New Delhi: US Vice President J.D. Vance has said that he hopes his wife Usha Vance, a Hindu, will one day be “moved” by the Catholic Church and “eventually” come to believe in the Christian gospel.
Speaking Wednesday night at a gathering at the University of Mississippi honouring political activist Charlie Kirk, Vance said, “As I’ve told her, and I’ve said publicly, do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved in by 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.”
However, he also said that the couple had worked out their “own arrangement” in their dual-faith household. Vance, who was raised in a loosely Christian family and rarely attended church as a child, met Usha before his conversion to Catholicism while at Yale Law School. “We decided to raise our kids Christian,” he said, adding that their two children attend a Christian school, and that their eight-year-old completed his first communion last year.
He added that while he hopes his wife converts, her faith does not create tension in their home. “If she doesn’t, then god says everybody has free will, and so that doesn’t cause a problem for me,” he said. “One of the most important Christian principles is that you respect free will.”
‘Mistake to exclude faith from public spaces’
Vance rejected the notion that faith must be excluded from government or civic life. “Anybody who tells you it’s required by the Constitution is lying to you,” he said. “The Supreme Court interpreted ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion’ to effectively exclude religion from public spaces at the federal, state and local level. I think it was a terrible mistake, and we’re still paying for the consequences of it today.”
Vance has made faith a recurring theme in his public remarks, and at Wednesday’s event, positioned himself as a defender of America’s Christian heritage.
“I make no apologies for thinking that Christian values are an important foundation of this country,” he said in response to a question about the separation of church and state. “Anybody who’s telling you their view is neutral likely has an agenda to sell you. And I’m at least honest about the fact that I think the Christian foundation of this country is a good thing.”
He also took aim at what he called a distorted form of modern liberalism, arguing that it has severed compassion from virtue. “There’s nothing wrong, of course, with focusing on people who are disenfranchised—that’s the focus of liberalism,” he said. “But if you completely separate it from any religious duty or civic virtue, then that can actually become an inducement to lawlessness. You can’t just have compassion for the criminal. You also have to have justice too.”
(Edited by Shashank Kishan)
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