 "US Vice President JD Vance with his wife Usha Vance. AP")
US Vice President JD Vance received major backlash after he told a group of college students in Mississippi that he hopes Second Lady Usha Vance , who is a Hindu, converts to Christianity. The vice president made the controversial remark while he was speaking at the University of Mississippi at an event sponsored by Turning Point USA , the group founded by slain Christian conservative activist Charlie Kirk .
The comments came after Vance was questioned over his wife’s faith. The former Ohio Senator replied that his wife grew up in what was “not a particularly religious” Hindu family and said they had always had an open dialogue on religious matters when it came to how they wanted to raise their three children.
He went on to mention that Usha often attends church with him and expressed hopes that she will someday be “moved” by the same things that brought him to convert to Catholicism as an adult. “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 said.
“If she doesn’t, then God says everybody has free will, so that doesn’t cause a problem for me. That’s something you work out," he added. The American vice president’s controversial remarks soon gained backlash online.
The condemnation that followed
An Indian-American commentator named Deep Barot also weighed in, mocking Vance’s suggestion that his wife was once “agnostic” when she had admitted having been raised in the Hindu tradition. “Usha Vance is Hindu, not agnostic. This is not very hard for you to follow. They even had a Vedic Hindu wedding and one of his kids’ names [sic] is Vivek,” he wrote in the post, sharing a photograph from Vance’s wedding.
Brot went on to call Vance “the biggest hypocrite.” Another Indian X user commented: Vance, a class A hypocrite,” and noted that the vice president had credited his wife’s faith with reinvigorating his interest in his own. Transgender activist Ari Drennen went on to suggest that Vance is going to be the “first VP to get a divorce while in office.”
It is pertinent to note that Usha Vance has maintained that she has no intention to abandon her family’s faith in favour of her husband’s. In an interview with conservative commentator Meghan McCain in June, Usha said that she was “not intending to convert or anything like that” and told McCain that she and her husband have given their children “each the choice” of experiencing both of their respective religious traditions.
“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 recent trip to India, and some of the religious elements of that visit,” she said at that time.