US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr has said that he never lost his faith, even when suffering in the throes of drug addiction.

The 70-year-old, who has previously called his faith “the centerpiece of my life” told radio host Eric Metaxas how he grew up praying the rosary every day, reading the Bible every night and attending mass.

However, he turned to drugs in his teens after his father Robert F Kennedy Sr was assassinated in 1968. 

In response to Metaxas suggesting RFK Jr had been an atheist, the presidential hopeful said: “I was never an atheist ever. I was raised in a deeply religious family, and I integrated that." 

He said he was a heroin addict “for a lot of years", the Christian Post reports. 

He added: “And when you're doing that, when you're living against conscience, which is what happens when you're an addict, you tend to push any kind of notion of God over the periphery of your horizons." 

However, Kennedy said after getting sober in 1983 he read something by psychiatrist Carl Jung about how believers beat their addictions more quickly and had more durable recoveries than those without faith.

This prompted him to make an intellectual decision to follow God. He decided to pretend that he believed God was watching him the whole time. The faith that was pretence is now real, he added.

Kennedy, who did not qualify for America’s first live televised presidential debate this week, held his own version of the debate live on social media platform X, which he named The Real Debate.

He answered the same questions in the same time frame as President Biden and Donald Trump. It was hosted by John Stossel, formerly of ABC News and Fox News.