The Conversion Candidate

Once the voice of Appalachian disillusionment, America’s Vice-President now plays to the MAGA gallery, as remarks on his Hindu wife expose the uneasy marriage between faith and opportunism.

Few politicians embody America’s moral whiplash quite like Vice-President J.D. Vance. Once a sceptic of Donald Trump and the politics of resentment, he has reinvented himself as Trumpism’s most polished apostle. This week, that balancing act came perilously close to collapse.

At a Turning Point USA event in Mississippi, Vance told a rapt conservative crowd that he hoped his Hindu wife, Usha, would one day convert to Christianity. He was careful to add that she had “the free will not to.” But the qualification could not blunt the blow as his interfaith marriage swiftly became a flashpoint. On social media and elsewhere, it rapidly became a test of whether America’s second-highest office can still speak to pluralism without genuflecting before the altar of Christian nationalism.

The irony is stark. A decade ago, Vance was the unlikely chronicler of forgotten America. His 2016 memoir ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ was an intimate, ambivalent portrait of working-class despair and was hailed as an antidote to the populist rage that would soon sweep Trump to power. Yet, within a few years, Vance would swap his role as interpreter for that of disciple. His political ‘awakening’ came with his 2019 baptism into Catholicism and his 2022 vice-presidential run alongside Trump. From Ohio populist to evangelical politician, his metamorphosis was not just theological but strategic.

This latest controversy fits neatly into that pattern. Faced with a question from an Indian-origin student about his wife’s Hindu heritage and the place of non-Christians in America, Vance began with the mild detachment of a Yale-trained lawyer. Usha, he said, had grown up Hindu but “not in a particularly religious household.” He added that both were “agnostic or atheist” when they met. Then came the political calculation: “I hope eventually my wife comes to see things as I do.”

The line drew applause from the young, conservative crowd and outrage from Indian Americans and Indians, who called him “Hinduphobic.” Diplomats and commentators accused him of hypocrisy.Vance’s damage-control response was revealing. “My wife is the most amazing blessing in my life,” he wrote on X, praising her for encouraging his rediscovery of faith. She had “no plans to convert,” he conceded, but he hoped she might “see things as I do.” To his MAGA base, it was proof of conviction. To his critics, it was confirmation that even his marriage was not safe from political choreography.

Vance’s critics have long noted his knack for reinvention. Once a vocal critic of Trump - calling him “an idiot” and warning he could become “America’s Hitler” - Vance later declared him the saviour of the working class.

Now, his faith is once again the centrepiece. His public musings about his wife’s conversion appear designed to flatter the Christian right, for whom family and faith are not private choices but ideological proofs. And in an era when MAGA’s moral code prizes public piety as political loyalty, Vance knows exactly which hymnal to sing from.

For all the noise, the episode also reveals a deeper insecurity. Vance, who owes his rise to the populist right, cannot afford to be seen as soft on religion or identity. Yet his very life defies the purity his base demands: a Catholic convert married to a Hindu, raising children named Vivek and Mirabel, occasionally photographed at Hindu temples.

So, he walks a tightrope by proclaiming love at home and conviction in public. But in trying to please both, he risks alienating all. Usha Vance, by all accounts a private and accomplished woman, has become collateral in his pursuit of power. His faith, meanwhile, is increasingly indistinguishable from performance.

Whether this controversy lingers may not matter. Yet, the episode leaves a bitter aftertaste. In a nation that has long prided itself on the separation of church and state, Vance’s language blurs that line, turning personal faith into political currency.

Disturbingly, his remarks reflect a darker undercurrent in America’s ongoing culture wars of the growing hostility faced by Hindus from an ascendant strain of White Christian nationalism. For the millions of Indian-Americans who quietly practise their faith, the Vice President’s invocation of “hope” for his wife’s conversion may sound benign to MAGA cheerleaders, but to many Hindus, it is a reminder that full acceptance in MAGA America comes with an asterisk: one must first kneel at the cross.