By DEEPA BHARATH

Vice President JD Vance recently told a packed college arena that he hopes his Hindu wife would someday convert to Christianity, thrusting into the spotlight the deeply sensitive challenges facing interfaith couples.

Experts who have counseled hundreds of couples who don’t share religious beliefs say the key is respect for each other’s faith traditions and having honest discussions about how to raise their children. Most agree that pressuring or even hoping the other would convert could prove damaging to a relationship, and all the more so for a couple in the public arena.

“To respect your partner and everything they bring to the marriage — every part of their identity — is integral to the kind of honesty that you need to have in a marriage,” said Susan Katz Miller, author of the book “Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family.”

“Having secret agendas is not usually going to lead to success,” she said.

Vance, who converted to Catholicism five years into his marriage with Usha Chilukuri Vance, shared his hopes for her conversion while taking questions at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Mississippi. A woman asked how he and his wife raise their children without giving them the sense that his religion supersedes her beliefs.

“Do I hope that eventually she is somehow moved by what I was moved by in church? Yeah, honestly, I do wish that, because I believe in the Christian Gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way,” the vice president said. “But if she doesn’t, then God says everybody has free will, and so that doesn’t cause a problem for me.”

Vance’s comments received extensive criticism. The Hindu American Foundation, in a statement addressing the vice president, cited a history of Christians attempting to convert Hindus, and what it says is a rise in anti-Hindu online rhetoric often coming from Christian sources.

“Both of these underpin the sentiment that your statements re: your wife’s religious heritage are reflective of a belief that there is only one true path to salvation — a concept that Hinduism simply doesn’t have — and that path is through Christ,” the statement said.

Vance’s press office did not offer comment for this article. But Vance did engage on social media with a critic who accused him of throwing his wife’s religion under the bus, calling the comment “disgusting.” He said his wife is “the most amazing blessing” in his life and that she encouraged him to reengage with his faith.

“She is not a Christian and has no plans to convert, but like many people in an interfaith marriage — or any interfaith relationship — I hope she may one day see things as I do,” Vance said in his X post. “Regardless, I’ll continue to love and support her and talk to her about faith and life and everything else, because she’s my wife.”

Interfaith marriage is more common today

A Pew Research Center survey in 2015, the most recent asking Americans about interfaith marriage, found that 39% of Americans who had married since 2010 have a spouse from a different religious group. By contrast, only 19% of those who wed before 1960 reported being in an interfaith marriage.

The number of interfaith couples in the U.S. has increased over the past decade, said Miller, whose mother was Christian and her father Jewish. Her mother chose to raise the children Jewish.

“Interfaith couples have different options,” Miller said. “They can choose one or both religions. They could choose a new religion or choose no religion, which is a choice a lot of couples are now making.”

But, she said, “pressuring one’s spouse to convert or even hoping they would convert is not a good basis for a successful marriage.”

At the Turning Point event, Vance told the audience that he and his wife decided to raise their children as Christian. He said they attend a Christian school and participate in milestone Catholic sacraments, such as his oldest son receiving his First Communion a year ago.

Vance has said that when he met his wife at Yale Law School, they were both atheist or agnostic. She grew up in a Hindu immigrant family that was not particularly religious, and they incorporated Hindu rites into their wedding ceremony in 2014. Vance became Catholic in 2019.

The Catholic Church requires interfaith couples to raise their children Catholic, and it’s a commitment Catholics must make in order to receive permission to marry outside the faith, said John Grabowski, theology professor at The Catholic University of America. Along with his wife, Grabowski helps prepare interfaith couples for marriage.

“If your faith is the most important thing in your life, you want to share that with your spouse,” he said, adding that it is a natural expression of love for Christians to want their partners to join them in eternal life.

“However, the Catholic Church does insist that spouses should not be coerced or pressured into the faith,” he said. “It’s a delicate line.”

Religious conversion in interfaith relationships is a key theme of Netflix’s hit show “ Nobody Wants This.” The romantic comedy follows the relationship between a Reform rabbi and an agnostic woman, including the pressures they face as she considers converting to Judaism.

Vance’s comments offered a glimpse into a real-life example of this intimate decision-making. Grabowski believes the vice president handled the touchy question “fairly well” by generally addressing the challenges in his interfaith marriage, but not detailing how the couple handle their differences.

“It was fascinating listening to that exchange,” Grabowski said, “because we normally don’t get a prominent political figure thinking out loud about grappling with these issues as a Catholic while trying to respect his faith and his wife’s conviction.”

Interfaith spouses handle religious conversion in many ways

Dilip Amin, founder of InterfaithShaadi.org, an online forum serving mostly South Asians, believes that religious conversion for the sake of a marriage could derail the relationship.

“If you convert because you’ve had an authentic change of heart, that’s fine,” he said. “But if it occurs because of constant pressure and proselytizing, that’s wrong. My advice is: Don’t let a religious institution drive your actions. Talk with each other. You don’t need a third party to interpret the situation for you.”

There is also strife when one spouse’s religious beliefs shift after marriage, said Ani Zonneveld, founder and president of Muslims for Progressive Values. She has officiated many interfaith weddings.

“I’ve seen that strain … where a Muslim husband who didn’t care much about practicing Islam became orthodox after having children,” Zonneveld said. “That’s unfair to the other person.”

The Rev. J. Dana Trent was ordained a Southern Baptist minister, but married a man who was initiated into Hinduism and lived as a monk. They’ve been married 15 years and together wrote a memoir titled “Saffron Cross: The Unlikely Story of How a Christian Minister Married a Hindu Monk.”

Raised an evangelical, Trent knows the Bible verse from Corinthians 6:14, that some believe discourages interfaith marriage. In it, the Apostle Paul says: “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers.”

Trent disagrees with that interpretation, saying its millennia-old context doesn’t apply in 2025 when being in an interfaith marriage often is not isolating.

“The goal of an interfaith marriage is not to convert each other,” she said, “but to support and deepen each other’s faith traditions and paths.”

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.