MTracey podcast - A livestream review of "Communion," the historic new treatise by JD Vance

Episode Date: July 6, 2026

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mtracey.netI have an actual written review in progress as well. But here’s a sweet, sweet first taste. Praise god.

We are gathered here today to review this excellent book. I only have the e-book version, so I can't do you know, my publisher sent it to me. It just came kind of unexpectedly in the mail. We have the same publisher, which is funny. And I was kind of mad because look at the, look at how many words they put on a page for his book versus my book. And they made his book seem longer. Like, look how small the print is on my book compared to his. And so they made his book look longer, which I was, which was, which was.

I was a little bit insulted by it, but that's okay. Yeah, I ended up not reading the paperbook. I ended up reading, I ended up listening to JD's beautiful voice on audio, and so I can feel the religious inspiration in there. Can we dwell on that point for a second? Because presumably he recorded this audio book while in office as vice president, correct? Because he says this is a book that he has been recurrently working on since 2017, and it's been a long-standing, you know,

a work of passion, a passion project for him that went through many fits and starts. And somehow or another, he finally got it done, or at least he finally got it done to publish in June of 2025. And that was accompanied by an audiobook reading of the text by him. Now, a lot of authors will have professional audiobook readers, read the audiobook version of their book because they don't want to do it or they're not comfortable

with it. I don't feel like their voice is sufficiently like an unciatory. Is that the right word? But he did it himself. So having done this yourself recently, I've never done it, but I'm aware people discussing what it takes to do something like this, how long would you estimate that it took him to record the audiobook version of this book? Okay. Before we, I'll tell you, but before we do that, sponsor now, Michael. Do you know this? We have a sponsor to our podcast. They're called Mechanize. I don't have a sponsor for any pod. I don't know. Where's

my chat? This is our, we are, we have Rope me into some Stevie's sponsorship that you're involved. They are trying to automate jobs. Software engineers started 300,000 to 400,000 base pay. Other jobs, too. The links are in the show notes.

All right. Sounds awesome. I'll make sure to apply right after me wrap up. They are looking for, they're looking at, they hire ambassadors to Michael. So maybe there's an opportunity for you also. So yes, the audiobook, I did it. It was grueling. It takes about, so my book was about 10 hours.

J.D. Vance's book was 8 or 9 hours when he read it. And it takes about twice that much time. Like, it's not, nine hours doesn't mean 9 hours. Nine hours means 18 hours and 20 hours. So I did Monday through Thursday on an entire week, I would come in at like 8 o'clock in the morning or 9 o'clock in the morning and I'd leave. like two, three o'clock. And the whole time I'd be working. And it's hard. You have to like, if you stutter, if you slur some words, if you read the wrong thing, you have to go back and you

have to like do that sentence. Or if it's a long sentence, like I have sentences that are like 50 words long, like I go back to like the last comma. And then I would have to, I would have to do it. And your voice gives out, like your mouth becomes dry. It's just kind of like a miserable experience to actually read text for, you know, 10 hours over three or four days. So, yeah, his book is eight or nine hours. And then it's, he must have dedicated in addition to writing the book. He must have dedicated 15, 20 hours to reading it. Okay.

So granted, the only constitutional prescribed, constitutionally prescribed duties of the vice president are number one to preside over the Senate. And number two, to assume the office of the presidency in the president. the event of the death or incapacitation of the president. So beyond that, the vice president does not have a very expansive range of constitutionally prescribed responsibilities. But in the modern era, taken to generally mean since, you know, Walter Mondale roughly, but you could even go back to precedents before that, the vice president does have a suite

of responsibilities or duties or purviews that the president chooses to delegate to him. So it's just notable to me that J.D. Vance had the time and the bandwidth to devote what seems to be a fair chunk of working hours to either finishing the writing of the book, the editing of the book, the audio book, rendition of the book, and now he's still, I guess, on some sort of press junket advertising the book. And I don't know. That just seems odd to me. That just seems like not something that we would ordinarily expect a vice president to choose or be allowed to choose to take the extensive time required to do.

