Trump’s pick for VP raised by hillbilly grandma, returned to faith when he married

By Michael Ashcraft –

J.D. Vance, Trump’s pick for VP running mate, was raised by a hillbilly, expletive-spewing Grandmother – he calls her Mamaw – who despite her tart tongue was a devout Christian. His mother struggled with addiction and his father abandoned the family.

“She had a deep Christian faith but in some ways she was unchurched,” Vance. 39,  told the RNC Faith and Freedom Coalition breakfast. “We went to church once or twice a month. But she read the Bible and prayed every single day. She loved to see Billy Graham whenever he was on T.V.”

He grew up believing in God but with a “shallow faith,” he says. When he grew up, he went to the military, to college and to law school. “That faith that was germinating sort of evaporated,” he admits. “By the time, I was in law school, I started to call myself an atheist.”

His wife was his path back to God.

“What really brought me back to Christ was finding a wife and falling in love and thinking about what was required of me as a husband and as a father,” he says. “The more that I thought about those deeper questions, the more that I thought that there was wisdom in the Christian faith that I had completely discarded and completely ignored.”

Prior to being picked for Trump’s running mate, Vance was an Ohio Senator. He is married to a high-powered attorney, Usha Chilukuri Vance, who was born to Indian immigrants. It was Usha, who is a practicing Hindu, who began to nudge her husband to enter Christianity when their first child was one, Vance says. The couple have three kids.

“There’s something about becoming Christian that is really good for you,” Usha told him. “There’s something about thinking about the Christian faith, there’s something about practicing the Christian faith that makes you more patient with our son and makes you a little bit more forgiving when I’m grumpy after a long day.”

Vance was baptized around 2019 into Catholicism.

After graduating from Middletown High School, Vance served as a Iraq combat correspondent in 2003-07. He attended Ohio State University, graduating in 2009. He graduated from Yale Law School in 2013. His 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy praised his Grandma’s efforts to raise him.

Prior to becoming a politician, James David Vance was a venture capitalist and a staunch supporter of working class.

“If you practice your faith, if you pray, if you think about what it requires of you then God makes you a little bit better each and every single day,” Vance said. “That to me has been the greatest lesson and the greatest blessing of my faith now.”

To learn more about a personal relationship with Jesus, click here.

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About this writer: Michael Ashcraft pastors a church in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles.