JD Vance deploys the vocabulary of the Antichrist as a tribal Christian marker while his office pursues the immigration policy his own Church has publicly condemned on Gospel grounds. That is the specific record, and that is the breach.
The Vice-President appeared last week on a Christian podcast hosted by Bryce Crawford and was asked whether we live in the end times. He replied: “I don’t know.” He added that it was “probably bad for me spiritually to focus too much on it, because there are, like, things you gotta do.” Then he said he would not be “shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us.”
His friend Rod Dreher, a conservative writer who was present when Vance was received into the Catholic Church, came on the BBC’s Today programme to vouch for the comments. They “might sound bonkers to someone who is outside the Christian religion,” Dreher said, “but it is a very, very common belief within Christianity.” Most Republican voters already believe this stuff, he added. Ronald Reagan said similar things and nobody blinked.
The BBC also reported, the same week, that Vance “has occasionally tangled with Pope Leo and his papal predecessor Francis, on issues including the Trump administration’s immigration policy.” That is the administrative action this column is built around. Not a press briefing. Not a podcast appearance. The immigration policy itself, pursued by an administration whose Vice-President now borrows the vocabulary of the Antichrist, while the Church whose vocabulary he is borrowing has publicly told him the policy betrays the Gospel.
Let me show you what the Bible actually says.
The word antichristos — antichrist, the opponent of Christ — appears only in the epistles of John. Five times, in three short letters, and never as a futurist politician at a podium at the end of history. First John 2:18: “Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour.” Read that again. Many antichrists have come. Plural. Not one future bogeyman. A category of people, already present, in the room.
First John 2:22: “Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son.” First John 4:2-3: “By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not of God. And this is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard was coming and now is in the world already.” Second John 7: “For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist.”
You will look in vain for a passage that says: identify the coming Antichrist by watching the cable news. The text does not say that. The text says the antichrist is a test you run on claims made in your own congregation, by people who come to your own church, with reference to whether Christ has come in the flesh and the shape of the community they leave behind. Now is in the world already. The end times are not a season; they are a present tense.
And the Bible’s discipline on end-times speculation is restraint. Matthew 24:36: “But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.” Acts 1:7: “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority.” First Thessalonians 5:1-3: “the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.” The Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24 opens with Jesus warning his disciples against being “led astray” — false prophets will claim the Antichrist has come; do not believe them. The chapter’s structural point is the opposite of the parlour game Vance and Dreher are running with the text.
Vance did tell the podcaster, in fairness, that he did not know whether we were in the end times and that focusing on the question was probably “bad for me spiritually.” That much is closer to Matthew 24:36 than to anything you would find in a Left Behind novel. But the comment about the Antichrist — that he would not be shocked if the Antichrist were walking among us — does the work his disclaimer cannot undo. He also said he was trying to focus on “doing as much of God’s work as possible right now.” He would like us to take him at his word.
I would. The Bible does not let me.
The work the Bible names, in the very next chapter of the Gospel Vance is quoting, is Matthew 25:31-46 — the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned. Matthew 25:40: “as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.” The vulnerable community named by the text is not a category of political opponent. It is the migrant, the deportee, the family separated at the border, the child fleeing violence, the person turned back at the port of entry. Leviticus 19:34, in the same Bible Vance opened on the podcast: “the foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself.” Amos 5:24: “let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.” The operation Vance’s administration is conducting — the immigration policy his own Church has publicly, repeatedly, named as inconsistent with the Gospel — is not the operation Matthew 25 describes.
The chasm — this is the part Vance’s defenders will not tell you — is that the same Bible Vance borrows from to make himself legible to the base is the Bible that names the vulnerable community his administration’s policy is making more vulnerable. Dreher is telling us this is normal. The plain text is telling us this is the test 1 John has been running since the first century.
Vance has made the contradiction for himself. He is a Catholic convert. The Church into which Dreher watched him be received has, in this very pontificate, publicly challenged his administration’s immigration policy on the Gospel grounds Vance is now invoking. He has tangled with that challenge and given it the careful non-answer the captured operation prefers. A Catholic cannot, in good Catholic conscience, deploy “Antichrist” as a tribal marker for the political opponents of the moment while his own Church is publicly challenging his own policies on the same Gospel grounds. The captured operation has not noticed this contradiction, because the captured operation does not read its own tradition; it reads its own political utility. Vance knows what he is doing. He is a lawyer. He has decided that the listeners’ comfort matters more than the texts’ plain demand. That is the shape the test 1 John is built to find.
So the Vice-President has two choices, and only two. He can bring the immigration policy of his administration into alignment with the Gospel witness his own Church has named. Or he can stop deploying Christian apocalyptic vocabulary as a tribal political marker. He cannot do both. He is doing both.
The Bible does not exempt politicians from its plain language. It does not exempt Vice-Presidents. It does not exempt Catholics who happen to find dispensational vocabulary useful.
The vulnerable community named by Matthew 25 — the migrant families at the southern border, the hungry, the stranger, the least of these — is named in the text, and the text names them as the place Christ himself is met or refused. The corrective owed is the policy change Vance has the standing to demand of his own administration, in the name of the Gospel he has decided to invoke. The test First John has been running since the first century is being run, in his case, in plain sight.