And just like nobody's pointed that out, which is odd. Like I don't think there's a modern precedent that I've been able to find of a vice president in the modern era doing anything like this. It just seems like everybody's fine and daddy with the current sitting vice president

and, you know, racking off huge chunks of his schedule to just do whatever is needed to do to undertake this book, tour, and all the work that went. Well, you said he doesn't, well, you said he doesn't have constitutionally prescribed roles. Sometimes he's a negotiator. Sometimes he's a negotiator with Iran. What else is he doing most of the time?

He's not a constitutionally prescribed role, though. That's just something that incidentally Trump has delegated him. Yeah, yeah, I know. So the question is, what is he, so he doesn't have that much to do. constitutionally. What is he actually doing when there aren't negotiations with Iran going on? Like what is it?

What do you hear about? It's a good question. I mean, maybe that's why. So maybe there's no mystery. He has nothing to do. Okay. I guess if he doesn't have much to do, then I guess maybe there should be more stuff for him to do or more stuff should be required if the vice president to do.

I don't know. To have to just be able to kind of like leisurely complete a book and then go on a press tour promoting the book. I don't know. I mean, if you're able to do that, it just seems like maybe there should be a little bit more of an intensive schedule for the vice president, or at least that should be something that's self- I don't know. It seems to me like if he did, if he had a... He's personally profiting from the sales of the board, right?

I think if he was doing a lot of things not constitutionally, you know, without constitutional basis, you would probably be complaining in the other direction, say he's a vice president. You should just be sitting around and doing nothing. I don't, I don't begrudge him. I don't know. You're spending time on the book. But anyways, what is your impression? Are you, I was just talking to Tim Miller on the Bullwork podcast, and he told me he didn't, the bands came up.

He told me he doesn't think he's actually a Christian. And he says, or he's not whatever, he says he believes in the book. And he thinks it's because he would not be so blasé about Usha. If he was a Catholic who believed that if you were not Catholic, you'd go to hell, he would not be, you know, he would not be okay with his wife being a Hindu and being like, shrugging his shoulders. at that. Well, what do you think about a sincerity? I guess we can start from there.

I wouldn't go that far to doubt the sincerity of his Christianity or to, let's say, doubt that he is a Christian as he professes to be or Catholic, rather, because, I don't know, there have been plenty professing Catholics and Christians throughout the ages who were able to reconcile various paradoxes or inconsistencies of far grander scale than that his wife happens to be a non-Christian.

That was pretty big. That was pretty big, though. I guess it's pretty big, but, you know, how old are they? Early 40s? Like, it's not out of the question that down the line she might have some epiphany, right? In other words, I don't see it as something that unto itself should cause me to doubt the sincerity in his professions of faith, per se. I have other questions or doubts as to the sincerity of some of the stuff that he

writes in the book. But in terms of the ultimate description of himself as a Christian, no, because that means we would have to question any Christian who doesn't perfectly abide by every theological like nook and cranny. Yeah, I agree.

So what do you? Okay, so, okay, so you, I agree with that. What is your, I mean, do you have any takes on the, on the actual, like, spiritual journey? There was a funny Atlantic review where they were like, if I was J.D. Van, Vance, I would be offended.

God didn't put a little more effort into recruiting me because he's like, his miracles, he has these, like, few miracles, right? He's spinning on the road, and he just remembers his years later, and the car stops. I don't know if it was physics. It's fun actually listening to the audio book in a case like this with the author, because, like, you hear Vaz, and he goes,

look, and you could just hear Vans. You know the way he says, look, when he's, like, tried to explain something stupid. And so it brings that up. Then he brings up, he was talking about theology with some conservative pundit. And then when Benz was on the Rostout that show,

