Speaking on Fox and Friends, Vice President JD Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance continued to publicly speak about their interfaith marriage. Vance has stated that when they met they both considered themselves agnostic, and while the First Lady still identifies as Hindu she attends church regularly with her now-Catholic husband.
For context, Vance has given a lot of airtime as of late addressing his interfaith marriage. Speaking to students at Ole Miss, he acknowledged their religious past and how she has been supportive of his conversion and how he hoped she would come to see what moved him to be baptized as an adult through regular church attendance. Their two boys are being raised Christian.
“My wife did not grow up Christian. I think it’s fair to say that she grew up in a Hindu family,” Vance said from a podium at the Mississippi Turning Point USA event. “But not a particularly religious family in either direction. In fact, when I met my wife, we were both – I would consider myself an agnostic or an atheist – and that’s what I think she would have considered herself as well.”
added in his speech, before concluding his specific remarks by saying he hoped she would likewise accept Christ as her Savior like he did. “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.”
And so it was on Fox and Friends that the pair sat down together for an extended interview and the question of their interfaith marriage again came up. “Tell me about ya’ll’s faith,” the Fox host casually prompted, to which Vance initially replied that he had never been baptized as a child despite growing up in what he described as a Christian family.
“I had never been baptized. Even though I was raised Christian, I’d never been baptized. So I was baptized for the first time in 2018. Usha was not raised Christian, is actually not Christian. But I remember when I started to re-engage with my own faith. Usha was, like, very supportive.”
Vance’s comment about his wife being supportive of his adoption of Catholicism prompted her to be asked why she was supportive, to which she said there “a few different reasons.” The first was that she valued religion. “One is that I did grow up in a religious household,” the Second Lady said. “My parents are Hindu, and that was one of the things that made them such good parents, that make them very good people. And so I think I’ve seen the power of that in my own life, and I knew that JD was searching for something. This just felt right for him.”
When asked how their family navigates a household comprised of parents of two differing faiths, Usha stressed that they communicate often about what matters and that ultimately they just “agree on” many thing. “There are a lot of things that we just agree on, I think, especially when it comes to family life, how to raise our kids, and so I think the answer really is we just talk a lot,” she added
Watch the dynamic Second Family discuss their marriage and faith below:
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