Vice President JD Vance said he hopes his wife, Second Lady Usha Vance, converts from Hinduism to Christianity.
Vance made the remark while speaking Wednesday night at a Turning Point USA event where he and Erika Kirk, the widow of Turning Point co-founder Charlie Kirk, spoke to students at the University of Mississippi.
“I’ve told her and I’ll say 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 in, by church? Yeah, I honestly, I do wish that because I believe in the Christian gospel,” Vance told the crowd. “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 and so that doesn’t cause a problem for me.”
Vance: Do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved in by church. Yeah, I honestly, I do wish that because I believe in the Christian gospel. And I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way. If she does not, then god says everybody has free will and so that does not… pic.twitter.com/IVVJfMFhKT
Vance said he and his wife have come to an agreement that their children we be raised as Christians but that Usha Vance is not forced to convert to Christianity.
“That’s something you work out with your friends, with your family, with the person that you love. Again, one of the most important Christian principles is that you respect free will,” Vance said. “Usha’s closer to the priests who baptized me than maybe I am. 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.”
JD Vance told the crowd at Ole Miss that each interfaith couple “has to come to their own arrangement here,” pointing out that Usha Vance accompanies him to church on most Sundays.
“The way that we’ve come to our arrangement is she’s my best friend, we talk to each other about this stuff. So, we’ve decided to raise our kids Christian. Our two oldest kids who go to school, they go to a Christian school,” he said.
“That’s the way that we have come to our arrangement,” he said. “The only advice I can give is you 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. For us, it works out.”
Howard Koplowitz is AL.com's Breaking & Trending Reporter for afternoons and nights. He has been with AL.com since 2015 and has served in a variety of roles, ranging from coverage of Donald Trump's first…
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