section_path: Personal life
section_name: Personal life
paragraph_text: Personal life
  
  Vance wrote in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, that he was raised in a low-income family by his single mother and grandmother. In 2013, Vance met Usha Chilukuri while both were students at Yale Law School. On June 14, 2014, they married in Kentucky in an interfaith marriage ceremony, as she is Hindu and he is Christian. Their wedding included a Bible reading by Vance's "best friend", Jamil Jivani, and the bride and groom were blessed by a Hindu pandit. Usha clerked for a year for Brett Kavanaugh, at the time an appeals court judge in Washington, then clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts for a year.
  
  JD and Usha Vance have three children. They own over 100 acres of land in Kentucky.
  
  Vance was raised in a "conservative, evangelical " branch of Protestantism. Vance has described that at the time he entered college, he was an atheist. By September 2016, he was "not an active participant" in any particular Christian denomination, but was "thinking very seriously about converting to Catholicism". In August 2019, Vance was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church in a ceremony at St. Gertrude Priory in Cincinnati, Ohio. He chose Augustine of Hippo as his confirmation saint. Vance said he converted because he "became persuaded over time that Catholicism was true and Augustine gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way", further describing Catholic theology 's alignment with his political views. Vance was influenced to convert to Catholicism by Peter Thiel. He was criticized by Pope Francis for supporting deportation of migrants and responded by evoking the traditional concept of ordo amoris present in Catholic theology, which he interprets as loving his own nationals more than foreigners and equates with the slogan " America First ".
  
  Nate Vance, JD's cousin and a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, volunteered to fight for Ukraine in 2022 after Russia's invasion. He served in the " Da Vinci Wolves " unit, fighting in major battles like Kupiansk and Bakhmut. In 2025, Nate criticized JD's stance on Ukraine, accusing him and Trump of aiding Russia. Nate expressed disappointment that JD, despite their family connection, didn't consult him for insights on the war.