Second Lady Usha Vance revealed how she and her husband, Vice President J.D. Vance, have handled the issue of having different faiths as they raise their three children.

Usha, 39, and J.D. met and fell in love while they were attending Yale Law School, graduating together in 2013. They married the following year.

She was raised in San Diego, California, by her parents, who hail from India. Their family is of the Hindu faith.

J.D. — whose life was the subject of the bestselling book “Hillbilly Elegy” and Ron Howard movie of the same title — was raised in Middletown, Ohio, primarily by his grandmother.

J.D. wrote in a 2020 essay that his Mamaw, as he called her, was not into organized religion but loved watching Christian evangelist Billy Graham on television, as well as Christian programs like “The 700 Club.”

When he was older, his father took him to a Pentecostal church in southwest Ohio, but by the time J.D. left the Marines in 2007 and became a student at Ohio State University in his mid-20s, he considered himself an atheist, resonating with the views of author Ayn Rand.

However, in his 30s, now a family man, J.D. felt drawn back toward faith and joined the Roman Catholic Church in 2019.

In an interview on the “Citizen McCain” podcast published on Wednesday, host Meghan McCain asked Usha how she and J.D. incorporate their different faiths in their family.

“At the time when I met J.D., he wasn’t Catholic, and he converted later, and when he converted, we had a lot of conversations about that because it was actually after we had our first child. Maybe it was after Vivek was born too,” she responded.

“When you convert to Catholicism, it comes with several important obligations, like to raise your child in the faith and all that,” Usha continued.

“We had to have a lot of real conversations about how do you do that when I’m not Catholic, and I’m not intending to convert or anything like that,” she recounted.

Usha told McCain that J.D.’s formal conversion was helpful because it forced them to address how they were going to handle the issue of faith in their family.

“So what we’ve ended up doing is we send our kids to Catholic school, and we have given them each the choice, right? They can choose whether they want to be baptized Catholic and then go through the whole step-by-step process with their classes in school,” she explained.

US Vice President JD Vance and his wife Usha greeting Pope Leo XIV in St. Peter’s Basilica after the Mass for the Pope’s Inauguration. pic.twitter.com/4ww2bx0rbR

— Catholic Sat (@CatholicSat) May 18, 2025

Usha said that their oldest child — son Ewan, who is 8 — has made that choice.

“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 visit recently to India, and some of the religious elements of that visit,” Usha said.

J.D. wrote in his 2020 essay about his conversion, “My wife has said that the business of converting to Catholicism — studying and thinking about it — was ‘good for you.’”

“And I came, eventually, to see that she was right, at least in some cosmic sense. I realized that there was a part of me — the best part — that took its cues from Catholicism. It was the part of me that demanded that I treat my son with patience, and made me feel terrible when I failed,” he continued.

This weekend, I led the US Delegation to Rome and met with Pope Leo XIV, as well as many other Church and international leaders.

I’m grateful to Pope Leo for the opportunity to meet with him, and I pray the Holy Spirit guides him with wisdom and fortitude during his papacy. pic.twitter.com/YMJ8P9EEZF

— Vice President JD Vance (@VP) May 20, 2025

“That demanded that I moderate my temper with everyone, but especially my family. That demanded that I care more about how I rated as a husband and father than as an income earner. That demanded that I sacrifice professional prestige for the interests of family. That demanded that I let go of grudges, and forgive even those who wronged me.”

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