Vice President JD Vance has hit back at critics who accused him of throwing his wife’s Hindu religion “under a bus” by declaring he wanted her to convert to Christianity.

The 40-year-old Catholic convert was accused of hypocrisy and “Hindu-phobia” this week after telling a Turning Point USA forum that he hoped Second Lady Usha Vance would switch from her religious beliefs to his.

But in the face of ongoing criticism, Vance clapped back on Friday morning, describing the criticism he has faced as “disgusting” and “anti-Christian bigotry”.

“My wife—as I said at the TPUSA—is the most amazing blessing I have in my life,” the vice president wrote on X.

“Regardless, I’ll continue to love and support her and talk to her about faith and life and everything else, because she’s my wife.”

The controversy began on Wednesday night when Vance appeared at the Turning Point event in Mississippi, in honor of the organization’s founder Charlie Kirk.

During a question-and-answer session with the audience, a woman asked him about his marriage to Indian-born Usha Vance, America’s first Second Lady of Hindu faith.

The pair married in an interfaith ceremony in Kentucky in 2014, with a Hindu pandit and a Christian officiant officiating. They now have three children who Vance who are being raised as Christians.

“You are raising three kids in an intercultural-racial-religious household,” the woman asked at the event, which has long been a forum for Christian conservatives and MAGA Republicans.

“How are you teaching your kids not to keep your religion ahead of their mother’s religion?”

Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019 as he was laying the groundwork for a political career, replied by saying that when he met Usha, “I would consider myself an agnostic or an atheist and that’s what I think she would have considered herself as well.

“Now, most Sundays, Usha will come with me to church… Do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved in by church? Yeah, I honestly do wish that because I believe in the Christian Gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.”

The comments were swiftly rebuked. Some observers accused Vance of pandering to MAGA Christian conservatives at the expense of his wife to further his career; others called him a hypocrite given his past rhetoric about religious freedom.

The Times of India, the nation’s third biggest newspaper and the world’s largest selling English-language daily, even said that the Vice President “came across as ‘Hindu-phobic.’”

But it was a post by Ezra Levant, a Canadian media personality and the chief executive of far-right media website Rebel News, that prompted the Vance to address the issue on Friday morning.

“It’s weird to throw your wife’s religion under the bus, in public, for a moment’s acceptance by groypers,” Levant wrote, using a term that is associated with the white Christian Nationalists linked to far-right identity Nick Fuentes.

Vance responded: “First off, the question was from a person seemingly to my left, about my interfaith marriage. I’m a public figure, and people are curious, and I wasn’t going to avoid the question.

“Second, my Christian faith tells me the Gospel is true and is good for human beings… Third, posts like this wreak of anti-Christian bigotry.

“Yes, Christians have beliefs. And yes, those beliefs have many consequences, one of which is that we want to share them with other people. That is a completely normal thing, and anyone who’s telling you otherwise has an agenda.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.