"But, without Mamaw around to guide him, JD lost his faith in God. 'With her gone, no one really cared about my faith, and soon I stopped caring too.'"

"By 2006 'I was no longer, in any real sense, a Christian.' Instead, he took up the winner-takes-all, blessed-are-the-rich philosophy of Ayn Rand, which he summarises as 'stop whining, stop praying, and start working your ass off.' Hers was the materialistic faith he followed through Ohio State University and most of Yale Law School, where they regarded Christianity as 'a weird superstition.' He now thinks his loss of faith was not primarily intellectual, but the inevitable result of transferring his political allegiance to an ungodly liberal elite. 'It was the equivalent of divorce. I was severing myself from my roots.' But then, around 2014, after he’d fallen in love and got married, he began to see that by becoming 'so focused on winning the game of life… I had neglected the deeper truth.'"

From "God, guns and 'Mamaw' — JD Vance’s memoir is part rant, part sermon/In Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, the US vice-president explains why the liberal elite pushed him into the arms of the Church — and Donald Trump" (London Times).