He’s attempting quite the balancing act—and he just might pull it off.
In a video taken from the passenger seat of a car after Narendra Modi’s address to the joint session of Congress in June, Vivek Ramaswamy was full of praise for the Indian prime minister.
“Modi talked unapologetically about Indian national identity,” he said in the video, which was posted on X, the platform previously known as Twitter. “He quoted the Vedas, ancient Indian scriptures. Yet here in the United States we have now gotten in the habit of apologizing for our own national history. … That’s what I think we need to learn here from Modi’s visit, is that we in this country are at our best when we too do not apologize for who we are.”
An American equivalent can mean only one thing. Hindus represent about 1 percent of the U.S. population; Ramaswamy certainly isn’t advocating for Hindu nationalism in America. Instead, he appears to advocate for a similarly shaped religious nationalism in the U.S. based on the country’s majority faith: Christianity.
Indeed, Ramaswamy has all but explicitly supported Christian nationalism on the campaign trail. “Our country was founded on Judeo-Christian values, there’s no doubt about it,” the candidate told NBC News in July. And in an interview with NewsNation this month, he declared, “I believe I live by those values more so than many self-proclaimed Christian politicians.”