Vice President JD Vance is ready to admit the “dumbest thing” he has ever said.
A decade after his best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” catapulted him into the national consciousness, and 18 months after he parlayed that fame into a job at the White House, Mr. Vance on Tuesday released a book conceding that his disparagement of some Democrats as “childless cat ladies” had been “boneheaded.”
In the 304-page memoir, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” Mr. Vance makes a running start on defining his political philosophy just as the 2028 presidential race — in which he is presumed to be a Republican front-runner — begins to take shape. He details the brief lapse in his Christian faith and his conversion to Catholicism, as well as the ambition that has powered him from the start of his career. And on the heels of his public spat with Pope Leo XIV, he lays out a vision for the United States that centers on Christianity.
Here are six takeaways from the book:
He regrets calling some Democratic women ‘childless cat ladies.’
In 2021, Mr. Vance lamented that the country was being run by “childless cat ladies” like Kamala Harris, then the vice president, and suggested that they had no “direct stake” in America’s future. The remark resurfaced after Donald J. Trump chose him as his running mate in 2024 and incited a widespread backlash.
As if anticipating continued scrutiny of his comment, Mr. Vance acknowledges in the book that he could have found a better way to frame his views on the American family.
“The comment caused two firestorms: the first when I made it, the second years later during a political campaign,” Mr. Vance writes. “It was a boneheaded comment, intentionally (and successfully) provocative rather than illuminating. Aside from enraging a great number of people, it had the added benefit of distracting from the actual point I wanted to make, which was that our society is becoming pathologically hostile to having kids.”
He concludes, “When I consider the Church’s admonition to respect the dignity of every life, this was a clear moment where I failed.”
He criticizes Vatican officials’ positions on immigration as ‘generic’ and ‘trite.’
One of the highest-profile meetings of Mr. Vance’s vice presidency was his visit with Pope Francis in April 2025.
Two months before Mr. Vance met with Vatican officials in Rome, the pope criticized the Trump administration’s policy of mass deportations in an unusual denunciation of U.S. leadership. And the day after Mr. Vance’s brief Easter exchange with Francis, who was seriously ill, the pope died.
In his book, Mr. Vance acknowledges that Francis’ approach to the subject “made me think” and “forced difficult conversations.” But he was “unsettled” by his meeting with Vatican diplomats, he writes, criticizing the “generic” nature of their views on immigration and arguing that a “Christian statesman” like himself must weigh the realities of enforcement with moral imperatives.
“Here I was, the most senior Catholic in the United States government, and the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes,” Mr. Vance writes. “That was true of Pope Francis, it was true of his predecessors, and it will be true in the future.”
Babies, and America’s declining birthrate, preoccupy him.
Babies are mentioned 33 times in “Communion,” almost as often as Mr. Vance writes of Mr. Trump (the president’s name appears 40 times in the book).
Mr. Vance devotes much of the book’s epilogue to his concern about falling birthrates in the United States and other Western countries, making clear that he sees increased fertility as a recipe for a prosperous society and Christianity as a path toward that objective.
While U.S. fertility levels well exceed those in Europe, he writes, “our abandonment of Christian culture has coincided with an apparent decline in our collective will to live.”
He points out that Israel is the only advanced economy that does not face a decline in “native-born population numbers,” and argues that this is because “the more religious a country it is, the better it fares with family formation.”
He adds that world leaders privately express fears to him about “pension programs going bankrupt” and about recruiting young people for military service as a result of low birthrates. He also frets about loneliness and dead-end “situationships” that he says young staff members and attendees at his speaking events describe.
He argues that U.S. leaders should be guided by Christian principles.
Mr. Vance lays out his argument for why the United States should embrace “the Christian inheritance of our civilization,” casting the faith as a balm for various problems even as he insists that he is not asking all of his readers to convert.
He also returns to the populist ideology that has characterized his political career, saying that Christianity should guide leaders’ positions on wages and economic policy as much as it does their views on social issues like abortion.
“If it is sinful to abort a perfectly healthy human baby before birth, so, too, is it sinful to depress that baby’s chance of living a good life afterward,” he writes.
He adds that policymakers rely too much on economic statistics and too little on morals to make decisions.
“As the decline of Christianity has left us without a shared moral language, economics has stepped into the vacuum,” Mr. Vance writes. “We pretend there are scientific answers to questions of values.”
The book divulges little about Mr. Vance’s official activities in the White House, but intersperses praise for the Trump administration throughout the book, including for its ban on cellphones at K-12 schools on military bases and the trade policies that he says advance economic self-sufficiency.
Notably, however, Mr. Vance does not mention the word “tariffs.”
He details his relationship with the second lady.
Much has been written about Mr. Vance’s relationship with his wife, Usha Vance, who was a fellow student at Yale Law School when they met in the early 2010s. In the book, he reveals that he fell for her while in a long-distance relationship with another woman during his first months of law school, and broke up with the woman to pursue Ms. Vance as his wife.
“Everyone else was like a dim light bulb set against Usha’s radiance,” he writes. “My feelings for her overrode every instinct and everything I thought I knew about women.”
He recalls a friend saying: “Remember when you told me you don’t have the gene where you fall head over heels for a girl? I always thought that was BS. Now I know it is.”
Some of the things that drew him to her were “how uninterested she was in traditional markers of success,” as well as her “intense” nature, he writes, disputing the notion that he was attracted to her for her ambition.
Today, he says, Ms. Vance, who is expecting their fourth child, is “the anchor” of their family. He also credits her, a practicing Hindu, for helping lead him back to his Christian faith.
“That Usha thought church was ‘good for me’ gave me both permission and inspiration,” Mr. Vance writes. “I wanted more than anything to be worthy of this woman. If church helped me, I’d sit my butt in the pew every Sunday.”
He reflects on the impact that Charlie Kirk’s death had on him.
The final pages of Mr. Vance’s book grapple with the death of Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist and co-founder of Turning Point USA who helped mobilize a generation of young, evangelical Republicans on college campuses before he was assassinated in September.
Mr. Kirk was “my best friend and closest confidant in the world of politics,” Mr. Vance writes, and suggests that the activist had influenced his views on Israel.
“While Charlie loved Israel, he agreed with a lot of his young fans that the Israeli government was not always aligned with the interests of the United States,” Mr. Vance writes.
He writes that Ms. Vance resisted his desire for a fourth child for years, but that she changed her mind after Mr. Kirk’s wife, Erika Kirk, “told us between sobs that she regretted having only two kids with Charlie.”
“One life was stolen from us,” Mr. Vance writes, “but another was given.”
