Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance became a Christian after considering himself an atheist, but he still gets in trouble for his swearing habit around his young children.
That habit, he said, came about in part because his grandma, dubbed the classic Appalachian name ‘Mamaw’, used profanity incessantly while trying to keep a younger Vance on the straight and narrow.
The tale came as the Ohio senator opened up about the origins of his faith before a crowd of Christians in Charlotte, North Carolina Monday evening.
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 before, was influential in his own conversion.
During his delivery, he issued a stark warning to the evangelists in attendance and boldly claimed Democrats are attacking religion.
‘We’ve gotta make people see that this election, I really think, will determine the course of religious liberty in our country,’ Vance said to the crowd at the Freedom House Church in Charlotte.
‘Because when we talk to our friends about persuading people, or when we go and 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 is blessed with religious liberty.
‘This election is fundamentally about whether Christians are going to be allowed to live our faith, whether Christians are going to be allowed to advocate for our principles, and whether Christians are going to be able to raise our children and build communities that are consistent with Our values. And I don’t think that’s an overstatement.’
The vice presidential nominee said he believes Christianity is the most prosecuted faith in the world, arguing that hundreds of millions of believers live in countries where they are hampered from practicing their beliefs.
‘If it can happen anywhere, then it can happen anywhere else,’ Vance reasoned.
‘And I think that we’re living through a time when we have the biggest opponents of religious liberty and people of faith running for office that we have seen anywhere in my life.
‘When you’ve got Kamala Harris, the biggest threat to religious liberty we’ve had in at least a generation, you better care about politics.’
But Vance’s journey to faith was far from typical.
He grew up in a Christian family, but the faith was not always a priority to his mother who struggled with opioid addiction as Vance was growing up, but got sober ten years ago.
‘I actually was a person who was raised in the Christian household by a grandmother who loved me deeply and took care of me because my own mother was unable to take care of me because my mom started with opioid addiction for big chunk of life,’ he explained.
‘And it’s unbelievable, because one of the people who actually helped me encounter the Christian faith for the first time is Billy Graham with my grandmother.’
Vance said that Mamaw would watch speeches given by Graham on TV and he would join her.
That made his trip to the pastor’s gravesite particularly special, he said.
‘She was, again, a woman of very deep and profound Christian faith. She also really loved the F-word. And both of those things could coexist.
‘I think that the one thing that my wife will change about me is that sometimes I talk a little bit like my Mamaw does,’ he told the crowd, joking about his own affinity for cursing.
‘And the problem is we’ve got a seven-year-old, a four-year-old and a two-year-old, so they start to talk like their daddy does. But honey, I promise you, I’ll honor the curse jar. I’ll get better, and the kids will stop talking like me and stop talking like Mamaw.’
Despite growing up around the religion, he says he often thought he was smarter than it and did not take it seriously until he was out of the Marine Corps in 2007.
He described once believing Christians were superstitious and backwards.
But eventually Vance came back around to the religion when he was contemplating what kind of husband and father he wanted to be after meeting his wife Usha.
‘Even though my grandmother was not an educated woman, she was a very brilliant woman, and there was a lot of wisdom in the faith that I discarded as a young man,’ he said.
‘God didn’t care about how much money I made, God didn’t care about where I went to school, God didn’t care if I wrote a best selling book or ran for vice president, but God really did want 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 in front of me.’