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JD Vance spoke about his wife Usha Vance’s religion while appearing at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Mississippi
Usha was raised Hindu, while JD grew up atheist and converted to Catholicism in his 30s
The vice president shared that his wife often attends church with him and admitted that he hopes that one day she’ll by “somehow moved” by Christianity like he was
Vice President JD Vance practices a different religion from his wife Usha Vance, but said he hopes she can still feel a connection to his Christian faith.
The vice president took the stage at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Miss., on Wednesday, Oct. 29, where like Turning Point’s late founder, Charlie Kirk, he took questions from the audience in the style of an informal debate.
One student who stepped up to the mic asked the VP a multi-part question about immigration, but ended with a key query about his multi-racial, multi-faith house.
“How are you teaching your kids not to keep your religion ahead of their mother’s religion?… Why are we making Christianity one of the major things that you have to have in common to be one of you guys, to show that I love America just as you do?” the student asked.
Usha grew up in San Diego as the child of Indian immigrants who raised her with their Hindu faith. JD, meanwhile, was raised white working class in a tumultuous family structure he documented in his bestselling book, Hillbilly Elegy.
He described himself as an atheist until his 30s, when he started reading about theology and philosophy, and converted to Catholicism.
The couple married in 2014 and share three children: Ewan, 8, Vivek, 5, and Mirabel, 3.
In response to the student’s question, JD admitted that when he and Usha met, neither of them was “particularly religious,” though later, he got serious about Catholicism, and his wife still considers herself Hindu.
“Everybody has to come to their own arrangement here,” he said. “The way that we’ve come to our arrangement is she’s my best friend. We talk to each other about this stuff. So, we’ve decided to raise our kids Christian.”
“Most Sundays, Usha will come with me to church,” JD continued. “Do I hope, eventually, that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved in by church? Yeah, honestly, I do wish that, because I believe in the Christian gospel and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.
“But if she doesn’t, then God says everybody has free will and so that doesn’t cause a problem for me,” he said. “That’s something you work out with your friends, with your family, with the person that you love. Again, the most one of the most important Christian principles is that you respect free will.”
In a June 2024 interview with Fox News, Usha opened up about her religious background, saying that she believes her parents’ Hindu faith is “one of the things that made them such good parents, that make them really very good people.”
Of her husband’s journey to Catholicism, she recalled, “I knew that JD was searching for something. This just felt right for him.”
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JD frequently praises Usha for her support in his career success, calling her his “spirit guide” when they were classmates at Yale.
“She instinctively understood the questions I didn’t even know to ask and she always encouraged me to seek opportunities that I didn’t know existed,” he told The New York Times in 2022.
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