Late last month one of the world’s most well-known Catholics, US vice‑president JD Vance commented publicly that he hopes his wife Usha Vance – who was raised Hindu – “may one day … be moved by the same thing I was moved by” in the church.
His words received warm applause but provoked immediate controversy online: critics argued that the remark was insensitive to her faith, while others lauded his comments.
The occasion was a campus debate with students in honour of slain Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, and in the video snippet of Vance’s response it seems he was responding to a question about his interfaith marriage.
“Everybody has to come to their own arrangement here,” he said. “We’ve decided to raise our kids Christian, they go to a Christian school, our eight-year-old had his first communion about a year ago.
“The only advice I can give is you’ve just got to talk to the person that God has put you with and you’ve got to make those decisions as a family unit. For us it works out. Most Sundays Usha comes with me to church. Do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing I was moved by in church? Yes, I honestly do wish that, because I believe in the Christian Gospel and I hope that eventually my wife sees it in the same way.
“But if she doesn’t then God says everybody has free will and so that doesn’t cause a problem for me…one of the most important Christian principles is that you respect free will.”
Presumably Mrs Vance is not unused to having her marriage turn up as topic of public commentary, but her husband’s comments are uncontroversial from the church’s point of view, even though the issue is not a simple one.
On one hand, faith is intrinsically evangelising. The church (and by extension you could say every Christian) exists to evangelise, as Pope St Paul VI wrote in his 1975 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi.
Christians believe the Gospel is good and true, and naturally wish to share it with their loved ones. On the other hand, the dignity of the other – their free will, their own spiritual journey – is also central to Christian teaching. As Vance rightly noted, each such ‘unequally yoked’ couple faces the task of growing in love while living with that tension.
I am reminded of the French couple Élisabeth and Félix Leseur who married in 1889 but Félix later renounced his faith and became a prominent atheist, much to his wife’s distress.
Yet the couple remained very much in love, and through her faithfulness and ardent desire to surrender to the will of God, after her death he returned of his own accord to the church and was ordained a priest.
He published her diary The Secret Diary of Élisabeth Leseur, which offers encouragement in living the Christian faith to the full in a secular and anti-Christian environment.
Her story reminds us that Christian hope for a spouse’s conversion is not misguided but must be rooted in love, respect, and a profound acceptance of the other’s freedom and of God’s timing.
