Vice President JD Vance, known for his ardent Catholic faith and unapologetic – and correct – view that Christianity developed all of the good that has entered the modern world, revealed that his belief in Christ dying for our sins and rising from the dead was previously challenged. Vance made the honest revelation in a candid interview with Fox News’ Jesse Watters.
Watters asked the lead-in question bluntly and gave the vice president plenty of space to develop his response. Simply put, he was asked how he lost his faith. In his response, Vance shared something many older adults who have returned to the church might relate to, that as a younger person he strayed and only grew after experiencing life and embracing wisdom from the right people at the right time.
“Well, Jesse, it’s an interesting question, but I think really it started with the fact that I wasn’t properly formed in my faith. I grew up, I went to church off and on. My grandmother, who raised me, she was a person who prayed, she was a person of very deep faith, but I was never actually that rooted in any particular church in any particular community of members. I remember a pastor, a guy who actually did a lot of ministry in prisons,” he began.
“He told me that one of the things he told the prisoners that he worked with is, ‘You show me your friends and I’ll show you your future. I unfortunately had a lot of friends who were not people of faith, I had a lot of people who just did not, I think, properly support me in my own faith journey, and so it kind of, I kind of just lost it,” he then said.
“There wasn’t any particular moment. It’s not like I had this particular fissure with my own Christian faith, but I think for a lot of kids, you know, they look at their faith, they maybe weren’t properly formed, they didn’t have a great church community when they were growing up, and then they get to the Marine Corps, they get to military, they get to college, and they realize their faith just doesn’t mean that much to them, and so it’s easy to discard, and that was certainly the case for me,” he went on.
“It didn’t mean that much to me, and so it was easy to discard, and a lot of ways, the story of this book is how I realized how powerful and important that faith could be. So, I came back to it, but it was a long and winding road, as they say,” he finished.
The entire Trump administration has often spoken about their Christian faith, and for Vance this is one of countless conversations he’s had in public. Vance was highly praised for defending the idea that Christianity introduced concepts beloved by the left, and often used as a political cudgel without realizing their actual historical origins. One such example is human rights.
“The very idea that human beings have rights, are a Christian concept. And so I’d ask you, my assumption based on the question, is that you’re skeptical of Christianity, or at least of certain public professions of Christianity. One of my favorite Bible verses is by your fruits, ye shall know them. And I think that the fruits of the Christian faith are the most moral, the most just and the most prosperous civilization in history,” Vance said during remarks with Erika Kirk at a Turning Point USA event.
“I make no apologies for believing that Christianity is the pathway to God. I make no apologies for thinking that Christian values are an important foundation of this country, but I’m not going to force you to believe in anything, because that’s not what God wants, and that’s not what I want either,” he added.