Mike Pence

Pence was born on June 7, 1959, in Columbus, Indiana, one of six children of Ann Jane "Nancy" Cawley and Edward Joseph Pence Jr. who ran a group of gas stations. His father served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War and received the Bronze Star in 1953, which Pence displays in his office along with its commendation letter and a reception photograph. His father was of German and Irish descent and his mother is of Irish ancestry. His paternal grandfather, Edward Joseph Pence Sr., worked in the Chicago stockyards. He was named after his maternal grandfather, Richard Michael Cawley, who emigrated from Doocastle, County Mayo, Ireland, to the United States through Ellis Island and who became a bus driver in Chicago, Illinois. His maternal grandmother's parents were from Doonbeg, County Clare, Ireland.

Pence graduated from Columbus North High School in 1977. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in history from Hanover College in 1981, and a Juris Doctor from the Robert H. McKinney School of Law at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis in Indianapolis in 1986. While at Hanover, he joined the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, where he became the chapter president. After graduating from Hanover, he was an admissions counselor at the college from 1981 to 1983.

In his childhood and early adulthood, Pence was a Roman Catholic and a Democrat, as was the rest of his family. He volunteered for the Bartholomew County Democratic Party in 1976 and voted for Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election, and has said he was originally inspired to get involved in politics by people such as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. While in college, Pence left the Catholic Church and became an evangelical, born-again Christian, to the disappointment of his mother. His political views also started shifting to the right during this time in his life, something which Pence attributes to the "common-sense conservatism of Ronald Reagan" with which he began to identify

Pence and his wife, Karen (née Batten), met while he was in law school at Indiana University. They were married in 1985. Pence's father died in 1988, leaving his mother a widow with four grown children and two teenagers. Mike and Karen Pence have three children: Michael, Charlotte, and Audrey. Michael Pence is a first lieutenant and pilot in the United States Marine Corps. During Pence's service in the House, his family lived in Arlington, Virginia when Congress was in session and in Columbus, Indiana, during recesses. During an interview in 2002, Pence told a reporter that he would not have dinner alone with a woman other than his wife. On May 1, 2004, Pence's mother re-married – this time to Basil Coolidge Fritsch, a widower since 2001. In 2018, Pence's oldest brother, Greg, entered and won the political race to represent Indiana's 6th congressional district in Congress the seat previously held by Mike). Greg and Mike are similar enough in appearance that Greg once successfully acted as a decoy to lure the press away from his brother when Mike Pence was being touted as a potential running mate to Donald Trump.

The family's pet rabbit, Marlon Bundo, was the subject of a children's book authored by Pence's daughter, Charlotte.

Pence was raised in a Catholic family, was as an altar server, and attended parochial school. He became a born-again Christian in college, while a member of a nondenominational Christian student group, and identified his first year—and specifically "a Christian music festival in Asbury, Kentucky, in the spring of 1978" referring to the Ichthus Music Festival at then Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky—as the moment he made a "commitment to Christ". After that point, Pence continued to attend Mass (where he met his wife ) and was a Catholic youth minister. Pence called himself Catholic in a 1994 news piece, although by 1995, he and his family had joined an evangelical megachurch, the Grace Evangelical Church. In 2013, Pence said his family was "kind of looking for a church". In 2016, Pence and his wife regularly worshiped at College Park Church, a nondenominational church in Indianapolis. He has described himself as "a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order", and as "a born-again, evangelical Catholic".

In a 2002 statement on the floor of the House of Representatives (reported in the Congressional Record), Pence told his colleagues "I also believe that someday scientists will come to see that only the theory of intelligent design provides even a remotely rational explanation for the known universe." When asked by Chris Matthews in 2009 if he believed in evolution, Pence said "I believe with all my heart that God created the heavens and the earth, the seas and all that is in them. How he did that, I'll ask him about some day."

In 2016 he was diagnosed with asymptomatic left bundle branch block. In April 2021, Pence underwent surgery for a pacemaker implant due to a slow heartbeat.