US Vice President JD Vance has said that he hopes his Indian-origin wife, Usha Vance, will one day embrace Christianity, while emphasizing that faith is ultimately a matter of personal choice.
Vance made the remarks while speaking at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Mississippi on Wednesday.
JD Vance on His Wife’s Faith
“Now most Sundays Usha will come with me to church,” Vance said during his speech.
“As I’ve told her and I’ve said publicly — and I’ll say now in front of 10,000 of my closest friends — do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved by in church? Yeah, I honestly do,” he added.
Vance continued,
“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, God says everybody has free will, so that doesn’t cause a problem for me.”
The Vice President’s remarks drew widespread attention online, as the couple’s interfaith marriage has often been a subject of public discussion in the United States.
Background: An Interfaith Family
JD Vance, a Catholic convert, met Usha Chilukuri Vance, who was raised in a Hindu household, while both were students at Yale Law School.
During the Mississippi event, Vance said that Usha “grew up in a Hindu family, but not a particularly religious family.”
He noted that when they first met, both he and Usha identified as agnostic.
“In fact, when I met my wife, I would have considered myself an agnostic or an atheist — that’s what she would have considered herself as well,” he said.
“Every family has to come to their own arrangement,” Vance added, while revealing that their three children are being raised Christian and attend a Christian school.
Usha Vance on Raising Children in an Interfaith Home
In a previous interview on Meghan McCain’s podcast Citizen McCain, Second Lady Usha Vance spoke about how she and JD Vance are raising their children — Ewan, Vivek, and Mirabel — in an interfaith household.
“We send our kids to Catholic school, and we’ve given them each the choice. They can choose whether they want to be baptised Catholic and go through the step-by-step process with their classes in school,” she said.
Usha added that when she met JD at Yale, “he wasn’t Catholic.”
“When JD converted, we had a lot of conversations about it — especially after our first child was born,” she said.
“Converting to Catholicism comes with obligations like raising your children in the faith. We had to talk about how to balance that, since I’m not Catholic and don’t intend to convert.”
A Balancing Act Between Faiths
The couple’s comments reflect the complexities of interfaith relationships, especially when public figures navigate personal beliefs in the public eye.
While JD Vance expressed his hope for shared faith, both he and Usha have emphasized mutual respect, personal choice, and family harmony as central to their marriage and parenting.
