JD Vance, Zohran Mamdani, and How We Talk About Religion – Good Faith Media

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by Craig Nash | Nov 13, 2025 | Opinion
The first argument about religion I remember engaging in was in junior high, sitting on the gym bleachers. I don’t recall what we were doing in the gym or how the conversation began, but I know how quickly it escalated when I boldly declared to my friends, “Religion will send you straight to hell.”
I’m not sure what I expected, but I wasn’t prepared for the angry responses that followed. I had assumed everyone in my mostly Christian East Texas town held similar views about the eternal dangers of religion.
I’d like to say that this controversial idea of mine came from a deep study of the Bible or years spent contemplating the nature of God, but I wasn’t even a teenager yet. The truth is far more predictable: I believed it because my pastor said it nearly every Sunday in his sermons.
The addendum we placed on “religion will send you to hell,” of course, was that “Christianity isn’t a religion; it’s a relationship.” The relationship, we believed, was with God through the person of Jesus.
If we were honest, we would have said exactly what we meant. Our message wasn’t that religion will send anyone to hell, but that your religion will send you to hell. It was a power play that essentially proclaimed, “Christianity is such a superior religion that it isn’t even a religion at all.”
The claim was a rhetorical sleight of hand that took one aspect of religion and elevated it as the defining framework of Christianity.
People far more intelligent than I have studied religion as a phenomenon for millennia, identifying various frameworks for understanding how we experience and talk about it. An extremely oversimplified condensation of all these ideas includes the following:
Practice
Religious practice is about what we regularly do. It consists of the rituals of gathering and worship, and the observance of holy days that ground us in our faith and tell the stories of who we are.
Story
Some refer to this as the mythic or narrative element, but a more accessible term is story. The story of a particular religion includes its history, origins, how its adherents have lived (and engaged with others) throughout time, and how all its elements are passed down to subsequent generations, whether through sacred texts or oral history. Story is the connective tissue of all the other elements.
Ethics
The ethical dimension of religion addresses what our religion asks of us in relation to others. It is about what we owe our families, communities, strangers, and the world, and how we “pay” what we owe through what we do or don’t do.
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is about what we believe is true about reality beyond the physical realm. It includes our answers about God, gods, angels, spirits, and what happens when we die.
Mission
Not to be confused with ethics, mission concerns itself with what (or whether) we are called to persuade others to do or believe.
Identity
Religious identity answers the question, “Concerning my religion, who are my people?” The answer to this can be simple—“My people are those who believe what I believe.” It can be complicated—“My people are those who identify with some combination of the other dimensions of religion that I identify with.” Or it can be situational—“My people are a mix of those who have chosen to be my people, others who were born into our religion, and still others who are identified with my religion based on geography.”
In the midst of practicing my Christian faith, I don’t have to identify or even be aware of all these various dimensions of religion. Among “my people,” I can use words and phrases like discipleship, God’s omniscience, and even Christian without much explanation, because we more or less share a common vocabulary. We are like the proverbial fish that don’t concern themselves with what water is.
But if I want to communicate and, more importantly, if I want to more fully understand my own religious identity, it is helpful to isolate and describe precisely what I am talking about.
The belief I parroted as a kid about religion sending people to hell was actually a clever manipulation of these various dimensions of religion. It took one of them—accepting a metaphysical belief about God sending God’s Son to die for our sins and to defeat death through resurrection—and made it the entire story of the Christian religion.
Belief in a particular “metaphysics of Christianity” became the only requirement. Everything else was minimally important or incidental.
Although I thought my junior high classmates were lacking in intelligence, faith, or both, their resistance to my “religion will send you to hell” claims was actually far wiser than my misguided belief. They likely (by virtue of identity—rural East Texans in the 1980s were almost exclusively fundamentalist Christians) believed the same thing I believed about hell and who goes there. But they were sensible enough to know that Christianity is just as much of a religion as Islam, Judaism, or Buddhism.
If all this seems complicated, it’s because it is. But the knot gets even more tangled when we consider that religion is just one of many identities we carry around with us. These include cultural, socioeconomic, gendered, racialized, ethnic, and national identities, just to name a few.
On top of the numerous identities we hold, we must also deal with how many of these identities can fuse with each other, either naturally or artificially. Many people conflate national or racialized identity with religious identity. Some assume an African American in the South is a Christian or an Arab American in Dearborn, Michigan, is a Muslim because of these interconnected identities.
