Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance opened up about converting to Catholicism in 2019 Saturday — and revealed he “feels bad” for dragging his Hindu wife to Mass every Sunday.
She “didn’t sign up to marry a weekly churchgoer” but she’s “more than OK with it,” the Ohio senator said of wife, Usha, during an oft-contentious interview with the New York Times.
The “Hillbilly Elegy” author said he started asking himself “big questions” around 2017 to 2019 when he became a father and had achieved career and financial success but found the “values of meritocracy … deeply lacking.”
“And when I started to think about the big things, like, what do I actually care about in my life?,” Vance, 40, said.
“I really want to be a good husband. I really want to be a good father. I really want to be a good member of the community. I wanted to be a virtuous human being, in other words.”
Vance said he was raised in Christianity but thought about what sect he’d want to raise his children in and landed on Catholicism after thinking about what faith the good people in his life practiced.
And Usha — whom Vance married in 2014 and now shares three children with — fully supported his spiritual journey, he explained.
“She thought that they were good for me, in a sort of good-for-your-soul kind of way,” Vance said. I don’t think I would have ever done it without her support, because I felt kind of bad about it, right?
“I feel terrible for my wife because we go to church almost every Sunday, unless we’re on the road,” Vance said.
While Usha — who was raised in a moderately religious Hindu household — attends Mass with Vance, she has not converted, the junior senator explained.
“Obviously I help with the kids, but because I’m kind of the one going to church, she feels more responsibility to keep the kids quiet in the church,” Vance said.
“She was more than OK with it, and that was a big part of the confirmation that this was the right thing for me,” he added.
In the interview, Vance was also grilled about his reversal on running mate Donald Trump, whom he previously called “America’s Hitler” only to eventually become an all-out supporter of the former president, 78.
“I think that in 2016, I saw the divisiveness in American politics as at least partly Donald Trump’s fault,” Vance explained.
“And by 2018, 2019, I saw that divisiveness as the fault of an American political and media culture that couldn’t even pay attention to its own citizens.”
He said Trump “was not driving the divisiveness, he was merely responding to it and giving voice to a group of people who had been completely ignored. And he was doing it in a way that really did poke his eye at that diseased media culture.”