Rostout that revealed that it was actually him. He was that pundit. They were talking, and he says a wine glass rose up on the floor. And then the third one, he was listening to a psalm on his way to meet some Dominican friar. And then they go to

chapel together and they play the same song in a different language, I guess. And he feels, it's funny because he feels like he feels a little bit of shame that it's like that lame and he says like I know it's easy to make the skeptics case in these of this stuff oh big deal JD you thought about you listened to a song and then you heard it but to quote Samuel L. Jackson from Pulp Fiction and that's that's his only refutation of like people not being convinced of

you know the miraculous nature of his conversion so I thought it was an honest story because it was kind of so lame. But, you know, I don't question people's religion as a general matter. I just, like, let people bracket that. Yeah, I mean, there is an irony in that he was supposed to have undergone this intellectual metamorphosis where the more kind of, let's say, down-home, quote-unquote, populist, evangelical Christian milieu that he grew up in. And the backwoods of Ohio gave way first to what he says is atheism.

which I don't really believe. And then later on, this more intellectualized version. Why don't you believe he was, why don't you believe he was an atheist? I mean, he was like a Yale, I'll get into that in a second. But there is an irony in that

he's supposed to have undergone this, you know, intellectual evolution that impelled him to adopt this adult version of Christianity or Catholicism that he now espouses.

And yet his kind of like experiential, data for this. Like the intellectualism of it is supposed to be buffeted by these little miracles that he says have trailed him throughout his life, which are basically just coincidences or the types of things that you would be surprised that people didn't have a couple of throughout their lifetimes. Yeah.

And most people who aren't looking for a reason to, like, justify some religious conversion would just chalk it up to an interesting, like, serendipitous little occurrence that does occasionally happened in the great mystery of life. But for him, that's ammunition to show why it is that, I guess, God had a purpose for him. But going back to the first one, right, where he's driving home from his mom-ma's funeral, right? He's driving back to his military base where he's stationed in 2005. And on the drive home, he hits a skid of some dampened roadway. and he slides into the guardrail

and he's thinking, okay, I'm dead, or maybe I'll survive if I only just topple over the guardrail and maybe like hit a lower point in the mountain or something, and that's the only way to survive, but he just stops. And he doesn't know how he stops. He doesn't know if there's even an explanation by reference to physics that could explain how to stop. But he says, like, that always gave him a little bit of a kernel of an attachment

to some grand, like, divine plan or something, or God's will that even as he was later an atheist, he couldn't shake. I just don't believe in the sincerity of the atheism, really, because he doesn't describe that great length what it means when he says he was a professing atheist. He says that he read Ayn Rand, right? So what seems like probably happened

is that he went through this very conventional phase of being into Ayn Rand, which like every rightist of his generation did at some point, And Iron Ram was this individualist atheist, right? And I guess therefore he kind of just associated with... Everything is like that, right? He becomes a Christian because Peter Thiel showed him that Christians could be smart. So that's like...

Yeah, no, exactly. I shot it down on both of me. Yeah, that's one of the most hilarious parts. He was an atheist, but then he meets Peter Thiel. And Peter Thiel is a Christian, and he's so smart that it just intrinsically makes J.D. he's so much less confident in what had been his assumption that all religious people are stupid. That's not that stupid because like sometimes

I'll be like this belief is really, really dumb. And then I'll meet a really smart person who has a belief and it'll make me question it. It's not that crazy. No, but he says, Teele impacted me in another way. Possibly the smartest person I never met, he identified very openly as a Christian. He defied the simple social template I had constructed that dumb people who were religious and smart people.

I don't think that's crazy. I don't think that's crazy. But if he had seriously been a professing atheist, meaning he had thought really deeply about it. He had read widely on atheism. He doesn't say that. He doesn't say he read deeply on atheism or secularism. He just saw that I and read and he liked it. He just said he was an atheist.

He just didn't believe in religion. He thought it was stupid. And he didn't, he wasn't an atheist theologian or whatever the equivalent of like a theologian would be for an atheist. He wasn't like, he wasn't talking about saying he was reading Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. No, but he does say he read some of that stuff.

