girl,” he wrote of Usha. “Or I will be a lifelong bachelor.”
He notes that he admired Usha’s intensity, intelligence, and curiosity while they were in law school together, even though they had divergent views about the existence of an afterlife.
Their discussion about death and a purported afterlife was sparked by Joan Didion’s book, "The Year of Magical Thinking."
“Usha, like Didion, dreaded neither the ‘loss of heaven’ nor ‘the pains of hell’ for the most logical of reasons: She simply didn’t think they exist. I came to believe in both, but I still didn’t find either particularly motivating,” he writes.
Vance married her in 2014.
In 2018, Vance, his wife and their son, Ewan, visited a cathedral in France and while reflecting on how the Catholic Church had endured over the years, his ambivalence about religion began to wither.
The experience gave him "a distinct sense of belonging and presence."
A year later, his conversion to Catholicism was completed at St. Gertrude Church in Madeira, Ohio.
Vance wrote that he enjoyed the “work” of reading and discussing that was required to become Catholic.