(LifeSiteNews) — Vice President JD Vance told a large gathering of students that he is raising his young children as Catholics and that he hopes that his wife, Usha, who was raised in a Hindu household, will one day join him in his Christian faith.
Vance spoke at the University of Mississippi for a Turning Point USA event, where he fielded a wide range of questions about Christianity, his personal faith, abortion, and his marriage.
While some have been quick to criticize the vice president for his mixed-religion marriage, both Vance and his wife, by their own admission, were at most agnostics when they married. Vance later converted to Catholicism with the full support of Usha.
“My wife did not grow up Christian. I think it’s fair to say she grew up in a Hindu family, but not in a particularly religious family.… In fact when I met my wife, I would consider myself an agnostic or an atheist, and I think that’s what she would have considered herself as well,” Vance explained.
JUST IN: JD Vance says he’s raising his children Christian, and he hopes his agnostic wife, Usha, comes around to the Christian faith.
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He said that one important strength of their marriage is their willingness to discuss important matters, not shy away from them.
“We talk to each other about this stuff. So we’ve decided to raise our kids Christian, said Vance. “Our two oldest kids go to a Christian school. Our eight-year-old did his First Communion about a year ago,” recounted Vance to a sustained roar of applause and cheers from the 10,000 mostly students in attendance.
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“Everybody has to have this conversation when you’re in a marriage,” said Vance. And to those who are currently in mixed-faith marriages or who are married to atheists, he advised, “You’ve just got to talk to the person that God has put you with, and you’ve got to make those decisions as a family unit.” He continued:
Most Sundays, Usha will come with me to church. As I’ve told her and I’ve said publicly, and I’ll say now in front of ten thousand: Do I hope eventually she is moved by the same thing I was moved in by Church? Yes. I honestly 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, so that doesn’t cause a problem for me,” said Vance, who acknowledged that others outside their marriage may also someday play a role in bringing Usha to Christ.
“Usha is closer to the priest who baptized me than maybe I am,” he said. “They talk about this stuff. My attitude is ‘You figure this stuff out as a family, and you trust in God to have a plan and you try to follow it as best as you can.’”
🚨 JUST IN: JD Vance says he’s raising his children Christian, and he hopes his agnostic wife, Usha, comes around to the Christian faith
Vance’s 8-year-old did his first Communion “about a year ago,” and his two oldest kids go to a Christian school
“Most Sundays, Usha comes… pic.twitter.com/RuXAWOD58j
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“My Christian faith tells me the Gospel is true and is good for human beings. My wife — as I said at the TPUSA — is the most amazing blessing I have in my life,” Vance later explained to one of his detractors on X, who accused Vance of throwing his wife’s religion under the bus for short-term political gain.
“She herself encouraged me to reengage with my faith many years ago,” said Vance. “She is not a Christian and has no plans to convert, but like many people in an interfaith marriage — or any interfaith relationship — I hope she may one day see things as I do. Regardless, I’ll continue to love and support her and talk to her about faith and life and everything else, because she’s my wife.”
Online commentator Kangmin Lee noted in response to criticism of Vance’s remarks that as a Chrisitan, if Vance “did not desire for his wife to believe in Christ, he would be a liar. It is because he cares about his wife [that] he wants eternity with Christ for her.”
“It is not betrayal. It is proper leadership and love,” added Lee.
In June, Usha told the same story from her perspective when she spoke to Meghan McCain on her podcast, “Citizen McCain.”
“At the time when I met JD, he wasn’t Catholic, and he converted later. And when he converted, we had a lot of conversations about that because it was actually after we had our first child, maybe it was after Vivek was born too,” Usha Vance told McCain. “When you convert to Catholicism it comes with several important obligations, like to raise your child in the faith and all that.”
READ: JD Vance says Christian values are central to US, created the ‘most moral’ civilization
“We had to have a lot of real conversations about how do you do that, when I’m not Catholic, and I’m not intending to convert or anything like that,” continued the Second Lady.
“So what we’ve ended up doing is we send our kids to Catholic school, and we have given them each the choice, right? They can choose whether they want to be baptized Catholic and then go through the whole step-by-step process with their classes in school,” she said.
While the mixed-religious nature of the Vance’s marriage arose only after JD converted to the Catholic faith, the Catholic Church has long addressed the often-problematic nature of “mixed” marriages and advised against them.
“Our Lord Jesus Christ instituted the sacrament of marriage as a symbol of His union with the Church, in order to present a fuller explanation of his sanctifying power and the model of this great mystery in the lives of the spouses (cf. Eph 5:32), who in virtue of their intimate communion of life, represent the love with which Christ offered himself for the salvation of mankind,” taught the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — now known as the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith — in 1966.
It continues:
The sacrament of marriage requires more than anything else the full and perfect harmony of the spouses themselves, especially in regards to religion: ‘In fact the union of spirits may fail or at least be weakened when there are differences of belief and oppositions of the will concerning religious truths and sentiments that make up the highest values that are the subject of human veneration.’
For these reasons, the Church considers it her most solemn duty to protect and safeguard the gift of the faith both for the spouses as well as their children. And for this very reason, it strives in every way so that Catholics do not enter into marriage with non-Catholics.
Read the entire document here.
