'I do wish': US Vice President JD Vance hopes his wife Usha converts to Christianity
US Vice President JD Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019 and said that when he met his wife, Usha Vance, he considered himself an agnostic or an atheist.
US Vice President JD Vance has said that he hopes his Hindu-raised wife, Usha Vance, will one day embrace Christianity, while emphasising that she has complete freedom of choice and that their interfaith marriage is built on mutual respect and understanding.
'But if she doesn't...': Vance
Addressing a Turning Point USA event in Mississippi on Wednesday, Vance was asked whether he hopes his wife will eventually "come to Christ".
Responding candidly, he said, "Now, most Sundays, Usha will come with me to church. As I've told her, and as I've said publicly, and as 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 wish that because I believe in the Christian gospel and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way."
He added, however, that faith is deeply personal and that differences in belief do not create conflict in their marriage. "But if she doesn't, then God says everybody has free will, and so that doesn't cause a problem for me. That's something you work out with your friends, with your family, with the person that you love," Vance said.
The Vice President, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, described Usha's background, stating, "My wife did not grow up Christian. I think it's fair to say that she grew up in a Hindu family, but not a particularly religious family in either direction."
He further explained that the couple has found a balanced way to manage their interfaith household. "Everybody has to come to their own arrangement here. The way that we've come to our arrangement is that she's my best friend. We talk to each other about this stuff. We've decided to raise our kids Christian. Our two oldest kids, who go to school, go to a Christian school. Our 8-year-old did his first communion about a year ago. That's the way that we have come to our arrangement," the Vice President said.
Usha Vance on embracing Christianity
Earlier, Usha Vance, a Yale-educated lawyer and the first Indian American Second Lady, said she has no plans to convert. In an earlier interview, she opened up about how she and her husband were raising their children, Ewan, Vivek, and Mirabel, in an interfaith household.
Speaking to Meghan McCain on her podcast ‘Citizen McCain’, the Second Lady said, "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 baptised Catholic and then go through the whole step-by-step process with their classes in school."
(With ANI inputs)
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