Vice President JD Vance said at an event on a college campus this week that he wants to see his wife, second lady Usha Vance, who is the child of Hindu Indian immigrants, convert to Christianity.
The vice president was speaking at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Mississippi Oct. 29 that also included Erika Kirk, the widow of Vance’s late friend, Charlie Kirk. A member of the audience, who said she is an immigrant, asked JD Vance critical questions about his call to reduce legal immigration into the U.S. and how he is teaching his kids “not to keep your religion ahead of their mother’s religion.”
JD Vance, who is considered a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028, said his wife grew up in a Hindu family that wasn’t particularly religious, and that the two were both agnostics or atheists when they met each other. Usha Vance’s parents immigrated to the United States from India. JD Vance converted to Catholicism after his marriage, and was baptized in 2019.
“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, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way,” Vance said.
“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,” he added.
Vance also said he and his wife have decided to raise their three kids Christian, and that the two oldest go to a Christian school.
The Vice President’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Usha Vance, but she has previously said she’s not planning to become Catholic and that Hindu traditions are part of her children’s lives.
Vice President JD Vance speaks during a Turning Point USA event at The Sandy and John Black Pavilion at Ole Miss in Oxford, Miss., on Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2025.
“I’m not intending to convert or anything like that,” Usha Vance said in a June interview on Meghan McCain’s podcast.
“We make going to church a family experience. The kids know that I’m not Catholic, and they have plenty of access to the Hindu tradition, from books that we give them to things that we show them to the visit recently to India, and some of the religious elements of that visit,” she added.
Vance’s comments sparked backlash, with some saying he disrespected his wife’s traditions on a public stage. Responding to one such post on X, Vance posted Oct. 31 that his wife “is the most amazing blessing I have in my life.”
“I hope she may one day see things as I do. Regardless, I’ll continue to love and support her and talk to her about faith and life and everything else, because she’s my wife,” Vance said.
JD Vance’s theological claims on immigration have sometimes put him at odds with the leaders of his own faith. Vance has cited “Ordo Amoris,” a Catholic concept about the ordering of Christian love, to justify the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration.
“Just google ‘ordo amoris,'” Vance posted on X Jan. 30, in response to Christian-based criticism of his comments in a Fox News interview on immigration. Vance said in the interview that Christian love prioritizes family, then neighbors, then community, then fellow national citizens, before the rest of the world.
“The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating … on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception,” the late Pope Francis said in a Feb. 10 letter criticizing U.S. mass deportations.
Before being elected to lead the Catholic Church on May 8, Pope Leo XIV, who was then Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, similarly criticized Vance’s comments on immigration. He shared an opinion piece from the National Catholic Reporter on X Feb. 3, reposting the piece’s title, “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”
Contributing: Sarah D. Wire and Francesca Chambers – USA TODAY.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: JD Vance says he wants his wife, Usha, to convert to Christianity
