US Vice President JD Vance has come out with a new memoir, which is mainly about his faith. Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, published June 18, 2026, traces his spiritual journey, how he was raised as an atheist, and how he found his way back to Roman Catholicism. It is his second book, following 2016’s Hillbilly Elegy, a best-selling memoir about Vance’s Ohio roots. However, he also co-wrote other books in between.In his ‘Communion’ he wrote: If the Titanic is going down, I would rather be in the lifeboat than in it.
What does quote mean?
At first glance this statement seems surprising. Why would anyone want to sink with the Titanic? But Vance explained that he was ready to join the Catholic Church, even when he was going through difficult times. JD Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019 when the Catholic Church was mired in scandals and losing members. But Vance said he was a man who would not abandon the Titanic if it sank. He will board the lifeboat instead of boarding it. Here he compared Titanic to Catholicism. He decided to adopt it in difficult times 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 Ohio in a troubled working-class family with roots in Appalachia. His childhood, which he famously described in Hillbilly Elegy, was filled with family instability, addiction, poverty, and constant turmoil. He was raised by his grandmother, known as “Mamaw”, who played a major role in shaping his values and early religious beliefs. In the second part he wrote that he was never afraid of ‘hell’. “I don’t care what I find on the other side of eternal sleep. Vance wrote, “Even as a child, I was never afraid of hell.”
JD Vance’s conversion to Catholicism
One of the central themes of Communion is that Vance’s ultimate return to Christianity was intellectual and philosophical as well 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 maternal uncle 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 began to doubt religion.Earlier Vance had described how the most important influence in his rediscovery of faith was René Girard, a French Catholic thinker known for his theory of “exemplary desire” – the idea that people often desire things because other people 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’s Priory in Cincinnati, Ohio. For his confirmation saint, he chose St. Augustine, reflecting Augustine’s influence on his thinking.At communion, Vance spoke about how his Hindu wife, Usha Vance, noted that therapy did not help Vance, but going to church did.