Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance converted to Christianity after considering himself an atheist, but still gets into trouble for his habit of swearing around his young children.
That habit, he said, arose in part because his grandmother, nicknamed by the classic Appalachian name “Mamaw,” used profanity incessantly as she tried to keep a younger Vance on the straight and narrow.
The story emerged when the Ohio senator spoke about the origins of his faith before a crowd of Christians in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Monday night.
The 40-year-old Catholic says he accepted Christ in 2019 and remarked during the event how the late Billy Graham, a son of the Tar Heel State whose grave Vance visited just hours earlier, was influential in his own conversion.
During his speech, he issued a stern warning to the evangelicals present, boldly stating that Democrats are attacking religion.
Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, pauses for a moment of silence at a campaign event in Charlotte, N.C., Monday, Sept. 23, 2024. At the event, he spoke about religious freedoms and how Christianity is under threat in the U.S.
“We need to get people to understand that this election, I truly believe, will determine the course of religious freedom in our country,” Vance told the crowd at Freedom House Church in Charlotte.
‘Because when we talk to our friends about how to persuade people, or when we go knock on doors or talk to people about our faith, or when we try to raise our children to share our values, what we’re really doing is living in a country that’s blessed with religious freedom.
“This election is fundamentally about whether Christians will be allowed to live our faith, whether Christians will be allowed to stand up for our principles, and whether Christians will be able to raise our children and build communities that are consistent with our values. And I don’t think that’s an exaggeration.”
The vice presidential candidate said he believes Christianity is the most persecuted faith in the world, arguing that hundreds of millions of believers live in countries where they are prevented from practicing their beliefs.
“If it can happen anywhere, then it can happen anywhere,” Vance reasoned.
“And I think we’re living in a time where we have the biggest opponents of religious liberty and people of faith running for office that I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.
“When you have Kamala Harris, the biggest threat to religious liberty we’ve had in at least a generation, you might as well worry about politics.”
But Vance’s journey to faith was far from typical.
Vance warned that Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world today and that hundreds of millions of followers are prevented from living up to their beliefs.
Vance also said that Vice President Kamala Harris is a threat to religious freedoms in the United States.
He grew up in a Christian family, but faith wasn’t always a priority for his mother, who struggled with opioid addiction while Vance was growing up but got sober ten years ago.
“I was actually a person who was raised in a Christian home by a grandmother who loved me deeply and took care of me because my own mother was not able to take care of me because my mother started with an opioid addiction for a large part of her life,” she explained.
“And it’s amazing, because one of the people who really helped me find the Christian faith for the first time was Billy Graham with my grandmother.”
Vance said Mamaw would watch Graham’s speeches on television and he would join her.
That made his trip to the pastor’s grave particularly special, he said.
The May 21, 2015 post features the late pastor Billy Graham and his daughter Anne Graham Lotz
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher welcomes American evangelist Billy Graham to 10 Downing Street in London
‘She was, again, a woman of deep Christian faith. She also loved the F-word. And the two could coexist.
“I think the only thing my wife will change about me is that I sometimes talk a little bit like my grandmother does,” he told the crowd, joking about his own affinity for swearing.
“And the problem is we have a seven-year-old, a four-year-old, and a two-year-old, so they’re starting to talk like their daddy. But honey, I promise I’ll honor the curse jar. I’ll get better and the kids will stop talking like me and they’ll stop talking like Mommy.”
Despite growing up surrounded by the religion, he says he often thought he was smarter than it and didn’t take it seriously until he left the Marine Corps in 2007.
He described how once believing Christians were superstitious and backward-looking.
Beverly, mother of vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), gets emotional in the VIP box as her son speaks on the third day of the Republican National Convention (RNC), at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.
But Vance eventually returned to religion when he was reflecting on what kind of husband and father he wanted to be after meeting his wife Usha.
“Although my grandmother was not an educated woman, she was a very bright woman and there was a lot of wisdom in the faith that I dismissed when I was young,” she said.
‘God didn’t care how much money I made, God didn’t care what school I went to, God didn’t care if I wrote a best-selling book or ran for vice president, but God really wanted me to be a virtuous husband and a virtuous father, and that made me realize that the Christian faith that I discarded was, in fact, the best solution to the problems that I had in front of me.’