US Vice President JD Vance says that he hopes his wife, Usha, a Hindu, would become a Christian like him, but if she doesn’t, it won’t be a problem for him because God has given everybody freewill.
In a candid discussion of family matters and faith on Wednesday, Vance asked, “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 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, but if she doesn't, then God says everybody has free will, and so that doesn't cause a problem for me,” he said.
Vance was speaking at a rally of the Turning Point movement in Oxford, Mississippi, when a woman of Indian origin asked him about the family’s inter-religious dynamics.
Turning Point was founded by Charles Kirk, a conservative Christian activist who was assassinated last month.
He said that reconciling religious differences also mattered in marriages between people of different Christian sects or between atheists and believers.
“Everybody has to come to their own arrangement here,” he said. “The way that we've come to our arrangement is she's my best friend. We talked to each other about this stuff. So, we decided to raise our kids Christian”.
He added, “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”.
Vance said that when he met Usha at Yale University, he was an “agnostic or atheist.”
His wife, he said, “that's what I think she would have considered herself as well.”
She “grew up in a Hindu family, but not a particularly religious family in either direction,” he said.
Vance gradually returned to his Christian roots in the Protestantism he grew up in, but in a move away from the sects that dominate President Donald Trump’s, he converted to the Catholic sect three years ago and is an ardent observer of that church.
Some Christian fundamentalists have expressed reservations about his membership in the Catholic Church and his marriage to a Hindu.
Vance said that his wife comes to church on Sundays with the rest of the family, and “Usha is closer to the priests who baptised me than maybe I am.”
“They talk about this [religious] stuff,” he added.
On religious freedom and diversity, he said, “The most one of the most important Christian principles is that you respect free will”.
Earlier, he stressed that real Christianity believes in freedom of religion because of the God-given everyone the freedom to choose whatever path they want.
He said that the moves by Republican states and leaders to introduce prayers and discussions of Christianity did not violate the Constitution because they did not force everyone to pray, and the constitutional ban was only creating an official government church, as some states had at Independence.
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