How VP Hopeful JD Vance Found His Way Back to Christ
By Movieguide® Contributor
Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance recently shared about his relationship with Christ at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s God & Country Breakfast.
Vance who, along with his older sister Lindsay, were mainly raised by their grandparents, recounted his Christian upbringing by his grandmother, whom he calls Mamaw.
“I was raised…by my Mamaw, who, despite the fact that she loved the f-word, was a woman [of] a very deep Christian faith,” he recalled.
Even though they attended church sporadically, Vance said that Mamaw “read the Bible every single day.”
“She prayed every single day, she loved to watch Billy Graham whenever he was on the TV, and that was really my introduction to the Christian faith,” he continued.
During his speech at the Republican National Convention, he shared about his grandma Bonnie and her no-nonsense approach to raising the Ohio native, especially when it came to the peers he associated with.
“She once told me, once she found out that I was spending too much time with a local kid who was known for dealing drugs, that if I ever hung out with that kid again, she would run him over with her car,” the Ohio senator said.
Mamaw’s “tough as nails” personality steered him from the same path of drug addiction that his mother battled, but as he got older, he walked away from his faith.
“[W]hile I really believed, and I believed quite passionately, there was something a little bit shallow about my faith when I was a kid, and so like a lot of kids…I went off to the military, to college, to law school,” Vance told the audience at the Faith and Freedom breakfast. “Somewhere along the way, that faith that had developed and was germinating sort of evaporated.”
By the time he got into law school, he considered himself an atheist. Vance reconnected with his childhood faith when he met and married his wife, Usha, whom he met in law school.
“[W]hat 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,” the dad of three said. “And 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.”
When he recommitted himself to Christ and started going to church his wife, who is Hindu, noticed the difference it made in him.
‘“I don’t have a background in this, but there’s something about becoming Christian that is really good for you,’” Vance recalled Usha telling him. “‘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 said that it was grace that she witnessed in him, and that is still in process.
“I think grace, the way that I understand it, is something that happens over a lifetime,” the 39-year-old said. “That in ways big and small if you practice your faith, if you pray, if you think about what it requires us, yet, in God makes you a little bit better each and every single day. And that to me, has been the greatest lesson and the greatest blessing of my faith.”
Vance addressed social conservatives and the fear that in the future “they will not have a seat at the table” within the Republican party.
“I want to say that is not true. Social conservatives have a seat at this table, and they always will, so long as I have any influence in this party, and President Trump, I know, agrees,” Vance said.
The VP candidate brought up “grace” again as voters see Trump’s administration and campaign “unfold.”
“President Trump is uniquely capable and aware of politics being the art of the possible, what can we accomplish in the here and now; how do we advance the ball one yard, before we advance it 10 yards, before we advance it to a touchdown?” Vance assured the audience.
He added, “Remember, that this is a guy who delivered for social conservatives more than any president in my 39 years of life. I think he deserves a little bit of grace, and he deserves a little bit of trust, and I hope that we will all provide that to him.”
Since Trump announced Vance as his pick as running mate, views of the movie HILLBILLY ELEGY, based on his memoir that recounts his life growing up poor in Appalachia country, has soared, as Movieguide® previously reported:
The 2020 Netflix film, based on Vance’s 2016 memoir of the same name, was watched for 19.2 million minutes on Monday — a huge leap from the 1.5 million minutes the film was watched on Sunday, by which point Vance’s VP bid was already a sweeping rumor,” Variety reported July 16.
“Monday’s total comes out to an estimated 163,836 views. This is calculated by dividing the number of minutes watched by the film’s 117-minute runtime, which means, for example, that watching half of the movie would constitute half of a view, etc,” Variety reported.
The movie was the fourth most streamed film on Netflix, as of Wednesday morning.
CBS News reported, “Viewers watched the film for a combined 19.2 million minutes on Monday, the day Vance was picked as Trump’s running mate, compared with 1.5 million minutes on the prior day, Luminate said.”
The movie is based on Vance’s autobiography and came out on Netflix in 2020. It stars Amy Adams, Glenn Close, Owen Asztalos, Haley Bennett, Bo Hopkins, Gabriel Basso and Frieda Pinto. It was directed by Ron Howard.
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