He quotes Christopher Hitchens, God is not great. He talks about the new atheists here and there. He gives the impression if he had been more involved in kind of formulating identity as an atheist beyond generic aversion to religion or your religion

custody. You're being too hard on him here. There's things to be hard on JD Vance for, but like his atheism wasn't well thought out enough. Like he never claimed to be, you know, an atheist philosopher. I think that's...

I know, but I'm just saying if you're going to, in years of hindsight, as part of your conversion story, say you were once lost, but now you're found and you were lost when you were an atheist, right?

and it was just meeting somebody who was religious and also intelligent was enough to show you that maybe your atheism was unfounded that's something that if you were like an actual atheist and that you were it's something that you had thought about like he he claims that he went on reddit and was looking at all these dopey like pro atheism uh subredits and refuting them in his mind or like that these these these arguments had stuck with them right so like one thing that any any atheists who had spent like a couple of hours on the internet reckoning with is that there are, yes, are intelligent people who are nonetheless religious. So there isn't this one-on-one one-on-one correlation

between intelligence and religiosity but he makes it seem like just meeting Peter Thiel was this grand revelation. So here's why I don't buy it. Look, I don't buy it because it's too convenient of a narrative little plot point for him to insert into this

tale that he's now telling as to how he somehow achieved enlightenment and realize that his youthful, or like the atheism of his young adulthood was misguided. Here, look, you're right, he's not that intellectual about the atheism. He's not really, he is a guy who likes to give the appearance of intellectualism, but everything, like, collapses at the least bit of, like, introspection. And if you look, it goes down to it, like, it's almost like J.D. does not have a sense of self, or he does not have, like, an independent intellectual life.

He's like, you know, everything, the story that he tells, and even though everyone is kind of influenced by their environment, he tells it in like a more explicit way. I was with this crowd and then I believed this, right? And then I saw this person who believes this. And that became... And then I met Donald Trump Jr. And then I believed Maga.

Yeah, exactly. It's all like this. It's like every step, like, the way he tells the story about his life. Like, I just wanted to, you know, become a lawyer or become successful and go to a fancy school because that's what everyone else was doing. And I wanted that. I didn't question myself.

And then he's like, and then I wanted something higher. So I became a Catholic. But like what he doesn't bring up here is that like everyone who was quote unquote based in like 2019, 2020, 2020, 2021, the thing to do of like an elite based law student or elite college graduate was to become a Catholic. I know a class of like Yale law students who all like became like 10 of them became Catholics like together. And a lot of them didn't stick with it.

But it was just like a thing you did if you were on the right. So he doesn't mention that. And then, yeah, like the thing to be, if you're a conservative, is to be a MAGA. He becomes a MAGA, right? And he can come up, he's smart enough, he can come up with a justification any point in the process. But at its root, it's always like what other people are believing and ultimately what's good for himself. I guess my issue is this, he wrote, he chose to write this book to chronicle his purported intellectual journey. Michael, are you tapping on the mic or something?

I hear like he chose to write this book because he felt that he had a fascinating enough intellectual odyssey in terms of his religiosity and lack thereof and then re-religiosity

that it was it warranted a book right he had put enough thought into it that it uniquely was deserving of the book treatment right so of course not everybody who just kind of like generically doesn't believe in some theist

conception of the Almighty necessarily has to have this well-developed philosophical outlook on things. But we're talking about somebody who wrote a book over the course of almost a decade on his intellectual and religious development. And yet,

the actual intellectual development, it seems, is like incredibly thin. It seems like, yeah. Overall, fimmatically, what strikes me is, so I read hillbilly elegy, you know, back you know, when he was nominated for vice president.

I heard about it before, obviously. But I hadn't sat down and read it until 24. And I just want to remind people the very first line of that book, okay? He says, hold on, wrong document. He says, hellbelly alloges begins with, quote, My name is J.D. Vance. And his current book, Communion, begins with,

um, it also begins with the word I. Okay, so I didn't write down the, the full sentence. I have it. I can pull it up for you if you want. It's,

uh, I take my kids to church every week. Well, usually that's the introduction. So it's just interesting to me that this guy has now written two books over the span of a day.