Vice President JD Vance thrust the deeply sensitive challenges facing interfaith couples into the spotlight when he told a packed college arena that he hopes his Hindu wife would someday convert to Christianity.
Experts who have counseled hundreds of couples who don’t share religious beliefs agree that pressuring or even hoping a partner would convert could prove damaging to a relationship.
Instead, the key is respect for each other’s faith traditions and having honest discussions about how to raise their children.
“To respect your partner and everything they bring to the marriage — every part of their identity — is integral to the kind of honesty that you need to have in a marriage,” said Susan Katz Miller, author of the book “Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family.”
“Having secret agendas is not usually going to lead to success.”
Vance, who converted to Catholicism five years into his marriage with Usha Chilukuri Vance, shared his hopes for her conversion while taking questions at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Mississippi. A woman asked how he and his wife raise their children without giving them the sense that his religion supersedes her beliefs.
“Do I hope that eventually she is somehow moved by what I was moved by in church? Yeah, honestly, I do wish that, because I believe in the Christian Gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way,” the vice president said. “But if she doesn’t, then God says everybody has free will, and so that doesn’t cause a problem for me.”
Vance’s comments received extensive criticism. The Hindu American Foundation, in a statement addressing the vice president, cited a history of Christians attempting to convert Hindus, and what it says is a rise in anti-Hindu online rhetoric often coming from Christian sources.
“Both of these underpin the sentiment that your statements re: your wife’s religious heritage are reflective of a belief that there is only one true path to salvation — a concept that Hinduism simply doesn’t have — and that path is through Christ,” the statement said.
Vance’s press office did not offer a comment for this article. But Vance did engage on social media with a critic who accused him of throwing his wife’s religion under the bus, calling the comment “disgusting.” He said his wife is “the most amazing blessing” in his life and that she encouraged him to reengage with his faith.
“She is not a Christian and has no plans to convert, but like many people in an interfaith marriage — or any interfaith relationship — I hope she may one day see things as I do,” Vance said in his X post. “Regardless, I’ll continue to love and support her and talk to her about faith and life and everything else, because she’s my wife.”
A Pew Research Center survey in 2015, the most recent asking Americans about interfaith marriage, found that 39 percent of Americans who had married since 2010 have a spouse from a different religious group. By contrast, only 19 percent of those who wed before 1960 reported being in an interfaith marriage.
The number of interfaith couples in the U.S. has increased over the past decade, said Miller, whose mother was Christian and her father Jewish. Her mother chose to raise the children Jewish.
“Interfaith couples have different options,” Miller said. “They can choose one or both religions. They could choose a new religion or choose no religion, which is a choice a lot of couples are now making.”
