Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE J.D. Vance rose to national prominence with Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir of Appalachian poverty and upward mobility that became one of the more discussed American books of the 2010s. Communion is its spiritual sequel. Where the earlier book asked how a man escapes economic and cultural deprivation, this one asks what happens to his soul once he arrives in public life. Vance describes how his conversion to Catholicism — received into the Church in 2019 — shaped not just his private convictions but his approach to governance, policy, and the obligations a politician carries toward ordinary Americans. The audience is anyone who has wondered whether Christian faith can mean something concrete in the machinery of modern politics, rather than functioning as a branding exercise. Vance's answer is that it does, and the book is an attempt to show how: through the formation of conscience, the discipline of prayer, and an account of the common good rooted in his own working-class experience. SECTION TWO - **Created**: Vance's conversion narrative assumes, rather than argues, that the human person is ordered toward truth and community — that the poverty and disorder of his upbringing were genuine privations, not simply neutral circumstances. The book's anthropological baseline is Thomistic in structure even when it does not use Thomistic vocabulary: the soul is capable of orientation toward the good, and political life is a domain where that orientation can be expressed or suppressed. - **Fallen**: The Fallen state appears chiefly in Vance's account of the social conditions he grew up in and returned to as a politician — addiction, family dissolution, economic despair, what Aquinas would call disordered appetite operating at a cultural scale. The book treats these not as policy variables alone but as symptoms of a deeper disorder in the desires of individuals and communities, which is precisely the CCMMP's account of concupiscence diffused through social life. - **Redeemed**: The strongest CCMMP thread is the Redeemed arc. Vance presents his Catholic faith as the condition under which practical wisdom became possible for him — not a supplement to political skill but its precondition. Grace, in the book's logic, restores the will's capacity to act for the genuine good of others rather than for personal advancement. This maps directly onto the Thomistic account of infused prudence as a gift that orders acquired prudence toward its proper end. - **Prudence (civic wisdom)**: The book is, at its structural core, an account of how a specific man learned to exercise political prudence — attending to the circumstances of the working class, remembering the lessons of his own formation, seeking counsel in prayer and community. Whether the book achieves this or merely claims it is a question readers will need to assess; the framework is coherent. - **Justice (worship and devotion)**: Vance's treatment of religious practice as a structuring discipline — not merely a source of comfort but of moral orientation — maps onto Aquinas's account of the virtue of religion as the proper ordering of the person toward God, which then flows outward into just action toward neighbor. SECTION THREE Richard John Neuhaus[^1] — priest, public intellectual, and founder of First Things — spent decades arguing that religion belongs in the public square not as a cultural artifact but as a rational resource for civic deliberation. Vance's Communion occupies the same argumentative space from the inside: where Neuhaus made the philosophical case for religion's public role, Vance offers the autobiographical testimony of a politician who experienced that role as personally formative. The two accounts are complementary rather than redundant — Neuhaus supplies the architecture, Vance the inhabited room. ## References [^1]: Neuhaus, R. J. (1990). *First Things: A Journal of Religion and Public Life* [journal founded]. Institute on Religion and Public Life. Described as 'an influential journal of religion and public life' founded in 1990.
✓ Strengths
- ✓Vance grounds his account of political life in a specific account of religious conversion rather than in generic civic virtue, giving the book an anthropological concreteness rare in political memoir.
- ✓The Created-state claim is strong: Vance treats the human person as ordered toward transcendence, and his Catholic faith functions not as a cultural accessory but as the source of moral reorientation, honoring the unity of intellect and will that Aquinas places at the heart of prudential action.
- ✓The Redeemed arc is unusually direct for a political book: conversion is presented as the condition of possibility for public service, not merely its backdrop, suggesting that grace precedes and shapes prudence rather than vice versa.
- ✓Vance's willingness to name the role of religious practice in forming practical judgment — prayer, community, sacrament — speaks to the virtue of devotion as an active, structuring discipline rather than a private sentiment.
- ✓The book offers a serious engagement with the question of what a Catholic politician owes his constituents in terms of truth-telling, placing justice-as-truthfulness at the center of public life.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠Vance's public profile is highly contested politically, and readers may find it difficult to separate the book's anthropological claims from partisan advocacy; formation directors should preview the text before group use.
- ⚠The book appears to leave largely unexamined the structural and social dimensions of justice — the common good in Maritain's sense — focusing instead on the individual conversion narrative, which may underweight the civic obligations that flow from redemption.