And then there’s this: We all order our various identities in different ways. Some Mexican immigrants in my neighborhood celebrate Día de los Muertos because it is an integral part of their cultural and national identities, even if they dismiss or minimize its religious and Indigenous roots. Others hardly connect it to culture or country at all, commemorating it primarily as a religious practice.
Some may claim to order their different identities in a particular way, but the external evidence suggests they may be deceiving themselves.
Case in point: There’s a church in my city that carries the name, “Christ is King.” And yet their property has as many American flags waving over it as Arlington Cemetery on Memorial Day. They may claim the order of their values is God first, family second, and country after that, but I have my doubts.
These simultaneously occurring and competing identities are some of the reasons we are warned against the dangers of talking about religion “in polite company.” Nowhere are these landmines more fraught than when they converge with the other subject we aren’t supposed to carry to the holiday dinner table—politics.
Two stories from October help demonstrate this point.
In the weeks leading up to New York City’s mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani gave an emotional speech about his Islamic faith outside the Islamic Cultural Center of the Bronx. The speech was in response to Islamophobic statements from his competitors, Andrew Cuomo, Eric Adams, and Curtis Sliwa.
Cuomo, in an interview, laughed and agreed with a radio host that Mamdani would “cheer another 9/11.” Adams compared Mamdani to violent extremists, and Sliwa claimed from the debate stage that he supported global jihad.
Mamdani’s speech and the events that precipitated it were teeming with allusions to the elements of religious identity that make it so difficult to discuss.
For one, he had to address a particular dimension of story within religious discourse. Every faith carries two narratives—the story it tells about itself and the story outsiders read into it (or project onto it). Those stories often collide, and in Mamdani’s case, the outside story was the louder one.
In the United States, this is a special challenge for minority religions such as Islam. We take the worst acts ever committed by Muslims and attach them to the story of Islam itself. Meanwhile, for the dominant religion of Christianity, we minimize the worst acts ever committed by Christians as aberrations and “not part of our story.”
Mamdani isn’t the first Muslim public servant who has had to give such a speech. It’s almost required for anyone who practices Islam to make a public declaration either denouncing their faith or, at the very least, declaring that it will be “properly ordered,” well below their national identity.
However, his speech stood out for its boldness in claiming his religious identity. It was, in fact, the theme of the address. 
“There are 12 days remaining until election day,” he said, surrounded by Muslims of all backgrounds. “I will be a Muslim in New York City in each of those 12 days and every day that follows after that. I will not change who I am, how I eat, or the faith that I am proud to call my own.”
The speech was notable because it was delivered by a proud Muslim man who refused to allow anyone but himself and his fellow Muslims to tell the story of his faith. 
A week after Mamdani’s speech, Vice President JD Vance spoke at an event for Turning Point USA (TPUSA), the late Charlie Kirk’s organization. At the end, he fielded a question about how he and his wife raise their family regarding religion.
Vance is an adult convert to Catholicism, and his wife, Usha, is Hindu.
The nuances of the exchange were, in some ways, even more layered than the task before Mamdani, whose concern was primarily about religious identity. Vance had to address all the dimensions of his wife’s faith (without her there to speak for herself) and an element of his own faith that the TPUSA crowd elevates to a slot just below metaphysics—mission.
Vance received criticism for saying he believes “the Christian Gospel” and hopes “eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.” Interfaith and secular observers chastised him for expressing a hope that his wife would convert. (The implication is that she would renounce her Hinduism.)
JD Vance, like Zohran Mamdani, is a skilled politician who knows how to bend language to his will. He noted that his wife “considers herself Hindu” but grew up “not particularly religious.” Here, Vance exhibited a keen awareness that religion can be as much about identity and ethics (like it appears to be for his wife) as it is about metaphysics and mission (as it is for him and the evangelicals that make up TPUSA). 
His statement masterfully walked a tightrope between respecting his wife by acknowledging her religious identity in neutral terms, all while giving the TPUSA crowd the mission-oriented message they were looking for.
They were both (Vance and the TPUSA questioner) talking about religion. But they were talking about two completely different things, and the audience seemed none the wiser.
Sitting on those bleachers years ago, there’s no way I could have imagined that my offhand comment about religion would become a mirror reflecting how we still talk about faith. We trade in absolutes, demand conversions, and mistake difference for danger.
The challenge for people of good faith—as well as for good people of no faith—is to speak of our religious identities (or nonreligious identities) not as weapons or tests, but as windows into how we each make sense of the world.

Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.
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