JD Vance says wife Usha aided journey back to Christianity, hopes she will convert

By Jon Brown, Christian Post Reporter Tuesday, June 16, 2026

Vice President JD Vance said during a Monday interview that his wife, Usha Vance, played a role in his journey back to Christianity, and reiterated his hopes that she will convert from Hinduism.

Speaking during a Monday interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity about his new memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, published Tuesday, Vance first said he was in his 20s when he identified as an atheist, until he came to realize the emptiness of devoting his life to pursuing prestige.

"The thing that I write about is, I got to a point where I was so obsessed with just getting ahead," he said. "I was calling myself an atheist. I had this arrogance about my own reason and rationality, and I just wanted to get the best job, I wanted to go to the best schools, get the most prestigious and best credentials I could."

"I kind of hit this point in my 20s when I'm like, wait a second, am I actually becoming a better person because of this? And I realized, no, I'm becoming a worse person."

"When you believe something ... then of course you want the people that you love to share that perspective as well."

VP JD Vance tells @seanhannity he hopes Second Lady Usha Vance, who is Hindu, will one day convert to Christianity.

Vance said faith is deeply important to him,… pic.twitter.com/lB9DLAyoq4

— Fox News (@FoxNews) June 16, 2026

Vance, who married Usha in an interfaith ceremony in 2014 when he was still identifying as agnostic, said his wife supported his journey to Roman Catholicism. He converted to Catholicism and was baptized in 2019, though Usha remains Hindu.

Vance pushed back against controversy that emerged when he said last year that he would like his wife to convert to his faith, telling Hannity, "When you believe something, and I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, then of course you want the people that you love to share that perspective as well. It doesn't mean I don't respect my wife."

Calling her "a brilliant person," Vance said, "A lot of my own journey back to faith she supported, even though she didn't necessarily see things the same way I do. She really inspired my journey back to faith. I think it's just a totally normal thing for a husband to want his wife to agree with him on some of these issues."

Vance added that "some of the best conversations I've had about faith, about religion, about theology" have been with Usha because of her different perspective.

"I have a learned a lot from her, and she has learned a lot from me, and that's one of the great things about being married to a person like her," he added.

Usha, who regularly attends Catholic Mass with her family and whose fourth child is due in July, said in an interview on "CBS News Sunday Morning" over the weekend that she once told her husband that church was able to heal him in a way therapy apparently could not.

"Therapy didn't work for you; church does," she told Vance, who was mostly raised by his Christian grandmother, Bonnie Blanton Vance, in working-class Ohio while his mother battled addiction.

"And it's not that therapy doesn't work for other people, but JD just doesn't have the right kind of trust in that process. He just didn't feel at home in it, really exploring some of the feelings that he had and trying to figure out how he wanted to be the person that he wanted to be for the rest of his life," Usha said.

Vance writes in his new memoir that he began to stray from Christianity after the death of his grandmother in 2005. "With her gone, no one really cared about my faith, and soon I stopped caring, too," he wrote.

Last week, Vance explained to Fox News host Jesse Watters that another reason he drifted from the faith of his youth was because he lacked a strong church and support system of Christian friendships after leaving home and joining the U.S. Marine Corps in 2003.

Remembering when a pastor involved in prison ministry told him that the friendships one cultivates can determine a person's spiritual life, Vance said he wandered from Christianity as he found himself surrounded by friends who didn't take religion seriously.

"I, unfortunately, had a lot of friends who were not people of faith," he said. "I had a lot of people who just did not, I think, properly support me in my own faith journey, and so ... I kind of just lost it."

Vance, who noted his spiritual drift was gradual, warned that many other young people raised religiously often find themselves in a similar situation because of a weak church community, which is later supplanted by something that offers stronger relationships and identity.