Vice President JD Vance says a lack of Christian friendships during his youth contributed to his drift away from the faith before he eventually returned to Christianity.
Speaking to Fox News host Jesse Watters about his upcoming memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, Vance reflected on his spiritual journey and the influences that shaped it.
“My grandmother, who raised me, she was a person who prayed, she was a person of very deep faith,” he said. “But I was never actually that rooted in any particular church, in any particular community of members.”
Vance recalled advice from a pastor involved in prison ministry who told him that a person's friendships can have a significant impact on their spiritual direction. Looking back, Vance believes the absence of Christian friends played a major role in his loss of faith.
“I, unfortunately, had a lot of friends who were not people of faith,” he said. “I had a lot of people who just did not, I think, properly support me in my own faith journey, and so ... I kind of just lost it.”
Vance said his departure from Christianity was gradual rather than the result of a single defining moment. Like many young people, he said, faith can be easy to abandon when it has not been deeply formed.
“That was certainly the case for me. It didn't mean that much to me, and so it was easy to discard, and in a lot of ways, the story of this book is how I realized how powerful and important that faith could be. So, I came back to it, but it was a long and winding road, as they say,” he said.
The vice president converted to Roman Catholicism in 2019. He remains in an interfaith marriage with his wife, Usha Vance, a practicing Hindu. According to reports, the second lady supports her husband's faith journey but has no plans to convert.
Vance said he hopes sharing his story will encourage others who are struggling spiritually and are “seeking reconciliation with God.”