Second Lady Usha Vance opens up about interfaith parenting with Vice President JD Vance

Fox News

3 days ago

Second Lady Usha Vance opened up in a new interview about how she and husband JD Vance raise their three children in an interfaith household, as Usha is Hindu and the vice president is Catholic.
Usha Vance spoke to Meghan McCain on her podcast, "Citizen McCain," about raising her three children, Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel, at the Naval Observatory, as well as the transition into becoming the second couple.
"At the time when I met JD, 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 said. "When you convert to Catholicism it comes with several important obligations, like to raise your child in the faith and all that."
"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," Usha continued.
The second lady said it was helpful because she felt she had a say over the directions of their lives.
"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 said.
Vance said their oldest child has done that, and added that they make going to church a "family experience."
"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 recent trip to India, and some of the religious elements of that visit," Vance continued.
Usha Vance was also the subject of a New York Times profile published Wednesday, which described some friends as "bewildered" by her going from once being a Democrat to the spouse of a Republican vice president.
Others said, however, that she naturally soured on the left over time, and she was reportedly outraged at Democratic attacks on future Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his wrenching confirmation process in 2018; she clerked for Kavanaugh when he sat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
"People close to the vice president, who went from being a vocal critic of now-President Trump to his running mate, argue that Ms. Vance went on a similar but less public journey that soured her on the left," the Times reported.
Usha Vance spoke to Fox News in August while her husband was on the campaign trail and told host Ainsley Earhardt how she deals with negative press coverage of her husband.
"Sometimes I don't see it all, and sometimes I do see it and I look at and think, well, this is not the JD I know, this is not accurate," she said at the time. "And other times it might span discussions or thoughts about what we should do next or how we should live. But I think we've been doing this now for a little while, and I've gotten kind of accustomed to it and grown a bit of a thick skin to it."
Usha Vance met JD Vance at Yale University, and the couple married in 2014. Vice President Vance, 40, is the third-youngest vice president in history and first millennial to hold the office, and Usha Vance is the first Indian-American second lady.