In an essay adapted from his forthcoming book and published June 5 by The Wall Street Journal, Vice President JD Vance reflected on the lasting lessons the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk taught him about faith, fatherhood, political charity, and the costs of public life.
The book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, is set for publication June 16. In it, Vance describes Kirk as a close friend and political confidant whose death deeply affected his family.
Vance wrote that Kirk called him during a difficult period after President Donald Trump selected him as his running mate in 2024, when Vance’s oldest son, then 7, was struggling with the sudden public attention, cameras, and Secret Service presence.
According to Vance, Kirk told him not to dismiss the burden his son was carrying.
“Don’t try to convince your son it’s not a sacrifice. It is,” Kirk told him, according to the excerpt. “Just try to take some solace in the fact that it’s a worthy sacrifice. I’ll say a prayer for you.”
Vance described Kirk as one of his closest friends and confidants in politics, saying Kirk was one of the few people with whom he regularly discussed the pressures national politics placed on his family.
“Politics is a dirty business sometimes, one where you have to make compromises and shape the public narrative in order to achieve the best possible — rather than the perfect — outcome,” Vance wrote, calling Kirk his “strategic partner” in the world of politics.
Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA and a major figure among young conservatives, also served as a political sounding board for Vance. In the excerpt, Vance wrote that Kirk told him in 2025 about rising anger among some young conservatives over Israeli influence in American politics. While Kirk acknowledged “legitimate disagreement” with the Israeli government, he worried that some criticism was turning into antisemitism, according to Vance.
Vance said Kirk “loved Israel” but also believed the Israeli government did not always act in line with U.S. interests. Kirk, he wrote, worked with young activists to ensure political disagreements did not turn into ethnic hatred.
Reflecting on Kirk’s Christian faith, Vance, a Catholic, wrote that commentators debated after Kirk’s death whether Kirk, a lifelong evangelical, had been close to converting to Catholicism.
Vance called Kirk a “person of profound faith,” who “certainly appreciated some things about Catholicism.” He recalled Kirk’s deep respect for Mary, writing that Kirk once told him Mary is “undoubtedly the most important human being to ever live,” while also saying that “some Catholics come too close to worshipping her.”
But Kirk also loved many aspects of American evangelical Christianity, according to Vance.
“It’s hardly a coincidence that his memorial service felt like an old-fashioned American revival,” Vance wrote. “My guess is that he would ultimately never have become Catholic, but who knows? The Lord cut his journey short.”
Vance said Kirk taught him to love “all parts of our Christian communion,” including what Vance described as a “certain charity about the body of Christ.”
“And if Charlie was right, and I think he was, there are things we Catholics can learn from Protestants, and vice versa,” Vance wrote. “We Christians are only able to argue about grace and good works, the veneration of saints, and the legitimacy of ecclesiastical authority because God gave us brains, and part of how we come to know Him is by figuring it out together.”
In a June 8 FOX News interview about the book, Vance also discussed his conversion to Catholicism, saying he was drawn to the Church’s “sense of rootedness.”
JD Vance: "What I loved about Catholicism was that you had this beautiful, ancient Church.
— Kevin McMahon (@Kevin__McMahon) June 9, 2026
A lot of the Christians...who were really good husbands, really good fathers, these were people who had been formed in the Catholic Church.
That's just what felt like home to me."
Jesse… pic.twitter.com/lCxOjpf26v
In a rapidly changing world, Vance said, Catholicism offered “this beautiful, ancient Church” with “very firmly rooted” traditions, some of which “go back thousands of years.” He said he “felt at home” when he went to Catholic churches and recognized that several men he admired had been shaped by the Church.
At the same time, Vance praised the “real dynamism” of Christianity in America, saying Catholics and Protestants sharpen one another by debating theological questions together.
In the Journal excerpt, Vance described traveling with his wife, Usha, to Utah after Kirk was shot to help escort his body back to Arizona. He wrote that Kirk’s widow, Erika, was devastated and repeatedly spoke about the couple’s young children, who would grow up with few memories of their father.
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Erika’s grief, Vance wrote, forced him to think about his own life as a husband and father.
“I realized that in such moments, everything worldly we value fades to nothing,” Vance reflected. “Erika didn’t care that her husband was politically influential or had the president’s ear. She cared about her babies and the fact that an assassin had stolen Charlie from them — so many memories and moments with their father robbed from them forever.”
He framed Kirk’s death through the communion of the saints, writing that Christians remain bound together across suffering, political division, and death.
“As Christians, we are all, together, part of the same Church,” Vance wrote. “Those who suffered and those who prospered. Those who voted for me and those who didn’t. The living and the dead.”
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He added that the mystery of suffering remains difficult to understand but said God still offers “little rays of light even in the darkest moments.”
One such “ray of light,” Vance wrote, came after Kirk’s death, when Usha became pregnant with the couple’s fourth child. The couple decided to try to have another child after Usha heard what Erika said in her grief.
“As my wife held Charlie Kirk’s widow on the first day of her terrible sorrow, Erika told Usha between sobs that she regretted having only two kids with Charlie,” Vance recalled. “For years I had asked Usha to have another baby, and for years she had told me she was done — especially now that public service had elevated us into the national spotlight. But something changed for Usha, and not long after we buried my friend, she became pregnant with our fourth child, a boy.”
“One life was stolen from us,” Vance wrote, “but another was given.”