JD Vance’s forthcoming memoir about becoming a Catholic features a United Methodist church on its cover.
The vice president, 41, announced the 304-page memoir, titled Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, on Tuesday, posting on X that it captured his “personal journey” to Catholicism after a period of atheism.
But the photogenic rural church pictured on the book’s cover is actually Mount Zion Church in Elk Creek, Virginia—a congregation of the United Methodist Church’s Holston Conference on Mt. Zion Road with an average Sunday attendance of 17.
The Bulwark reported that the image is a widely used stock photograph that has previously illustrated a Babylon Bee satire piece mocking a local church for holding only a single weekly service.
Notably, Vance has no Methodist connection.
His religious journey ran from a loosely evangelical, non-denominational Protestant childhood—he was never baptized as a child—through a brief spell as a devout Pentecostal teenager attending his father’s church in southeastern Ohio.
He then had a period of atheism in college before he converted to Catholicism in August 2019. He was received into the faith by Dominican priest Father Henry Stephan at St. Gertrude Priory, a Dominican parish in Cincinnati, after months of private theological instruction with the friars. He chose St. Augustine as his patron saint and has described himself as a “baby Catholic.”
There is, of course, another possible explanation for the book’s cover. Vance has long navigated an awkward tension between his Catholic faith and the predominantly Protestant, evangelical base he courts, among a MAGA crowd that has historically viewed Rome with deep suspicion.
A rural white clapboard church, nondenominationally photogenic and coded as vaguely evangelical, could be a more commercially palatable cover image for the readers Vance is trying to reach with his book, which is out June 16.
Since joining the White House, Vance has clashed repeatedly with Catholic leadership over his use of the faith to justify the Trump administration’s mass deportation drive.
He has been rebuked by the National Catholic Reporter, which called his Catholicism “little more than a political prop,” and censured by two popes, Francis and his successor, Leo XIV.
Vance’s latest ecclesiastical error comes at a particularly fraught moment. Pope Leo appeared to address Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s public prayer for “overwhelming violence” against Iran in his Palm Sunday homily, declaring that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, 58, piled on Tuesday, responding to Vance’s book announcement on X with a pointed question about a U.S. missile strike that killed 175 people at an Iranian school complex: “What would Jesus say about bombing a school?”
A Vance spokesperson directed the Daily Beast’s questions to the publisher, HarperCollins, which did not respond to a request for comment.
