United States (US) Vice President JD Vance has said that he would not be surprised if the antichrist was “walking among us”, suggesting the world could be living through the “end times”.
Vance made the remarks during a podcast interview with 22-year-old evangelical Christian Bryce Crawford, who has more than a million followers on YouTube.
While discussing his new book ‘Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith’, Vance said that he was trying to focus on “doing as much of God’s work as possible”.
“Do I think that we’re in the end times? I don’t know. I think that it’s probably bad for me spiritually to focus too much on it. There are things about the world that make me feel not shocked if the antichrist was walking among us.”
“I tend to think that while I wouldn’t be shocked if we are living in the end times, what I’m trying to focus on is doing as much of God’s work as possible right now, and that if that leads to the end times, OK.”
In Christian teachings, the end times refer to a period in which the antichrist rises to power, turns against God and persecutes believers before the return of Jesus Christ.
Vance also linked the discussion to artificial intelligence while describing a situation involving a friend whose wife used an AI chatbot for counselling.
He said the chatbot agreed with everything she wrote, leaving no real human feedback in the conversation.
“There’s no real human feedback; it sort of short circuits that social part of our brain where we respond to other people’s wants and needs.
“I think that’s kind of satanic. When you completely divorce the human from the social element that God made us for, I think that’s very bad.”
Vance was an evangelical Protestant as a teenager before becoming an atheist and later converting to Catholicism. He was baptised and confirmed as a Catholic in 2019.
Since his conversion, Vance has spoken about the role of his faith in shaping his political views, including his interpretation of the Catholic concept of “ordo amoris”.
He has linked the doctrine to his views on immigration, saying it places a greater moral responsibility on people towards their families and communities than towards the wider world.
The late Pope Francis criticised Vance’s interpretation in a letter, writing that “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extends to other persons and groups”.
Vance met Francis at the Vatican on April 20, 2025, a day before the pope died at the age of 88.
The latest comments are not the first time Vance has referred to satanic or anti-Christian forces. In March, he told another conservative podcast that he believed UFOs were “demons” rather than extraterrestrial life.
