(RNS) — Appearing last week at a Montana State University forum sponsored by Turning Point USA, Vivek Ramaswamy, next year’s likely GOP gubernatorial candidate in Ohio, had his Hindu identity called into question by a number of students.

“Jesus Christ is God, and there is no other God,” said one. “How can you represent the constituents of Ohio who are 64% Christian if you are not a part of that faith?”

Another student, who couldn’t match his understanding of Hinduism as a polytheistic faith with Ramaswamy’s appearance at an ostensibly Christian event, said, “I wonder why you have Christian values.”

Ramaswamy, who knows the TPUSA drill, proceeded to get the latter up on stage, give him a copy of the U.S. Constitution, and have him read from the sixth article of the U.S. Constitution, to wit:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Boom!

Originalists in the crowd could claim that the Article Six ban on religious tests really applies only to federal officeholders, so Ramaswamy might also have pointed out that the original 1803 Ohio Constitution reiterated the ban, declaring that “no preference shall ever be given, by law, to any religious society or mode of worship, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification to any office of trust or profit.” 

Of course, the religious test bans do not forbid American citizens or civic organizations from opposing a candidate for public office on religious grounds. It’s a tradition most notoriously exemplifed by the anti-Catholic campaigns against Democratic presidential candidates Al Smith, in 1928, and John F. Kennedy, in 1960, but it goes back as far as the anti-Catholic “Know-Nothings” of the 1840s and 1850s.

Such campaigns have always been vulnerable to the charge that there is something un-American about them, but candidates may nevertheless feel an obligation to fend them off with something like a disclaimer. Over the years, Kennedy has been criticized in some quarters for having insisted, in his famous speech to the Protestant ministers of Houston, that he would make decisions on issues like birth control and divorce “in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.” (As if to say: Catholic teaching doesn’t matter to me.)

For his part, Ramaswamy assured the students at the TPUSA forum that he is “an ethical monotheist,” presumably in order to reassure them that, when it comes to “Christian values,” he’s not going to go all Shiva on them. But, as Richa Karmarkar usefully points out in an RNS account of the episode, this required him to sum up the Advaita philosophy of Hinduism’s Vedanta school in a way that drew criticism from some Hindu scholars.

Ramaswamy also sought to allay the students’ concerns about Hindu polytheism by saying, “Every religion has its reconciling of the one and the many” — and went on to point out that Christianity considers itself monotheistic despite representing God as a Trinity.

This is a bit of a tender subject within the Abrahamic tradition, inasmuch as Jews and Muslims have long had a habit of using the Trinity to accuse Christians of being polytheists. Ramaswamy has drawn some Christian criticism as well for appearing to suggest that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are equivalent to India’s many gods.

Be all that as it may, the would-be GOP candidate for governor of Ohio who, to paraphrase JFK, happens also to be a Hindu, acquitted himself well before the skeptical TPUSA crowd. I doubt that many Christian Buckeyes will hold his religion against him.