US Vice President JD Vance has come up with a new memoir, which is primarily about his faith. Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, published on June 18, 2026, traces his spiritual journey, how he was brought up as an atheist, and how he found his way back to Roman Catholicism. This is his second book after 2016’s Hillibily Elegy, Vance’s bestselling memoir about his Ohio roots. However, he co-authored other books in between.In his ‘Communion’, he wrote: If the Titanic is going down, I’d rather be on board than hop on a lifeboat.
What does the quote mean?
At first glance, the statement seems surprising. Why would a person want to sink with the Titanic? But Vance explained that he felt ready to join the Catholic Church even when it was going through a tough time. JD Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019 at a time when the Catholic Church was mired in scandals and was losing members. But Vance said that he is such a person who would not leave the Titanic when it is going down. He would be on board instead of hopping on a lifeboat. Here, he compared the Titanic to Catholicism. He chose to embrace it at a tough time because he believed in it. Vance also revealed his loyalty, obligation and belonging through this much-discussed quote from his book.Vance grew up in a turbulent working-class family in Ohio with roots in Appalachia. His childhood, which he famously described in Hillbilly Elegy, was marked by family instability, addiction, poverty, and frequent upheaval. He was largely raised by his grandmother, known as “Mamaw,” who played a major role in shaping his values and early religious beliefs. In another part, he wrote he never feared ‘hell’. “I don’t worry about what I will find on the other side of eternal sleep. Even as a child, I never feared hell,” Vance wrote.
JD Vance’s conversion to Catholicism
One of the central themes of Communion is that Vance’s eventual return to Christianity was intellectual and philosophical as much as emotional. The book describes his movement from evangelical Christianity in childhood to skepticism and atheism as a young adult, before ultimately converting to Catholicism in 2019. His Mamaw had strong evangelical Protestant beliefs. Vance, as a teenager, identified as a Christian but then during his years in college and law school, he gradually became skeptical of religion.Earlier Vance recounted how the most important influence to his rediscovery of faith was René Girard, a French Catholic thinker known for his theory of “mimetic desire”—the idea that people often desire things because others desire them. While reading Girard, Vance became increasingly interested in Christianity’s explanation of human behavior, morality, and social order.After years of study and reflection, Vance entered the Catholic Church through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA), the standard process through which adults become Catholic. In August 2019, he was baptized and confirmed at St Gertrude Priory in Cincinnati, Ohio. For his confirmation saint, he chose St. Augustine, reflecting Augustine’s influence on his thinking.In Communion, Vance said how his Hindu wife Usha Vance noted that therapy did not help Vance but going to the church did.
